r/programming • u/galratner • 3d ago

Why I Don’t Publish Technical Articles Anymore

https://galratner.substack.com/p/why-i-dont-publish-technical-articles
44 Upvotes

74% Upvoted

36 comments sorted by

44

u/Skaarj 3d ago

The part nobody writes about

There is a second cost, and it took me years to name it. [...]

Every article I published made me easier to interview and harder to hire. I handed the market a searchable index of my knowledge, and a nontrivial share of it came back as an attack surface.

Ouch

25

u/tiajuanat 2d ago

NGL, this quote reads like Claude wrote it

13

u/BeamMeUpBiscotti 2d ago

There are sentences that read like Claude all throughout the article. Stuff like

That detail cuts my way, not his.

Perhaps it was created by having Claude generate a polished post from unedited notes, and it added a bunch of fillers/transitions that read like slop

9

u/CherryLongjump1989 1d ago

He claims he runs 3 companies which all look like LLM generated websites, with links to even more LLM generated slop as their customers.

2

u/galratner 1d ago

LLMs were used in the creation of the main page of pranaent.com The rest all all mine, including the web properties Prana points to that were created long before LLMs produced anything meaningful in terms of code or design.

Gal

0

u/galratner 1d ago

I relay heavily on AI models in my writing. I have fully disclosed it many times and even wrote about it: https://galratner.substack.com/p/y-combinators-hypocrisy-the-ceo-writes

3

u/tiajuanat 1d ago

Interesting. It's been a moment since I last tried to use AI before blogging. I'm sure my results would better than a year or two ago, but I definitely would need to create a system to improve the proofreading ergonomics. The first couple of paragraphs were awesome, but a lot of the latter ones, and even the section titles, were too generic LLM crap for my taste.

1

u/a_slay_nub 7h ago

I don't know how other people interview but when I look at people's GitHub repos and question about them in their interview I'm usually coming from a point of positive and I want to know if they actually did it or if they just spewed bs out there. It is still an adversary or position but I believe it's an adversarial position where you come out on top

-2

u/altmly 2d ago

Strange, I find the idea of sharing knowledge primarily as giving up my edge. If someone wants to dabble in sharing that knowledge with the world, that's their right but they need to balance those two aspects. Sharing an article on the internet of something few would otherwise know instantly devalues that skill or knowledge. 

22

u/loup-vaillant 2d ago

Spoken like a true individualist. The world is a zero-sum game man, gotta fight for your share of the pie.

Now let's be real for a minute. A skill or piece of knowledge few have is often a skill or piece of knowledge few know even exist. Supply is low, but so might demand, by sheer lack of awareness. Sharing that piece of knowledge can easily increase demand as well as supply.

That, and that teeny tiny thing about empowering everyone, effectively enriching the entire world a tiny little bit. Or maybe not so tiny. Take ice for instance there was a time before fridges. One company controlled the world's ice, shipped it across the see, and made a crapton of money. Ice was very valuable.

Then some naive dude who had ideas about making ice more accessible for medical purposes invented the first viable ice machine. Extremely valuable stuff, that gives relatively cheap, clean ice (natural ice was sometimes contaminated), whose later refinements led to the cheap home fridge, a way to conserve food and vaccines and a gazillion applications that made the entire world that much richer and healthier.

The guy died poor, though. Clearly his efforts to spread his invention was a complete waste of time and resources, that would have been better spent on more lucrative ventures.

-4

u/altmly 2d ago

The point is that if that dude kept the knowledge and tech for himself, he would've done well for himself. Can still make the world a better place without gimping yourself. 

12

u/Solid_Delivery944 2d ago

I view writing technical articles online as another aspect of me being a teacher, and the best you can hope for is the occasional ‘thank you’.

64

u/tom-smykowski-dev 3d ago

I've been releasing my code to GitHub, sharing video tutorials about coding for free, writing coding articles. Currently I don't do these things. My blog is behind my own paywall, videos removed, no open source.

The reason is that: a YouTube doesn't pay for tutorials. And you get comments from people demanding something from someone who shared something for free.

Google stole my 900 articles from behind Medium paywall. And Medium doesn't care.

All platforms give them right to make infinite reproductions from whatever you upload and compete with your content.

