Mostly because I see a ton of y'all running linux, then there is me, running windows 10/11 for everything. This site seems to cater to a lot of people that actually know what they are doing on a computer. My expertise in that field extends no farther than understanding the experimental flags on Chrome.
The only things I've coded were a Neopets page and a "how many days have you been alive" calculator in Visual Basic that I made for my high school senior project. Beyond that, every attempt I've made to learn coding has been fruitless. Despite this, the online communities I have gravitated towards are ones dominated by coders. The queer programming sphere has a lot of interests that intersect with mine! I enjoy reading the posts and comments and jokes, even though I don't understand a lot of the stuff about Linux and mathematical theorems and strings of code.
It took me a while to realize that even though I don't understand those things, no one worth listening to is going to judge me for that. What matters is that the other things being discussed, which includes deep dives about queerness and living on the internet and photography and cats, those subjects appeal to me and speak to me. And I can contribute in my own ways, because this is not a community of just coders. This is a community of weirdos, of strange people finding other strange people to be strange with. We lift each other up with our art and writing and comedy. We all look at someone's fuckery with a .jpeg of eggbug and go YES! EGGBUG! and it brings us joy as a group.
You don't have to be a programmer to belong in this space that is predominantly defined by weirdness. You just have to be a bit strange, and everyone's at least a bit strange.
If you like things share them with others because then you might find they like those things too and now you have a friend.
also going to point out that most of us who use linux are doing it under duress, it doesn't make anything particularly special.
the reason people post about it so much is that it's always breaking
it's like a project car. Sure, you learn things from doing it, but you also make it un-drivable or at least un-street-legal once a month, usually right before important appointments.
as for the posting itself: Cory Doctorow wrote about this awhile ago: https://doctorow.medium.com/so-youve-decided-to-unfollow-me-7452c96b4772
it's a bit of a long read, so here's the tl;dr to hook you: post what you want, post it whenever you like, post to people with similar interests or at least a vibe you want to cultivate, and the rest just flows from there.
I've known (and, obviously, respect) people from all walks of life, here on the internet, and all education levels, many industries.
they all make pretty good posts, and get better with time. But the thing is? most of us just post whatever, and the things that take off take off, and the rest are just for us and followers, or just us. Big Posts aren't what we're producing, we're just writing posts. and you can too.
(But I'm also going to say that the least important part of coding is knowing how to write the code, and much more the problem solving -- if you have that down, finding your way through learning to code isn't very hard, but importantly: nothing really sets coders apart outside of that specialization in problem solving + going and finding the information they need to solve the problem. It's not necessarily (or even commonly, I'm learning) a product of formal education, or "intelligence", and much more just, a thing you get better at over time doing anything in any field. If you don't understand things, ask -- once they're rephrased, it's pretty likely you can follow what they're talking about, but here's the important part: only if it interests you. It's useful to remember that a lot of talk there is people talking about their job, and less it being a thing required to get to know them or whatever
the reason many 'good posters' are in tech is because, well, on one hand it's a good skillset for tech (this is complicated and deserves it's own post), and on the other, we've been Posting longer, on average, because we've been hopping on shiny technological things for longer than people who aren't, and that includes twitter and tumblr and before that livejournal. Some of us have over two decades of posting experience (I am ashamed to even say my 15y). So, don't sell yourself short.
It's like that art thing, where people feel discouraged by their inability to draw but with 3 months of practice they make huge improvements.
It's okay if yours dont seem as good. Ours weren't either, for a long time. Hell most of mine still aren't. But I can read the winds now, and that's really all that's changed outside of a larger set of information in my brain, just from having more time to read random bullshit, posts or no.)
