I would argue this is an unduly negative take on following the work of other developers. Following the work of one of your peers in your field does not have to become a cult of personality. It can help you discover what kind of open source work or intellectual direction is actually useful, especially at the beginning of your career. It's totally reasonable to not follow other developers but I also wouldn't want to cultivate the perception that following the work of others is a failure to be busy enough on your own.

> (2) I don't like buying into a cult of personality, no matter how benevolent

The reason to follow many developers is could be due to their useful output (e.g. informative blog posts). You don't have to agree with everything that someone puts out (cult of personality) to find things that they produce useful.

There are developers that I have met in real life, whom I didn't really like their personalty, yet I still take notice whenever they put out a new project because they usually have well-thought out and infinitely usable interfaces.

I suppose I prefer to consume my personal developer blog posts filtered through something like HN. It ends up being fairly high quality without worrying if I'm following enough people or the correct people.

I understand what you're saying, some people follow a popular developer and that can cause them to take what they say and regurgitate it with an annoying arrogance.

But supposing everybody took your stance we wouldn't be able to have something like Hacker News. I think following popular developers and sharing what you believe to be good content may not be enjoyable all the time, but I do think it's necessary. Just as someone who has only been in the software culture for about two years now.

You are right. Someone has to do it. I suppose I just don't want to be me :-p

They call me the wanderer.

Following the blogs of people whose work you like doesn't take much effort. All it takes is a good RSS reader.

Because most of them don't have time to write frequently. The people I follow tend to write once in a blue moon, but when it happens, the articles are really good and I consider it a shame to get lost in a sea of noise.

If I open my RSS reader right now, I'm sure to find 10 good articles that I like, which is not what I can say about HN on any given day.

In fact on HN I'm glad to see an item worth my click once per month. The content promoted here is really bad IMO and I only come for the discussions, which tend to be interesting as people bother to post long comments.

I was going to say pretty much this answer - good ideas stand out on their own, not because [insert person] says it is good. There are many fantastic developers out there that you probably have not heard of their name until they come up with a new idea that blows up or they become known for a prticular talk given or project released - the moment of recognition isn't the point where they suddenly became a developer at that level.

I find that it is better for developers to go through the exploration of ideas and to come to their own conclusions/path on the ideas that works for them. Encouraging that academic learning is much better than recommending a specific person for people to dump their time listening to.

I don't agree with the view that following specific people's work is the equivalent of cult personality, although thats how cults start out. It's not transpositional.

It's a decent starting point for those just starting out in the community/open source culture to get the hang of it.

The general idea however is to keep an eye out on places like HN to general trends and follow popular/radical repositories in those areas.

However, I would strongly suggest to not fall for the trap and limit yourself to just following people / news. Get the news but dig deeper, read posts on that topic, clone and play around with repositories, create and share small projects, connect this to what you already know and create ideas, no matter how useless you think it is, read influential papers (re-read them) and get involved in conversations on them.

That is more fulfilling and impactful than following personalities.

That's like a doctor not following leading medical scientists in his field...

You don't have to, but, it's probably a good thing.

Can't the doctor read medical journals and published papers in their fields instead of tweets from a select few peers?

Very much agreed. Curated, peer-reviewed, or just generally thought through by more than one person -- we need more of that.

What's the analogue to that in the software development space? Following a project usually means following a person, unless you're talking about huge projects maintained by a team of developers.

I think they mean following them on github to see what they're starring and working on.

I suspect he's referring to following HN and similar communities.

Or, scientific research? We do have that in IT.

Why can't we have both?

> when I see a new thing by antirez on HN, I am likely to click it because it's usually good stuff, but I am not going to be following his blog

In that case following his blog explains how he made that good stuff which helps in building skill and also helps others to build great stuff.