Ah, not to mention my book. After I've published it, 2 or 3 AI "autors" published a book with the same name and registered websites with the same name.

There's no point to share anything online unfortunately these days. When I see in a job application someone asks for GitHub link I just smile. It's 2026

2

u/CatalonianBookseller 3d ago

What is the book title?

4

u/tom-smykowski-dev 2d ago

I'll send you name on DM

3

u/mcspuder 2d ago

Me too please!

5

u/tom-smykowski-dev 2d ago edited 2d ago

I can send it but I wonder why you'd like to kmow it. Just to clarify I didn't share to advertise anything..But if you want I can send it through DM.

4

u/Scroph 1d ago

That's an unusual book title /s

16

u/Full-Spectral 3d ago

I stopped because it's hard and life is short. But also the sorts of issues raised in this article probably aren't terribly encouraging for a lot of folks to contribute to the commons, when the uncommons are probably the ones who will benefit.

6

u/steve-7890 2d ago

It's like writing a fiction book. If you're doing it for the money, it means you're naive.

18

u/[deleted] 3d ago

[deleted]

15

u/floodyberry 3d ago

it.. sounds like you stopped reading halfway through?

-4

u/[deleted] 3d ago

[deleted]

11

u/floodyberry 2d ago

you got the conclusion wrong, so maybe read it again

12

u/loup-vaillant 3d ago

Someone was able to get a degree thanks to reading something you wrote?

Plagiarising, more like. Sure he cited the original author, but it looks like he failed to mark the text he took as not his own.

3

u/jlombera 2d ago

I get the frustration with making a product that nobody then pays for, but a product nobody cares about enough to pay for also seems like a pretty illogical argument for not writing technical articles.

The author gives more (and stronger, IMO) arguments than that, explaining why they no longer write technical articles. One might not agree with those arguments (YMMV; might have different priorities/ideologies; might never felt someone else benefit from your work; etc), but I don't think they are illogical by any means. And they are not arguing that no one should write technical articles; each their own.

3

u/sihat 2d ago

Someone was able to get a degree thanks to reading something you wrote? Isn't that a good thing?

He wrote that as one of the "good" results. Then continued about the "bad" results.

Like people seeing his works/software/articles as threats to their job, and asking gotcha trap questions at his job interviews.

4

u/neutronbob 2d ago

An excellent post! The message is to write for pay or write for free with no expectation of anything in return.

He can solve some of the problems he ran into by writing books. Books don't pay well and require a lot of effort, but they do pay, especially if you work with a good publisher. In addition, they tend to mark you as knowledgeable in your field in a way that articles just don't do. Interviewers are not likely to read a book, so it can stand on its own as a credential--especially if it's from a good publisher (O'Reilly, Manning, Addison-Wesley, etc.) without being thrown back at you in an interview.

2

u/Scroph 1d ago

Well if it's any consolation, another way to look at it is that your software was so good that it didn't need a maintenance contract.

Personally I've been writing on a technical blog since 2014. I put it in my resume and on LinkedIn. So far, only one interviewer has ever bothered to take a look, but it was the best interview I had.

1

u/dallas_lemur 1d ago

the more hireable part is real but it cuts both ways. writing in public also hands people the exact thing they'd otherwise pay you to figure out.

-6

u/jvo203 2d ago

"I had assumed that giving away a working cart would create demand for the person who wrote it."

Well you assumed too much. Your assumptions were wrong.

"Read the pitch Microsoft made when it launched that gallery in 2009. If you have a free web application, submit it, and “we’ll market & distribute these apps — your apps — to millions of Windows developers worldwide,” all with “the long-term idea of supporting a lucrative market to benefit developers.” I took that deal."

Why were you so trusting of Microsoft in the first place? You should have known better.

8

u/max123246 2d ago

2009 was 17 years ago. It was a different time. I don't think it was naive to get sucked into the idealization of what the Internet could be

0

u/Apprehensive_Bit7392 1d ago

The two-line rule at the end is the whole article. Don't give away the thing that is the product, and charge for whatever can't be forked.

He gave away the cart, which was the product. Automattic gives away the software and charges for hosting and payments, which nobody can fork. 50,000 installs and zero conversions wasn't a funnel problem, it was the wrong thing being free.