remetheus

The absolute state of this shit. It's hard for me to navigate as an experienced programmer let alone someone just trying to learn.

a lot of the internet experience has been diminished by the rise of blogspam that overly optimizes itself for search result position, and now googling things sucks. sites with no pedigree or trust are starting to be the first 5 search results for any technique, and they all have different names, and wild levels of quality.

the use of AI more and more frequently also isnt helping, both in the sense to generate content, but also to try and use it to guess the answer of what you want.

Yeah, it's almost as bad as it was in the days before stack overflow, back when no one ever taught themselves programming.

Wait.

Yes, Google has slipped for reasons that are complicated but probably boil down to capitalism and incentive structures, so that exact route is probably muddier than it was and someone just starting out would probably need to take a slightly different route than the one you took. This does not mean that the path to learning to code is closed, just that it's happening somewhere else that you don't know about yet and that when you meet someone in five or ten years who taught themself to code and ask them their story, it'll be different from yours.

This has always been the way of things in this industry. People keep finding their way in, and then the world changes and that way doesn't work any more and people find their way in again. It's very difficult to know what the way in will look like for the people behind you.

As an aside, I've just had an idea for a book that I should move on while it's still possible to interview the older people I'd need to interview...

It's true but also I'm reminded that back in the later 1990s Philip Greenspun wrote about his experiences writing computer books and wrote this gem that has stuck with me even since: "In the beginning, computer books were thin hardbound volumes in muted colors with minimal text on the cover. Then a marketing genius produced an incredibly thick book, in an incredibly bright color, with an enormous amount of text on the cover. Readers wandered in the bookstore knowing that they had a problem with, say, Lotus 1-2-3 macros. Attracted by the thick brightly-colored spine, the reader would pull the book from the shelf and then scan the front and back cover. Because there were so many words and software product names festooning the book, there was a good chance that the reader would spot "Lotus 1-2-3" and "macros". Thus did the book get bought without the reader carefully examining its interior and/or competing titles.

Like stockpiling atomic bombs, this approach works best if you're the only one doing it. When you walk into the computer book section of a store today, you're seeing the result of a decade-long arms race. Every book is fat. Every book is bold. Every book has enough keywords on the cover that you almost need an index for the cover itself."

all my homies hate geeks4geeks >:(

As a beginning programmer... I very much feel this. It's very hard to learn how to really think and approach programming, and as a result I feel trapped in tutorial hell because all these sites teach is "hello world" and the very basics.

I've tried an approach of finding books for programming, and it's somewhat worked better. Appending awesome to this is also a smart idea. Does anyone else know how to really get out of the blogspam induced tutorial hell?

It feels like Google has capitulated to spam. These blog-aggregator sites are clearly manipulating the domain authority part of the PageRank equation, but it doesn’t seem like Google is doing anything to combat it. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a proliferation of “gray hat” SEO websites, but in the past Google has been relatively responsive and updated their algorithm to mitigate it (see eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda)

I've heard rumblings that apparently younger zoomers are starting to use TikTok like a search engine to find information on a given topic. This may be total BS, but if it is true to some extent, it is probably because that makes it easier to find content made by an actual human being instead of some SEO nonsense a bot crapped out.