500 articles to read!
500+ articles to read. That backlog took years to build. Years of, “Yea, I’ll totally read that”. Then not reading anything. While I was able to trash part of the backlog. (No, I don’t need to read “4 spaces are better then 2 when formatting code”). I still had a healthy backlog.
To not keep anyone in suspense, I read it 1. Reading it reminded me of my favorite articles from years past. So, this December I’m gonna try and share the articles that I have enjoyed over the years. Especially those that impacted my work.
Why are any of these worth your time to read?
When I started reading on the internet, I didn’t spend anytime thinking about this. I voraciously consumed. At peak I was consuming over 500 blogs. Provenance wasn’t important, only that they were interesting.
Then I tried to put something it into action from an article. It was clear at that point, who or what is publishing the content is damn important if you have a job to do and want to do it well.
My answer to the why question is a cliche, but its the efficiency of it all. Anyone can publish whatever they want on the internet. Furthermore, it can be easy to publish.
The availability and the ease allows folks to publishing everything from the insightful and unique to utter trash garbage.
It allows folks who don’t even realize that there are gatekeepers to communicate their ideas to the rest of us.
It truly democratizes publishing.
If you’ve got your net out there, you can find something that will change your life.
Of course, there are great books, peer reviewed research, lectures, and videos out there as well. But, I have a soft spot for The Feed of written content the internet produces.
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In a stopgap effort this year I printed it out. I wrote code to condense the articles to two columns. Even then printed on the front and back, I sheepishly hauled over 200 pages for a month, but I read them all. ↩︎