It used to be that well-researched people and passionate people blogged about technical topics they knew very well, and when they blogged about unfamiliar topics they usually declared that upfront.
Nowadays there are an order of magnitude more grifters churning out a massive amount of blind-leading-the-blind garbage to "build a presence", and they usually pose as experts even though they barely know the topics. As an example, whenever I try to compare two similar technologies/libraries I'm not familiar with, I can almost always find one or more Medium or whatever articles on the topic, but 80+% of the time it's quite clear the author basically wrote the useless crap of an article after reading the READMEs, or slightly better, the bare minimum example projects.
I was looking recently for some guides about Docker, as some parts were confusing me -- everything on the first couple of pages of Google was clearly just badly repeating the "getting started" guide, which I'd already read!
I’m not advocating to abolish blogging platforms, but they’ve been a double-edged sword in that way.
The fact that they are generally crap is an orthogonal problem and one the author addresses pretty well IMO.
Do you have a list of those articles? And which sites do you visit to find those articles?
Hosting SQLite databases on GitHub Pages or any static file hoster https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27016630
How to crawl a quarter billion webpages in 40 hours https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4367933
Writing an open source GPU driver without the hardware https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30107002
Teleforking a process onto a different computer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22987747
How NAT traversal works https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30707711
BPF, XDP, Packet Filters, and UDP https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24848391
A viable solution for Python concurrency https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28880782
Updating the Go Memory Model https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27810459
zig-cc: A drop in replacement for gcc/clang https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22679138
Finite state machines as data structure for representing ordered sets and maps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10551280
Time-lock encryption https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061752
My first impressions of Web3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845208
How to build large scale end to end encrypted video calls https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29570938
Secure value recovery https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21838413
How Google code search worked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18582469
Deploying authoritative DNS with Mirage Unikernels https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868589
Playing around with Fuschia OS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23466564
Making tokio scheduler 10x faster https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21249708
JVM Anatomy Quarks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22190815
The hunt for a cluster-killer Erlang bug https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31746090
Static B Trees https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30376140
Files are hard https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10725859
Faster JavaScript calls https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143648
Firefox's new compiler https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16169236
Abusing Linux's firewall: The hack that allowed us to build Spectrum https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16821807
Million packets per second ingress https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9726185
Streams: A general purpose data structure for Redis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15384396
Let's build a compiler https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20444474
Improving compression with zstandard https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18719592
When bloom filters don't bloom https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22463979
Critbit trees https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6920862
Mobile physical memory security https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25505517
How the Linux kernel works https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14422605
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11467309 Following a select statement through postgres internals
LMAX https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3173993
ELF https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17114672
Reading privileged memory with side channels https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16065845
How fast are Linux pipes anyway https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31592934
Reverse engineering a mysterious UDP stream in my hotel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744518
io_uring examples https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23132549
Clojure design patterns https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15771561
Inside the Magic Pocket https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11645536
A high performance cache in Go https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21023949
Lockfree data structures https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7734202
mtime considered harmful https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18473744
Bracket colorization https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28692470
Linux load averages https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14959288
A bump in the wire to make your internet go faster https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17721496
Backblaze durability https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17550837
H.264 is magic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12871403
Redbean: single file web server https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271117
Gotchas from 2 years with Node https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372303
Counting objects https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10259471
Idempotent APIs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13707681
Norvig's auto correct https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42587
QuickJS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20411154
...
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
https://github.com/255kb/stack-on-a-budget
https://github.com/cloudcommunity/Cloud-Free-Tier-Comparison
A big thanks
More programming oriented, less ego boosting.
Just send me an email.
The reality is that most interesting dev articles are about relatively unusual problems that a dev solved in an innovative way. You can learn a lot about dev work from those (approaching problems, thinking about things, some cornercase dev tools, algorithms, etc) even if you can't cut and paste code from them into your own project. This exposes a further problem though - you can't write those articles until you're sufficiently experienced to face those problems, and knowledgeable enough to solve them. If you're a new dev starting out with ambitions to be a 'thought leader' and wanting to get to the top fast, you're bound to end up writing another "Why Array.pop is the best array method ever!" article.