Why do only a handful of developers get all the views these days? It used to be a lot more decentralized and interesting. Nowadays, there are a few somewhat junior people you keep hearing about over and over and they're usually talking about boring mainstream tools which are mostly mediocre. They're clearly being artificially pushed onto us by algorithms.
Early in my career 15 years ago, I was getting all my info from experienced old folks like Douglas Crockford, Don Norman and Alan Kay.
> Nowadays, there are a few somewhat junior people you keep hearing about over and over and they're usually talking about boring mainstream tools which are mostly mediocre. They're clearly being artificially pushed onto us by algorithms.
The primary audience for software influencers are either junior themselves or non-devs aspiring to join the industry. It's not the same thing that Douglas Crockford or Alan Kay were doing back in the day.
I agree with this sentiment, but I'll note it happens on forums/reddit/HN as well.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but I've lost count of how many times I've seen people say things that are obviously not great. They generally make sense in theory but not practice.
The audience is vastly different, the median computer person used to be far more passionate and got into computing earlier in their life, knowing better who created interesting things and therefore who to look up to. Today people are used to consuming highly image and audio doctored videos and tend to follow whoever spends their time doing that, favored by recommendation algorithms.
I have seen blog posts calling terrible names some of the great figures in our industry such as Richard Stallman, Robert C. Martin and Kent Beck.
So there is no surprise those who "teach you to become a senior developer by learning this one liner trick" get more audience and praise.
Yes, it is partially algorithmic, but it's primarily because this is a brand new generation of content creators and streamers. The audience for streamers like t3.gg and Primeagen primarily consist of relatively new developers seeking knowledge and entertainment, as well as seasoned developers seeking infotainment. It's not solely the information being conveyed that attracts viewers; rather, it's the holistic experience of live streaming on platforms like Twitch and YouTube, complete with humor and entertainment value. While these streamers do provide some valuable content – for instance, Primeagen's insightful series on Neovim configuration greatly assisted me during my transition to Neovim – it's important to recognize the significant contribution of production quality and entertainment value. The most successful streamers are not necessarily those with the best information, but rather those capable of delivering a comprehensive package, maintaining a regular streaming schedule, and so forth. However, if their content consistently lacks quality or spreads misinformation, their viewership would likely diminish. Conversely, it's also untrue that viewership is solely determined by the quality of information provided; you could be the most knowledgeable person, but if you suck at streaming, if you have a dry personality, etc. you likely won't get this level of view. The streamers who do well invest considerable effort into their streams, including editing and other production elements. So, comparing them to individuals like Crockford doesn't make much sense as this medium offers a unique platform for content delivery that was previously unavailable.
All that being said, there's thankfully some more niche YouTubers, or whatever you want to call them, who don't put much work into the stream per se, but their teaching and information is so good and valuable within their domain that they have decent viewership. People like Jon Gjengset who has far less subscribers both because a) he's covering more nich topics, e.g. 1.5 hour streams in depth on Rust language concepts and b) he just streams very plainly. People love his content, but it's a smaller pool and he's not going to get the hundreds of thousands of subs that t3.gg or Primeagen get.
I find it challenging to take this guy seriously. In this particular video, he first claims to have extensive experience writing Ruby code, yet he seems to struggle with understanding a basic Rails CRUD example. I even checked his GitHub profile for past noteworthy contributions but was again disappointed. Is my critique too harsh, or is he just not accurately representing his expertise? Also did you know he used to work at twitch? I am sure but he may have mentioned it before.
Most serious JS engineers I've spoken to regard Theo/t3.gg as a social media celebrity. His priority is creating a brand and selling products, not really giving valuable advice. If you watch enough of his videos and look at this Twitter, this becomes evident quickly.
I also don’t release very much of my code to the public.
Just looking at the merits though:
The article author is clearly a medium article programmer that bounces from one thing to the next to the next to the next depending on which medium article he happened to read most recently.
Theo demonstrates that I have to take what he says with a grain of salt, as he is unquestionably wrong to suggest that sql in the presentation is fine for anything but quick and dirties (I’d suggest that even quick and dirties is a dangerous proposition for sql in the presentation. Use Jupyter or something similar for quick and dirties).
Neither of these two are people I would ever find myself listening to.
I agree that the quantity of publicly available code isn't the most reliable indicator of someone's seniority.
My issue with this individual arises from the discrepancy between his public claims of significant expertise in the content he produces. He positions himself as a highly experienced developer, attracting a large following of junior developers who take his advice at face value.
I am trying to collect data points supporting his claims of seniority. For instance, his website prominently features a statement that he is the creator of the T3 Stack. However, a review of the contributor statistics for the T3 Stack https://github.com/t3-oss/create-t3-app/graphs/contributors reveals minimal contributions from him, which raises questions about the validity of his claims.
He seems a bit biased maybe?
Its fair that a rails controller does not exactly screams what its doing (implicit view rendering, routing etc).
But then, for someone not deep into react, a magic string like "use server" also does not clarify anything.
Also, he argues that just because you can it does not mean you should scatter sql queries around your views. But again, just because you can do a bunch of implicit stuff on a Rails controller it does not mean you should.
Yeap. I had the same feeling. If he never mentioned that he worked with Rails before I would understand not being familiar with the Rails concept of the "New" and "Edit" actions, but he mentions a lot of time throughout the video that he worked with multiple Rails backends and he doesn't even have familiarity with the most simple concept of Rails Controllers and Routes?
I felt that he has a bit of an agenda against DHH and I guess that's why he thrashes Rails as much as he did on that video.
Yeah this video is just cheesy strawman arguments. Make a claim that's not true then argue passionately about why it's a bad idea.
Like droning on about scaffolding without acknowledging that it's just get you going training tool that you're expected to grow out of almost immediately.
Or bemoaning that Rails is "framework" and so you're forced to use all of it. It's just reasonable defaults you can opt out of really easily.
e.g. swap out ActiveRecord for Sequel or replace ActionController with GrapeAPI.
Don't like backend rendering? Just remove it. You can pick only the bits of Rails you want via Railties.
Even going on about how you're forced to put business logic in models is pretty silly. It's right there in the Rails Guides how to keep models only for data access and move business logic into business logic into pure service classes. Don't like that? Use modules or engines or Trailblazer or any number of alternatives.
So.. that's 45 minutes of a YT'er/fullstack-historian (more so than a dev) reacting to a post, and viewing other frameworks through metadata. "Lots to talk about", not so much technical content.
> That said...most of my work is clearly not in Elixir. What if I left it all behind? Dropping React, NextJS, TypeScript, tRPC, everything I'm known for? What about PHP, Rails, Gatsby, and Remix? Lots to talk about here
> Daniel did just that, and requested I react to it, so here we are
Early in my career 15 years ago, I was getting all my info from experienced old folks like Douglas Crockford, Don Norman and Alan Kay.