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Comment by bitcharmer | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised Brendan Gregg hasn't been mentioned here yet. He's the Linux tracing/profiling god.

http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html

Don't get me wrong, I respect Julia Evans as a professional, but what she mostly does is simplify other people's hard work and in-depth analysis of difficult problems in various layers of the technology stack.

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How exactly are the next generation of systems programmers supposed to get there without great minds like Julia documenting their journey along the way? If no one can apply someone's work for practical purposes then what good does it do?

Julia mentions Brendan in her post already and she's done _plenty_ of great work. Don't tear other people down, it's not cool.

The OP clearly mentioned their respect for the individual in their comment.

They didn't appear to be "tearing anybody down." Accusing people of malice for expressing their opinion is also "not cool."

It's perfectly acceptable to not be a fan of someone's blog posts. It's also perfectly acceptable to express that in a respectful manner which they did.

Saying you respect someone is meaningless if immediately followed up by a suggestion that they're just simplifying other peoples' "real work":

> what she mostly does is simplify other people's hard work

OP also called Brendan Gregg a "god" in the same post. So Brendan is a "god" but Julia is just distilling other peoples' work? Sounds pretty disrespectful to me.

>"Saying you respect someone is meaningless if immediately followed up by a suggestion that they're just simplifying other peoples' "real work"

Why are respectful and critical mutually exclusive?

Do you believe that one negates the other?

It seemed to me he was recognizing her skill as a distiller of information. That's what a lot of her posts are, how is that disrespectful?

> simplify other people's hard work

I don't mean to pull the argument one way or another one. But, IMO simplifying other people's hard work is hard work too. At least I personally find it to be.

Depending on our experience we can understand OP as being respectful (or not). I would like to give her/him the benefit of the doubt.

I already admitted my respect for her as a professional. There is nothing negative in what she does. I'm just stating a fact - if you want more details you need to turn to people who she sources from.

What is bad about it?

I didn't think there was anything bad in what you said. It was your opinion and I thought you were respectful.

What I have seen though is that saying anything even slightly negative about the content in this individual's blog posts will draw a strong rebuke as you have just seen.

I personally find the amount of fawning commentary and aggressive defensiveness for this particular blog and author a bit cultish.

Had you left off the final paragraph, I think the comment simply would have been upvoted, and nothing more would have been said.

i don't think that's what she does. i think she's the Bob Ross of Linux. what she does is to evangelize learning about low-level debugging / tracing tools and such to a wide audience, with a tone of "you can do this! it's ok if you're a novice". if all talented programmers understood and encouraged beginners like she did, we'd have an embarrassment of great programmers.

Yes - this. I'm pleased that younger people in my team are learning things from her posts. Being a grey-hair *nix guy (not a grey beard!) the posts are interesting, but I know there is a LOT more beneath the surface. She's a valuable addition to the net!

> What she mostly does is simplify other people's hard work

This is the opposite of "respecting" someone as a professional.

Julia mentions and links to Brendan Gregg four times in the this article.

Plus crazy experiments. Don't forget the crazy experiments.

This is why we can't have nice things :(

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