Not another JavaScript tutorial

Are you a new developer? Do you ever feel guilty for not having an online presence full of technical content, where you try to explain what you've learned? Do you get the sense that you'll never have a successful career if you don't? Or that you're missing out on being part of a community of developers and content creators learning in public?

My unorthodox opinion as a career switcher: don't be.

You might be a dark matter developer

In the last decade or so, there’s been a sometimes not-so-subtle trend towards pushing developers to have more of a presence online. Some prominent voices in the developer community encourage newcomers to do at least one of the following:

"[W]rite demos, blogs, tutorials and cheatsheets, speak at meetups and conferences, ask and answer questions on Stack Overflow or Reddit, make YouTube videos or Twitch streams, start a newsletter, draw cartoons (people love cartoons)”

There's an implication that if you don't create technical content alongside your professional development trajectory, you may be one of those mysterious “dark matter developers”:

"They don't read a lot of blogs, they never write blogs, they don't go to user groups, they don't tweet or facebook, and you don't often see them at large conferences. Where are these dark matter developers online?”

Scott has in mind the mysterious C++ and .NET developers happy with their lot, using tried-and-tested technologies, while swyx and others target newcomers, i.e., developers who started in the last five years (after 2017). But the FOMO message that you could be one of those people who doesn't exist unless they create technical content exhaust hits just the same.

The learning-to-code content landscape

On the surface, it seems well-intentioned to give new developers a new path to advance their careers or increase their earning potential.

But, as someone who learned how to code in the last five years, I can testify to the existence of a well-documented glut of beginner content. This corpse-laden hill called "learning to code" tutorials looks more or less like:

• A few good or great people at the top, who first became technically good, then started to create content and share their expertise;
• Many obvious charlatans who prey on the hopes and dreams of aspiring developers;
• A glut beginners creating incomplete, often barely proofread articles or unstructured video tutorials, that rarely get updated or corrected.

Excluding charlatans, this is a new phenomenon: beginners without technical expertise or mastery of a domain are encouraged to create content for attention and credibility, to discriminate themselves in a competitive world.

But this both pointless and demoralizing.

Why I don't create technical content

The main reason is that I lack the technical expertise to do so. True mastery of a field takes a long time, and I've barely scratched the surface at time of writing.

It's not for fear of being online (though, for some people, being harassed would be a good reason to not write). I've been writing online under my name since 2003, and also wrote on behalf of companies I worked for. It also boils down to not wasting the reader's time, or my time:

If it doesn't add something new, it probably adds to the noise

Human knowledge grows when you create something new or combine existing information in novel ways. Without mastery in the field, it's unlikely I'll achieve either.

Until then, I do have unique insights into the challenges I faced. Arguably that might be more interesting than any technical content I could create at this stage.

Adding another How to iterate over an array in JavaScript tutorial could end up being annoyingly incomplete, or damaging for someone else. After years of public-facing writing, I feel a sense of responsibility for the content I put out. So it seems detrimental to leave technically inaccurate or incomplete information out for others to stumble upon.

Being a content creator is a ton of work

Follow enough of them online and you will know it's almost a full-time job. I don't even see that many senior developers who have time to do it consistently, unless their job or career aspirations require (or demand) it.

New developers already have so much to learn and catch up with. Piling on the expectation that you need to also create technical content to get ahead, on top of the bleak leetcode-style grind that many people pursue, is soul-crushing and unnecessary.

Recommended: "Struggling to believe greatness is worth it"It also stinks of the toxic and discriminatory "publish or perish" mentality seen in academia. So why bring a nascent form of this to programming? There's still room for everyone here, including people whose personalities put aren't in the loud-online-pushing-things-forward 1%, as Scott honestly describes himself?

What I write instead

These alternatives might inspire you too, and could also help you publish one day:

1. A developer diary, or devlog. I write a document for every complex feature or bug I work on that challenges me. I outline what I know, what my approach will be, and later reflect on how it all went down. It's not very sophisticated, and it has become a reliable problem-solving flow that works for me. The reflection often proves to be the most valuable - what often challenges me is the emotional, rather than the technical part.
2. A personal knowledge store. Because I learned to code by myself, it would take me dozens of articles or videos to understand a concept, or help distinguish facts from opinions. I ended up creating Notion pages as 'personal documentation' for the technologies I use. In them, I mostly explain things in my own words, often going back to add more sophisticated explanations as my knowledge deepens. When I manipulate information in this way, I retain it much better.
3. Write opinions, or about unique experiences (like this post). While I don't have any mastery or technical expertise to speak of, it might still be valuable to share what I know, in the hope that it helps someone. People who people buy the benefit of what you do, and, increasingly, the why behind what you’re doing. In a world where few developers

I'll end on this fitting quote from Henri Matisse, who started making collages from paper cutouts when he became too frail to paint large canvases, but not too frail to learn something new.