A Modern Tech Comedy

The Noble Developer Blogger

Ah, the noble developer blogger. A hero of the modern age. The kind of person who generously takes time out of their day to teach us how to code. Except they don’t, because, apparently, the one thing they don’t actually know how to develop… is themselves.

The Comedy of Errors

You’ve seen them, right? These people write 2,000-word blog posts about building scalable apps in Kubernetes or, I don’t know, AI-powered toasters. And yet, for some reason, they never include a link to the GitHub repo.

Like, ‘Oh, you wanted the code? No, no, sweetie, that’s a DIY project for you. I gave you the concepts. Isn’t that enough?’

Just take my half-baked code snippets, sprinkle a little imagination, and boom! You’ve got yourself a full-stack app. It’s like IKEA, but worse, because at least IKEA gives you those sad little cartoon instructions. All I’ve got is a paragraph that ends with ‘And there you go!’

The Copy-Paste Button Trap

And then there’s the copy-paste button. You’ve seen it. You’re reading the blog, you find this shiny little button next to the code block, and you’re like, ‘Wow, how considerate! They’ve made this so easy!’ So you click it, paste the command into your terminal, and… what happens?

Yeah. Turns out they didn’t bother stripping out the dollar sign. Or the extra whitespace. Because testing your own code before publishing it? That’s for amateurs. Why debug when you can let your readers debug it for you? It’s open-source trauma-sharing.

The Case of the Missing References

And look, I know what you’re thinking. ‘Okay, Roger, but what about references? Surely they include links to documentation, right? A little extra reading for those of us who want to dive deeper?’

HA! No, absolutely not. These bloggers don’t believe in citations. Their knowledge comes straight from the heavens—or more likely, the first three Google results they skimmed during their lunch break. Sure, they’ll mention React or Docker or some library you’ve never heard of, but will they link to it? Nope! Instead, they’ll just drop cryptic phrases like, ‘Just add AI.’

‘Just add AI,’ they say. Like it’s parsley. Like I’m supposed to know where to add it. What framework do I use? What’s the dataset? Do I train a model, or is this some magic GPT-4 sorcery? I have questions! And their answer is always the same.

Motivational Vibes Disguised as Tutorials

Honestly, these blogs aren’t tutorials. They’re vibes. They’re motivational speeches disguised as technical content. They’re saying, ‘Here’s the general idea of what you could do, and if you manage to figure it out, congrats, you’re smarter than me.’ Like, thanks for the vote of confidence, I guess?

Diagrams and Other Artistic Choices

And let’s not forget the diagrams. Oh, the diagrams. Nothing says ‘professional tutorial’ like an ASCII art flowchart made of dashes and vertical bars. Like, sure, I’ll definitely understand your distributed system from a stick figure you drew in Microsoft Paint.

The Existential Truth of Tech Blogging

But here’s the thing. Deep down, I get it. Writing blog posts is hard. Writing good blog posts is harder. And a lot of these people are just doing it for free—or worse, for exposure. You think they’re getting paid? Please. Half of them are just trying to beef up their LinkedIn profiles. Like, ‘Look at me, I’m a thought leader now!’ Meanwhile, I’m over here thought-leading myself into a bottle of whiskey because their code snippet bricked my server.

And let’s be honest, blogging is way more glamorous than actual coding. Why spend six hours debugging your JavaScript when you can write a blog post about how you would have debugged it, if you’d bothered? Blogging lets you skip the whole ‘making things work’ part. It’s great!

Trust Issues and Hope for the Future

So what’s the moral of the story? Simple: don’t trust anyone. Ever. Assume every command you copy-paste is broken, every explanation is missing a crucial step, and every diagram is lying to you. But hey, that’s the tech world for you. We’re all just flailing around, hoping the next Stack Overflow thread will save us from existential despair.

And who knows? Maybe one day, developer bloggers will evolve. Maybe they’ll start linking to GitHub repos, testing their commands, and citing their sources. Or maybe… they’ll just add more dollar signs to their code snippets for fun. I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime, I’ll be here, copying and pasting commands with one hand and holding my coffee in the other.

Cheers, folks.