"The whole reason he's a public figure is from his blog posts that include a bunch of deliberately placed attitude and bombast of the sort that turns a lot of people away but is selected for anyway because it gets just as many (or more) followers, and attention is only additive."
This is not a defensible statement *based on my writing*. Give it a shot, if you think you can pull it off. I'd like to see some real citations here rather than broad, unsupported generalizations.
Now try *that same statement against DHH's writing* -- what you said is exactly correct.
> This is not a defensible statement based on my writing.
The writing is all there is; the entire basis for the remarks is the obnoxiously cocky posts confidently published to the Coding Horror blog. (Or, I dunno, maybe things changed and that's no longer the case; I started ignoring everything published there 10+ years ago.)
> Now try that same statement against DHH's writing
Try as you might, you're not going to convince me to give enough of a shit about going off and familiarizing myself with whatever you're referring to all for the sole purpose of being able to figure out who is the biggest blowhard.
Thank you for the kind words! A project should never be about me, personally, anyhow -- it's always joint decisions between the team and the communities actually using the software. Please email me at jatwood@codinghorror.com if you'd like to review a draft of an upcoming blog post I'm planning to make that relates to Discourse, but is far wider in scope.
"hired" is a bit of a stretch! Joel had some design input, and the original "let's replace this terrible thing with something better" idea for sure, and Expert-sex-change was the mimeograph, but it was me, Jarrod Dixon and Geoff Dalgas and then Kevin Dente in the earliest days.
It's not though; all topics are permanent and searchable. So it's the best of both worlds. Have you ever tried searching chatrooms and 100+ channels? Excruciating.
I have used search in slack/discord/telegram and found it's super fast and fairly reliable. I can often see references to the same error messages or bring up the topic I'm interested in.
Discourse has the advantage that it is indexable by Google which is a big one, but I don't share the frustrations that many here talk about.
IM has always felt faster and more responsive than forums ever did. I used to be a huge forum user and I remember posting questions and having to wait at least a day to get to an answer while on IMs I have often found people start to help out immediately and provide their best guess even when they don't have the full answer.
While forums felt too formal and if you didn't post a well researched and correct question, your post would immediately be locked/flamed/sunk down.
Oh, I'm well aware of this workaround. The problem is that Ctrl+F is muscle memory by now, so I usually hit it and immediately start typing... then notice that it's the wrong search, swear, hit it again, and type again.
