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Coding Horror: Are You a Doer or a Talker? (codinghorror.com)
9 points by nickb on Dec 13, 2007 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments



Doing IS Talking. It's called prototyping.

Almost every good app I've ever worked on started out this way. We always had SOMETHING working while the talking heads were still...talking.

Great article. Wish it had a link entitled, "Email This to Every PHB You Ever Knew"


OK, time to give Coding Horror the xkcd treatment. Jeff Atwood has repeatedly said he's writing to the 80% programmers, the kind that don't read programming blogs (especially not Hacker News). Unless there's something exceptional (like the FizzBuzz firestorm), please just let us read it on RSS.

Repeated from my comments at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=88817

We get it, [Coding Horror] is [Informational]. Enough [articles] have been posted that people who didn't know about it know about it now. Not every single [article] needs to be posted - that's what RSS is for.

Thanks, and I do appreciate you making sure YCNews readers are aware of [Coding Horror]. I'm a subscriber and a fan, so please don't interpret this as criticism, just the kinder side of a social news site.


I disagree with this whole line of thinking.

The most important reason to continue submitting xkcd and Coding Horror links to news.yc is the comments. When I see an interesting article come in over RSS, I often click over to news.yc to see what the folks here have to say about it. Smart people read this site.

By contrast, I almost never read the comments on Coding Horror itself. I don't know that crowd.

Secondly, it's easy to just skim past the Coding Horror and xkcd links. It's not like they take up more than two lines on the news.yc page. It's not like news.yc has a thirty-second load time when you click the "next page" button.

Thirdly, these sites have limited traffic. It's not as if xkcd will suddenly explode and generate 50 posts per day, all of which will be submitted to news.yc.

Finally, everyone is a newbie once. There are several sites that I've been introduced to by seeing them cited repeatedly on news.yc. I think it's foolish to assume that people "can just read Site X on RSS": how do I know that site X exists and is worthy of a spot in my RSS feeds unless I see it getting recommended over and over by smart people?


this would be my +10 of the day


A couple of quotes come to mind:

"Well done is better than well said." -- Ben Franklin

"The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It's as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer." -- Nolan Busnell


I don't know....I think these kinds of articles don't really offer any new insight.




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