Technical blogging in the era of Stack Overflow

https://ognjen.io/technical-blogging-in-time-of-stack-overflow/

by rognjen • 5 years ago

55 33 5 years ago

lbriner• 5 years ago

Interesting that the article mentions SO being better for noobs but really, the quality is so variable that it is hard for a noob to tell a good answer from a workaround from a terrible answer.

If they fixed the reputation system so it more accurately reflected quality, it would be easier but some people have 10K+ reputation for asking a simple question that lots of people upvoted and others who have added high quality replies to more specific questions might only have a few hundred.

rognjen7• 5 years ago

hard for a noob to tell a good answer from a workaround from a terrible answer

While that's true the noob questions often have multiple answers and they're simpler to try out in sequence.

TeMPOraL• 5 years ago

That's the thing though: you don't try out SO answers. Either you understand them and know if they address your problems, or you need to continue your research.

Programming is not like baking cookies, you can't just copy a snippet and hope it'll work out OK.

da_chicken2• 5 years ago

If they fixed the reputation system so it more accurately reflected quality, it would be easier but some people have 10K+ reputation for asking a simple question that lots of people upvoted and others who have added high quality replies to more specific questions might only have a few hundred.

How exactly do you tell the difference?

stemlord• 5 years ago

The problem I had as a noob was posting a question. Many downvotes and nitpicks about making it more a "mimimum reproducable example" definitely felt like a form of gatekeeping. I remember spending a good hour or so at a time putting together a good question just for it to get downvoted without any mentioned reason. Then the pressure from tech-jargon-filled comments to go read up on every word they just used for another 30 mins in order to give a half witted response because if I ask them to dumb it down they'll ignore and move on, or accuse me of being lazy...

deft• 5 years ago

Nice to see this written out, I've came to the same conclusion just based on the things I read.

rognjen7• 5 years ago

Thanks. Once you get a bit of experience Stack Overflow drops off quite quickly and it's the technical blog posts the become much more informative.

azhenley• 5 years ago

If you're looking for more technical blogs to follow, I just made a list of my favorites a few days ago:

Technical blogs worth reading https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/favblogs.html

FillardMillmore• 5 years ago

This is a great little collection, thank you!

rognjen7• 5 years ago

Great, I'll look through that.

My post was based on a comment from the refined.blog thread.

EMM_386• 5 years ago

The Old New Thing by Raymond Chen is a good one not on this list, especially for Windows developers.

There are a lot of gems on there about a lot of deep topics.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

rukshn• 5 years ago

Another thing I want to mention is that other than SO Google also promotes poor content. Google results are filled with poorly written articles and medium posts that is there because of SEO spam or domain quality.

Stronico• 5 years ago

I've always found the "You can accomplish Task A by using Method B, but Method C is way easier and better in the long run" quite helpful, and rarely on stack overflow

cbsmith3• 5 years ago

Reading the docs and the source code are learned skills.

This makes me sad.

I'm also confused... who reads blogs but doesn't read the docs?

yumaikas• 5 years ago

Why does this make you sad?

cbsmith3• 5 years ago

Because, to me, reading the docs & source code should be skills that are learned prior to "using the code and writing code".

ThePadawan• 5 years ago

I'm also confused... who reads blogs but doesn't read the docs?

You've been spoiled by good docs ;).

cbsmith3• 5 years ago

More like I haven't been spoiled by good blogs. ;-)

rognjen7• 5 years ago

Docs are often very terse and assume a lot of background knowledge. When blog posts are written effort is put in to make sure a wider range of audiences can understand them.

monodot• 5 years ago

I'm also confused... who reads blogs but doesn't read the docs?

I’d say lots of people. Most people are searching for a specific solution to a technical problem. If they see a how-to blog that fits their use case in the results, many people will prefer it over the official docs.

rognjen7• 5 years ago

This is particularly true because docs explain functionality and rarely mention use-cases.

