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Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging

40 points ilreb 3 hours ago 11 comments

abubnov75 57 minutes ago | parent

Helpful, thank you. I'm just going to write such an article

all2 48 minutes ago | parent

Wait, do you intend to implement each anti pattern into a single article? Or do you intend to write an article with none of these anti patterns?

weinzierl 55 minutes ago | parent

"The meandering intro"

Not only the intro. Many bloggers try to write as if they'd writing a story, building suspense and all. For technical writing, don't bury the lede.

pastel8739 35 minutes ago | parent

Is blogging necessarily technical writing?

mobilejdral 25 minutes ago | parent

The community yearns for a new stack overflow.

esafak 16 minutes ago | parent

Do they? How would it be different?

rglullis 20 minutes ago | parent

> From the reader’s perspective, there are a billion other articles they could be reading. Why should they read yours?

I'd rather read something that shows any semblance of personality than yet-another engagement/reach/marketability-optimized "article" that just follows all the established tropes and could be written by any drone or clanker.

ram1500natrluvr 12 minutes ago | parent

"The meandering intro" might be the most common mistake, by far, but the most damaging mistake, by far, is the failure to connect the topic with something the readers are familiar with (anti-pattern #2). Some things simply require a certain level of expertise/prerequisites to begin to understand, but I've repeatedly seen in software blogging, READMEs, etc. a failure to answer "what is this, compared to what I'm familiar with, and if I'm not familiar with anything relevant, why should I want to be?"

This applies to almost everything in the software space. New tool? New design pattern? New library? Language idiom? Language? Or, for more modern takes, new model? New harness? New harness option? New use pattern? Give a brief summary of what a project looks like without it, to convey the problem that its existence alone is solving. Then go into the details of how it might compare to other solutions.

Maybe it's just a specific way of how my brain works that finds this sort of information intuitive, and the lack of it particularly annoying.

mcphage 9 minutes ago | parent

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".

dewey 3 minutes ago | parent

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