That people like video formats isn't really surprising to me since it's everywhere, but I still don't fully understand the appeal. Even if you were raised on video content and started coding that way, at some point you have to reference text documentation, right? At that point, I would think you would just stick to the text and not go back to the video, but maybe it's just more entertaining the other way.

I like (some) programming videos and I'll give my perspective as someone who learned 100% from books and 3-ring binders for old languages like C/C++/C#/Javascript/Python/bash/etc. (The 1980s Microsoft C Compiler manuals were 3-ring binders.)

The newer languages I learned with a hybrid of videos + traditional books would be HTML CSS, Apple Swift, and PyTorch with the latest AI toolkits and libraries.

The extra dimension that videos offer besides plain text is the live usage of IDE, tools, troubleshooting, etc. For me, watching a dynamic screen with a moving mouse cursor and voiceover seems to activate extra neurons moreso than just reading static text in a book.

There's also a lot of "activities in-between the coding" that's helpful such as seeing the programmer looking up something in various pages of documentation, scrolling around, navigating etc.

Another useful aspect that's underappreciated is seeing the mistakes the programmer makes during the video recording. E.g. the code doesn't compile because of invalid syntax. Or a config setting is wrong and he troubleshoots what's preventing it from working. In contrast, virtually all text books or blogs of coding are "perfect happy path" outcomes. But real-world programming is messy with broken intermediate states. A lot of videos show the messy steps to get to a working state.

The videos that are not that helpful would be the videos of C++ CppCon conference sessions where there are a bunch of static slides with bullet points and the speaker just reads them aloud word-for-word.

Although I learned C++ from textbooks, I found videos of Matt Godbolt showing tips & tricks of how to use his Compiler Explorer (http://godbolt.org) very helpful.

In summary, the artifacts of coding may be the text, but the activity of coding involves a lot more than just the text and that's why some videos can enhance learning.

That’s because those “people” are either larping students or kids that want to become programmers. I have never in my 10 year career met a person who said “yeah, I learn my craft from Fireship videos”.

Videos are sort of easier to produce (via screen capture), and are much easier to show the effect of FE things: look, we write code like this, now we can click here, and the page reacts that way. No need to muck with JSFiddle or something.

I'm not a fan of videos as a reference medium, but they can be elucidating to those who needs more hand-holding, literally "click here, see the result". Back in the day, a few short videos about Blender helped me quite bit to grasp certain things that were not obvious from descriptions.

I've been seeing more and more of a certain kind of person who are into these videos on some Discord servers, and it is clear that they are driven more by culture and style than by the goal of creating some thing, or having a strong understanding of how to make computers do certain things.

https://remix.run/

These grifters sell entire courses on the product, that's their game. So when you find an unmaintained Remix app at your company, well, the grifters got the ears of your junior devs :(

And they just promote it and promote it:

https://kentcdodds.com/blog/a-review-of-my-time-at-remix

https://kentcdodds.com/blog/why-i-love-remix

https://kentcdodds.com/courses

Pure grift. But since most people are decent people they don't know and fall for it, and something like this influencer emerges. They have entire Discords of customers, the same as crypto scams.

Edit: I don't know why people would downvote calling out a notable grifter in a thread that extended out to a discussion about influencers. WHICH influencers? Are we scared of that topic? The climate of the JS ecosystem didn't happen accidently.

People fall victim to this shit right here on HN, and then write blog posts about what the fuck is wrong with frontend:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39453767

(This entire thread reads like deliberate testimonials.)

Stop buying this stuff.

But I do agree that there’s just way too much fast moving, breaking changes on front end in general, frameworks released every other week, etc…

I won't try to argue there's no front-end treadmill: there absolutely is, and I had to laugh reading the current top comment because I just had to migrate off Apollo CLI at work.

But this "The web was perfect in 1999--stop changing things!" take is tedious and intellectually lazy. (I'm not accusing you of it, but it's certainly a common sentiment.)

We should be working together to solve concrete problems, and avoid both chasing the latest fads and pretending there's no room for improvement.

When we shepherded a lot of sheep into frontend via these courses and boot camps and quasi courses/bootcamps in the form of certain frameworks (hey, you only know this one framework?), we created a cohort of something.

Now what is that something? It’s not really the tinkerer that loves doing this stuff and would have found a way to express themselves (please pay attention to the word “express”, as in, can’t help it). That something was … a pragmatic identity. A pragmatic identity was formed where “I am now a software engineer because I and my cohort agree, we really know how to do our stuff”.