Bayart• 5 years ago

That's honestly entirely dependent on the doc base. Case in point : learning C# recently I've done everything I could to escape Microsoft's official doc and found myself on a lot of blog posts expounding on topical issues I was encountering. It both makes an incredible amount of assumptions and goes for the most cryptic syntax at all times.

dspillett3• 5 years ago

Some documentation is sadly lacking generally, but even some very good documentation in terms of detail is not terribly useful to a beginner as it is often more a reference work for people with some experience.

With a bit of experience a detailed reference is great, but it can completely overwhelm a beginner who is better served by being given some simple worked examples of a core sub-set of features/methods/properties/processes/… then being given the more referencey docs to find the other details (ideally with some starting pointers, linking what they were shown in the tutorial examples to relevant bits of documentation).

Remember when 4X games came with paper reference manuals? If you skip the SMAC tutorial and go through the reference in order you'll hit the copter and hovertank units (late-game additions that you don't need to care about initially) long before the speeder (something you have access to early on, from the start in the case of one player faction). Just giving beginners reference docs is much the same thing.

Many have become attuned to searching for a tutorial elsewhere, assuming the docs will be overwhelming initially, even if more introductory information is available for a given thing. Also, many or introduced to new libraries and such through tech blogs, another reason for that being their starting point. And of course if searching via Google et. al. you have the issue of blog-spam that is SEOed to the nth degree coming up before the better documentation.

shantnutiwari• 5 years ago

>I'm also confused... who reads blogs but doesn't read the docs?

Most docs are hard to read- dense text, millions of options, and not a single example of a use case. Same with most man pages.

90% of the time, I just want to do something simple, and its easier to read thru blogs than trudge thru a dense hard to read official document.

And with Python-- you are guranteed to get out of date docs in Google search. Not just for Python 2, but older unsupported versions of libraries

Sometimes, the page even helpfully tells you it is out of date, and invites you to go to the home page and start searching again (rather than, you know, just link to the latest page)

gjadi• 5 years ago

IMHO, do write technical blog if you want to, if it helps you learn and if you like to.

But if you can, please try to contribute to the official documentation as well.

It's not applicable in every cases, it takes longer (and may not work), it doesn't bring as much visual karma, but I believe it improves the situation for every one in the long run.

Thank you.

dspillett3• 5 years ago

Another reason to write your own technical content, even if a similar question/answer does exist on SO, especially in examples where you experiment to put together examples that show/prove a point, is that it is practise for yourself.

I intend to get some of my own content out there (it may never happen, the intention has existed for quite some time!) and if I ever find time to do it some of the things I might include are expansions of things I've given as SO answers, expanding on details that might have been too much in the SO/SE context and potentially caused confusion or sliding off into tangents that would be too far off-topic from the starting point. I might not ever point people at this writing, the main point of it will be my own practise (of technical matters, and just the act or writing and organising information). If it comes to be something that feels useful then it might be the start of an online portfolio that I selectively send people to, or feed back into SO/SE (i.e. giving an answer with bits extracted from something I've already written with a “for some related tangents you might find this fuller article useful” link, as I already do for other people's articles like the very useful tomes of MS SQL knowledge at https://www.sommarskog.se/ that I've referenced on DBA.SE before now).

rognjen7• 5 years ago

That's a very good point. Blogging as practice for communicating more clearly.

ManuelKiessling• 5 years ago

It’s also a great extension of a CV, at least I see my https://manuel.kiessling.net blog that way.

LandR• 5 years ago

I write technical stuff to convince myself that I understand a topic. I'll write a tutorial for myself on it, and during this, ask questions that someone who doesn't know it at all would ask, sometimes I don't know the answer so I need to research more.

But at the end I can end up with a pretty good, in-depth, tutorial / notes / blog post.

I just don't publish them to the internet. But I find it's a pretty good way of checking how well you understand something. Like rubber duck debugging with yourself in a way.

Technical blogging in the era of Stack Overflow

Related Stories