Sometimes I want to write about a topic I know, be it a technical thing or something more philosophical. I then give up or change my mind, because I feel that it will be superfluous.
After all, a lot of the things I know about computers come from other internet sources, which means they are already avaliable. Everything that I didn’t learn on the internet comes from university, the place where someone can call themselves a computer scientist even if they didn’t touch a text editor in 40 years. Even when not obviously wrong, the things I learned/I am learning in university are summaries of summaries of summaries, and sometimes they feel like straight up lies. It’s great if you want to pass some exams, less so if you want to feel like you learned something.
Anyway, for one reason or another I always end up not writing anything, even if I find the thing interesting: either people already it, or I know too little about it to have something meaningful to say about it.
What I often don’t consider when thinking these things is the huge amount of misinformation that exists alongside those sources. There are social media that continuously post complete nonsense, either because they were taught wrong or because they are trying to farm engagement. There are blogs and YouTube channels who teach stuff by just regurgitating information they found somewhere else, adding mistakes on top of copied material that already had mistakes. There are people who still preach clean code, people who try to warn you about raw pointers, people who do language benchmarks, people who talk about all the things you can do in Python that you “can’t” do in C. And, perhaps most importantly, there are beginners who use ChatGPT as their search engine, read summaries of articles written by Gemini and trust every word in them with their life.
What I am trying to say is: maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh on myself. I should write about the things I learn, even if many people are already aware of it, even if I don’t have 30 years of experience in that field. Even if there are fifteen Handmade Hero episodes about it.
Everybody, me included, just remember: for every time you hand-coded a parser for a custom file format like it was second nature, somebody loaded a Json with a Python library because they read somewhere that C is unsafe and speed doesn’t matter.