Ask HN: Percentages of developers who blog, release code online?

4 points by tomx 14 years ago | 2 comments

I find it's easy to forget many developers are effectively completely invisible online. I guess people just don't feel the need to broadcast information to everyone. So, out of interest:

What percentage of your coworkers - maintain a blog? - post code online? is it a big company or a startup? location? (i.e. the valley or elsewhere?)

I am interested whether we find the 1% rule ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) ) applies to developers&blogging, developers&posting code, or not. In my experience at least (small UK company), it's true for blogging, but not for posting code. About 1/4 the people I work with have a github account.

apsurd 14 years ago |

My kneejerk reaction to this is that it's very hard for a programmer-type to write. Part of programming is of course discipline, attention to detail, conciseness, etc. The same things apply to writing but it comes across much much harder because we don't actively write, we code.

So writing is hard and when we write we know we suck. And we don't want to publish things that suck so we don't publish at at all!

Finally, blogging software is a pain in the ass to deal with as a programmer. Over the years I've had 5 properties (2 WP blogs, google group, posterous, custom site, and tumblr) I'd post at most 3 articles to them and then go years without updating it.

I just didn't get the workflow, and maybe that's an excuse but now I think writing is so important that I did what any insane programmer would do when faced with a "my tools aren't good enough" challenge, I made it my damned self:

http://jekyllbootstrap.com which spawned http://ruhoh.com

- Just my personal take on your question.

bkvirendra 14 years ago |

I blog at http://bkvirendra.github.com

But its really difficult to express myself on my Blog as I really suck at it !!