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Comment by Splines | Hacker News Reader

> If you follow the right folks on Twitter, you'll get to overhear a lot of conversations about the important issues in Python, R, or what have you, and gain a context that eludes most people who learn programming languages from books.

I've tried this a few times, but discoverability on Twitter is impossible. I don't know who's an authority, digging through someone's past posts is hard, following a discussion is really difficult. It feels like I'm tasked with digging through a SMS chat log looking for content. Am I just doing it wrong? I can't keep up with twitter. I follow 20-30 accounts and inevitably every time I open up the app and there's 600+ unread posts. I couldn't imagine following any more than that.

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It takes a bit of work to figure out who the influencers are.

For instance, in R you will want to follow Hadley Wickham (tidyverse), figure out who replies to his threads and build out your list from there.

In Python, I started off following folks whose PyCon talks I liked. Certain names come up often in the Python world, names like Dave Beazley, Raymond Hettinger, Wes McKinney, Jake VanderPlas, etc. I started there and built out my list.

I'll admit some days there is low signal to noise because lots of folks interleave their technical tweets with tweets about their personal lives or tweets of (sometimes very funny) jokes. But I accept it because life is like that. When you meet people at a social gathering, you can only talk shop for so long. Software development is as much sociology as it is code slinging. It's often as important to know why (the motivations, use cases) something is done a certain way as it is how it is done (algorithms). There is explicit knowledge, and there is tacit knowledge, and the latter is harder to mine but gives one a deeper understanding of the whys as opposed to the hows.

Yes it is easily to be overwhelmed, but that is the price one pays for picking the brains of people who build the tools you use every day. Once in a while you pick up something valuable which makes it all worthwhile.

The much-maligned "things you may have missed" box helps. Also giving up on reading every tweet.

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