Such a cohort can only be fueled by identity, not passion. This cohort can’t innovate and must cling to the identity of their original accreditation, so they will always be defensive.

That’s the first layer of the asshole as we enter it, it goes deeper. The second layer involves large amounts of money and people’s livelihoods, to which they’d defend unto death.

Money will be made on all sides regardless and we will all be fine financially. I'm talking about something else, inner. The infinite anus, asshole, is real - but now I'm just projecting.

IMO, the pain from "mostly" starts to show when integrating React Router v6 with legacy frameworks and applications. I'm sure if you go all in on React Router v6 it's great.

At my $DAYJOB we are migrating to Remix w/ GraphQL Federation. It's been a pain.

Especially because we haven't finished any of these migrations:

* ExtJS -> JQuery

* JQuery -> React class components

* React class components -> MobX-observed components

* Observable MobX components -> functional React components with context

* Functional React Components with context -> React Router v6

* React Router v6 -> Remix w/ GraphQL federation

I understand my situation is unique - I'm just bitter from needing to know ~6 different frontend technologies at once. Let alone all the Not-Invented-Here-Syndrome abominations in our codebase.

My problem is having all of them existing at once.

To be fair to both code bases - it's very impressive that they're still running, right?

It actually wasn't even THAT bad considering how huge it is. People still complained (admittedly myself included), but it had been TDD'd from the start so had very good test coverage, at least. Also, some people who had worked on really massive Java applications called it "really good!" so it's all about perspective, I suppose :)

What if I use `fetcher.submit(data, { encType: "application/json" })`? Why not just use fetch directly at that point? I believe it adds a layer of indirectness that just wasn't there before.

If web standards are so important, why don't we use `window.fetch` and `new FormData()` directly instead of wrapping it?

Incidentally, Remix is an open source project started by the React Router devs to create more framework features around React Router. React Router is probably one of the most widely deployed JavaScript libraries ever and is the furthest thing imaginable from a project created by grifters to sell online courses.

Remix was also a company that raised a $3 million seed round and then was acquired by Shopify (for presumably much more than $3 million). Shopify appears to continue to invest heavily in Remix and React Router development, and appears to use Remix heavily.

If so, not disclosing that when he promotes Remix is a bit shady.

Nice dude and all, but that is one thing I take issue with still.

This is a funny example (to me) because in 2017, one of the two co-creators of React Router (Michael) came to my job and gave a two or three-day in-person training course on React. I think he also covered Redux and React Router. We had a great time getting to know him.

It turns out that Ryan and Michael spent a substantial amount of time and effort on a side business called React Training. It is fair to say that their speaking engagements were a solid revenue stream, but agreed - definitely not grifters.

Look at wouter for what is possible if your motivation isn't selling training material. It was written and left alone, it works just as well, it's stable and doesn't change for no reason.

I guess that's fine for you but it's very smarmy IMO.

https://frontendmasters.com/courses/remix/

That was the end goal for this whole thing. I do look at the pricing page (what are you trying to sell constantly?) on anything people put up on the internet and judge from there. You can have the last word and put in a testimonial for Remix, since I won't be budging on this. It's a rabbit hole for both you and me to keep going at this, as I've seen enough of this pattern. Consider me a neural net on this front (end).

Again, I want to be clear: This is NOT an endorsement of Remix. Your line of thinking seems to be conspiratorial and not grounded in reality. You mention repeatedly about pricing and the end goal of funneling noobs toward course purchases... One would assume that in conspiring to sell courses the team behind Remix might actually advertise that they have courses for sale on their website.

I have to be honest as a third party that a. doesn't work with remix, b. doesn't know anyone who works on remix, c. doesn't know you - it seems like you have a personal vendetta.

We can't just keep sitting here and blaming developers for being

1) New

2) Dumb

3) FOMO

4) Dumb

5) Unqualified

You understand? It's worth looking at what content they are consuming and where the mindshare is being promoted from. It's worth asking who is selling them the idea of these frameworks.

Well, as a cohort, I think the ratio of inept programmers to skilled programmers stays mostly constant regardless of stuff like this. Like, if programming is hard to learn, fewer people will try and learn it. But also the skill bar goes up - so people spend more time as inept developers before they’re skilled. Likewise if programming gets easier to learn, we get a swell of fresh faces eager to become frontend developers. And the ratio stays more or less the same. It’s kinda like a sales funnel, or a hiring funnel. You always have more leads in your funnel than conversions. (And if you don’t, you’re in trouble!)

