100% agree. These factors are generalized and without context. The context you bring is essential to making the right decision. The next post I'm writing is all about how to apply this framework to your specific context.
While reading Franklin's autobiography, I was completely struck by the systematic, almost algorithmic way he taught himself to write. He designed a process of compressing, reconstructing, and comparing his work against a "gold standard" to find and correct his "faults."
The more I looked at his 4-step loop, the more it resembled the modern training loop for a machine learning model (data collection, forward pass, loss function, backpropagation/gradient descent).
I wrote this piece to explore that parallel, how Franklin basically reverse engineered the principles of deliberate practice and error minimization 250 years before we had the formal language of AI to describe it. It's a fascinating piece of history, but also a practical model for how anyone can learn a complex skill.
This much more clear and honestly more impressive (because the first four are so obviously group effort that I discounted the last two - I had my suspicions about spf13-vim, though).
No, Steve that is not accurate. You didn't build MongoDB, Docker or Go. They were all wildly successful before you came on board. It's dishonest of you to insinuate that you built or helped build the core products. I can speak first hand for 10gen. For Docker you were not even there for a year, and for Go Rob was pretty clear who helped build it - Ian, Russ, Adam and a long list of people. You were ancillary involved around the periphery of all these.
Having worked on all these should be good enough you don't need to embellish and constantly overstate and lie about your contributions. Let other people talk about how great you are.
I think your wording was fine. I didn’t read that into it at all. Of course you worked with folks to do them. You also spent the majority of the post thanking people you worked with.
I’ve also read your code. I enjoy it and learned a lot more of go that way.
Whatever. Thanks for helping make Go so much fun for me. I look for excuses to write CLIs with Cobra/Viper. They’re of a very few set of libraries I look forward to using.
I use Hugo for much more than it was intended for.
Heck, I wrote a CLI with Cobra around Hugo and a simple theme for my personal note taking and todo management. I was annoyed with other markdown note tools and DIY was a fun waste of time :).
I built and led the team that was responsible for the MongoDB user experience. We designed and built MongoDB's integrations with programming languages & third party systems (Drupal, Hadoop, Storm, Spark, etc). Our team wrote the MongoDB user manual too and we were responsible for the websites.
My blog has a lot of talks / posts about the work our team did if you want to read up more about it.
Thanks, appreciate your response! Didn’t occur to me that you were talking about the UX for the entire ecosystem. Will read your blog for more details.
Technically I don't think "author of article says they can confirm that numbers they used in their article are accurate" really holds up as a valid argument ;).
Tongue-in-cheek feedback aside, congrats on all your achievements and good luck on your future projects!
A couple of the Go authors did a lot of the initial coding and continue to code in Acme (rsc, r). The broader Go team use a wider variety: Vim, Emacs, Goland, and VSCode are the most popular from what I've seen.
I did this exact thing when I got frustrated with Jekyll (and friends) and created Hugo. Of course, at the time all SSGs were in dynamic languages and very VERY slow.
I know the feeling. In my very meta case I get frustrated with my own SSGs, so every time I start learning a new language an SSG is one of my two standard projects to give a frame of comparison.
I now have my own SSGs written in C#, Go, Node, Python, Ruby, and PHP.
It's totally ridiculous, I know. Yak shaving and shiny to the nth degree.
That makes a lot of sense to me. It used to be that writing a blog engine was the "Hello World" of a new language or framework. So, it makes sense that a SSG would be a good non-trivial project to use to learn or understand the pros/cons of a language.
Sorry to pile on here, but THANKS for Hugo! It’s legitimately great and has helped me quickly and easily updated (with the help of netlify) set up a really useful set of online notes for myself. I truly appreciate your work.
Hey - thanks for making Hugo. We run our blog on it and I love it. Spitting out an AMP version and maintaing it side-by-side with our non-AMP version was a piece of cake.
Edit: noticed you make Cobra too! Damn - I owe you like 1000 man hours of saved work.
When Jekyll was created, all Apple laptops shipped with Ruby, and Apple has (had?) a large share of the “developer/power user” market. That’s my theory, at least.
