Coding Horror

Same here. It may be basic and crappy, but if you want to read an unsuccessful blog with no attempt at monetization or ads or even visitor counting, mine[1] is where you should feel right at home.

But I guess the author means a platform, not loose websites without a collective 'new' feed. I remember looking for one when wanting to make a new blog and I haven't found a platform that felt right, at least back then (probably ~2015). Heck, I couldn't even find software to install: everything is either super heavy stuff that requires caching or at least a beefy CPU to survive the HN homepage (with custom software, HN can be survived on an ancient Atom CPU even if you use PHP (also pre-PHP7) and do multiple SQL queries per pageload) or some static generators that I wasn't looking for.

Edit: While we're at it, another blog I read is Robert Heaton's one[2], and I'm subscribed to a few others but they don't seem to post anymore since I stopped getting email notifications. I remember Coding Horror[3] was also nice to read but he posts very infrequently now (for those who don't know, that's by the co-founder of Stack Overflow). Finally, Cryptography Engineering[4] might be nice if you're into that sort of thing. But I suppose those can all be mostly considered successful in that they all have a following.

[1] https://lucgommans.nl/blog

[2] https://robertheaton.com

[3] https://blog.codinghorror.com

[4] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com

> For those that don't know, Fizz Buzz is less an aptitude test and more of an attitude test.

The articles which popularised FizzBuzz as an interview question stated as a categorical fact that most computer science graduates or programmer candidates (one article even said 199/200!![2]) cannot do FizzBuzz[1,2,3] and were absolutely recommending it as an aptitude test.

I personally think this whole thing was simply untrue back in 2007 (or at the very least incredibly overstated) and we are paying the price for it with ridiculous 15-stage interviews as a paranoid response to some urban legend from ~20 years ago.

[1]: https://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/ [2]: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/01/dont-overthink-fizzbuzz.html [3]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

What I meant specifically was overreliance on AI, in the sense that I'm now hearing that many junior devs can't do basic coding without AI.

(The parallel that comes to my mind is that programmers raised without garbage collection learned to write more efficient code, and now a text editor uses several gigabytes. But yeah, someone called me a "dinosaur" already in this thread ;)

Though this "increase in incompetence" might be a case of selection effect rather than degradation of ability, i.e. people who wouldn't even have gotten the job before are now getting into the industry. I'm not sure, it's probably a bit of both.

I guess it's nothing new! See this great article from nearly 20 years ago: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

For software development - I favor books that are about good practices generally rather than books about particular languages which work well as references.

I usually recommend:

* Code Complete (Steve McConnell)

* The Pragmatic Programmer (Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas)

* Clean Code and The Clean Coder (Robert Martin)

* The Mythical Man-Month (Fred Brooks)

* Test-Driven Development By Example (Kent Beck)

I also recommend blogs for more bite-sized knowledge. Jeff Atwood's blog at https://blog.codinghorror.com and Joel Spolsky's at https://www.joelonsoftware.com in particular have been helpful to me.

"It's so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an NDA to tell me the simplest idea.) To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

To make a business, you need to multiply the two. The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000. That's why I don't want to hear people's ideas. I'm not interested until I see their execution."

https://blog.codinghorror.com/cultivate-teams-not-ideas/

> Pirates get a better product.

Your comment reminded me of this classic article: https://blog.codinghorror.com/oh-you-wanted-awesome-edition/

"If I choose open source, I don't have to think about licensing, feature matrices, or recurring billing."

That is, it's not just pirates who get a better product; open source users get a better product too.

(Going back to the context of this thread: those who chose an open source alternative to the products in question have avoided all of this mess, even if they had to forsake some useful features for that.)