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mcphage • today at 4:26 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

My biggest pet peeve: "Here's this thing I did once, and now I'll tell everybody how to do it as if I were an expert".


Replies

mtlynch • today at 5:14 PM

OP here.

This is something I see a lot too, and I almost covered it in the post. I think it goes hand in hand with excessive formality where people think that if you're writing a blog post about something, you have to be an authority on the topic, but that's not true.

It's valuable and useful to write about things when you're still a beginner as long as you present yourself as a beginner. Julia Evans does this extremely well. My favorite example is "Some notes on using nix,"[0] which got me to start using Nix when I'd seen lots of other posts from more experienced Nix users that were too in the weeds for me to understand. But the way Julia approaches it is that she's learned a little bit more than someone who's never touched it, so you can read her progress and get a slight head start from where you would have started without her notes.

[0] https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/02/28/some-notes-on-using-nix/

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dewey • today at 4:32 PM

How would you define the limit above which it's appropriate to share your findings on a given topic on your blog?

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