We live in an anti gatekeeper era. Content is free, but nobody protects you from wasting your time watching edutainment. The downside of that is real - lots of people waste countless hours larping as students. But the upside is real too. It’s easier than ever to learn anything.

Is it without providing anything, or a value extraction greater than what one is providing?

If the former, it makes the definition very each to check, but it almost makes it very easy to avoid grifting by providing even the most minimal value, and leads use to needing a new word for providing some value but extracting more than provided (perhaps intention should be included). If that is the case, might I suggest "jrift"?

There goes my hero: https://youtu.be/EqWRaAF6_WY

It's quite a nice framework. It's easy to learn, straightforward, the people in their discord are very helpful. It has the backing of a large company (shopify) who are using it extensively.

It is, I'll say again, obviously not a conspiracy to sell training courses.

Kent on the other hand, worked with them for a short time. He makes his living selling training. Filling in a gap (selling training) isn't really a grift is it? The dude's got a family and he's found something he can sell.

So we went to the nearest bookstore and got a bunch of other books on programming. For many Flash developers the bible was Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel. Most of the source materials for game programming (and that was a lion share of Flash programming) was in C++.

I'm not claiming that we were smarter, but by sheer coincidence, most people, even folks like me who skipped school, had very solid fundamentals. And partially due to the fact that it wasn't that lucrative back then.

Today most people don't care, IT is just easy money, kids have short attention span and trends are tailored by tiktok videos. All in all, it's just a fashion driven developement.

Higher barrier of entry should statistically lead to less people making it past and that those who do make it past aren't a random sampling of the initial group making the attempt. While the selection isn't only for intelligence, specifically the subsets of intelligence related to programming, I would doubt any claims it wasn't a factor at all.

Me either, but I have a hunch about why.

Are you a fast reader?

I am, at least compared to the population at large. And one of the reasons I can't stand video as a format for learning about coding topics is that it is so frustratingly slow compared to my reading speed. To get anywhere close, I have to crank the playback speed up so high that I start having trouble understanding what the presenter is saying. That's on top of other things like poor searchability and no way to copy-paste code snippets.

The decline of reading skills, at least in the US, is pretty well-documented. And my hunch is that for the increasingly large number of people coming into the industry who don't read quickly or well, the efficiency of learning from videos is closer to parity with text. What's more, I suspect there's high correlation between lower reading skills and dislike of the act of reading, so videos are a way to avoid having to do something unpleasant.

I have no solid evidence to back any of this up, but it seems at least as plausible to me as any other explanations I've run across.

Gen Z just sends you a picture of your door. (Mobile broadband)

What we perceive as the best way is often just driven by the technology available when we learned how to operate in the world.

Another example of advertising destroying the world.

Just see how hard it is to read more than a few paragraphs when tired before bed vs. how hard it is to watch something in the same state.

I think this gets added to the point you are making about reading skills declining.

I’m by no means a weak reader, I love reading and do so often. I just find myself re-reading complex sections to ensure that I understand 100%.

I also like to be able to read something and then follow it on a train of thought. For example, if a post/article says that X causes Y because of Z I want to find out why Z causes it. What causes Z to be etc.

With a video I find this sort of learning to be inefficient and less effective while also making the whole experience a bit rigid. I also find that videos tend to leave out less glamorous details as they don’t video well if that makes sense

I think your dislike of video over text is because you're a quick learner. Like you said, going on a tangent and researching some word or sentence or statement makes you a thorough learner I think. Eventually you have a quicker and bigger grasp of the subject at hand, which is the whole point if you ask me.

I do agree with the thorough learner aspect. I think having come from physical engineering backgrounds helps a lot with that.

When studying aerospace, for example, there was a lot of ‘but why’ which usually ended up leading to ‘natural phenomenon’ after abstracting far enough.

Why? Attention span. If someone is reading to me, I tend to get 'pushed along' and it makes it easy to slog through a non fiction book that really could have been a pamphlet but the author needed it to be 400 pages. If I space out listening, it's usually not a problem because most non fic books are so repetitive. I suspect that's the secret behind video's popularity, people's attention is in short supply.

I don’t think it has anything to do with reading speed. When taking in complex technical information, you spend more time thinking and trying to understand than actually reading.

If you’re finding that you can quickly race through content, it probably just means you find the content easy to understand because you’re already familiar with many concepts.

IMO you don’t need any. The correctness of your conclusion is self-evident. Proof by common sense, QED.

I hate YT, X, Insta. Don't even have an account. Some years ago there was really great content on YT, now it's mostly clickbait.

Then if I decide I like it I read the manual.

The fact that there's influencers for everything nowadays made me realize I'm old.

It's super useful that everyone is sharing their opinions and expertise to get that sweet 5 minutes of fame - I just learned how to tile my bathroom after watching a slew of TikToks on the subject, some with millions of views.

I suspect in his case he might actively dumb down his skill level for the stream, so he doesn’t scare away the junior devs.

Go for a decent text editor, learn how to type! It's incredible how we use ai tools to write code for us but some don't know how to actually write themselves! Again, look it up, there are plenty of resources out there. If in doubt, search for said resources here on hn. If still in doubt, ask chatgpt what does the hn community recommend for x or y.

He's actually the opposite of the "trendsetter" kind that is being criticized here, and is more of an educator with lots of experience in both education and business.

I found value in a handful of Primeagen's videos (he inspired me to relearn C programming in a roundabout way) but the vast majority are fluff and I skip them based on the title or within the first 5 minutes.

A couple exceptions are Low Level Learning and Tsoding, who both generally stay technical, and any guest appearance by Casey Muratori will be worthwhile.

But even those, you're better off with a book or your own project to work on.

Remember to take them as another perspective, not a source of truth.

The most problematic influencers are the ones who have pivoted to selling courses. If you find yourself thinking about dropping hundreds of dollars on someone's video course, spend a couple days reading free learning materials first so you can realize that it's almost always not worth it, no matter how much the smiling cheerful influencer pretends they're only trying to help you.

With fame being slowly propagated via tapes and floppies sent by mail, or some BBS archives.

Now you comment on what others do, or commit single function packages.

Current tech influencers are generally smart and qualified but they aren't experts in anything specific and they aren't innovative in any way. They are chosen by algorithms out of a large pool of possible candidates.

Nah. It’s not luck. It’s charisma. And skill at performance & in many cases clowning. Some people just have that certain something that makes people enjoy listening to them. It can be learned, but like programming it takes a lifetime to master. And like programming, some people are naturals at it.

I know because I’ve been training in improv theatre and clowning for the last 6 years. That’s enough that I could tell you in detail what people like the Primagen or Joe Rogan are doing. But I can’t replicate it. I’m way better than I was, but I’m nowhere near their skill level as a performer.

That sounds like I’m a snob - but I really get it. I’ve been watching Inkmaster lately with my gf - which is a reality tv show about tattooing. It’s super fun sitting on the couch judging all the tattoos they do. It would be nowhere near as much fun if I had to actually think, or do work while watching the show.

I think primagen is like that. It’s kinda like a trashy reality tv show about programming. If you don’t know any programming, you’ll probably learn a thing or two along the way. But you aren’t going to become a great software engineer by watching his channel. Not any more than I’m going to become a great tattoo artist by sitting on my arse, eating chocolate and watching ink master. I still do it. But I wouldn’t call it educational.

Edutainment perhaps?

I'm not a 'frontend guy', but I do write frontend code. I use Typescript React with hooks and context most of the time, rollup with esbuild to bundle and to run my dev workflows and raw CSS/SCSS for styling or Bootstrap for cookie-cutter UIs. I've also dabbled with Svelte.

This stack has served me well, and nothing here is newer than 5 years old. There's a cadre of much newer technology that I would consider stable (Vite + SvelteKit), but since new projects come with a maturity curve from the framework side and a learning curve, learning to troubleshoot issues and solve problems.

Anyone who constantly hops frameworks is doomed to be a perpetual amateur, working with buggy frameworks they know nothing about, and they will leave a trail of projects using deprecated frameworks in their wake.

It is only natural for a dev to ask themselves "am I still current? am I still relevant?". The induced FOMO triggers the worst bits of that anxiety, and sometimes I feel the influencers do not realise just how harmful this is.

It all seems like it is for CV glory. Then the projects don't see a commit for years.

I feel sad to hear that. I thought that the decrease in the VC-money flow would also slow down the number of new FE-related frameworks entering the mainstream, but it seems I was wrong then

Dear Developer, the Web Isn't About You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYXSck7TyVM