Comment by LandR | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LandR | Hacker News Reader

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I would say do not look to conference videos for how to write production quality code... Most talks at conferences are shallow and at worst just the blind leading the blind.

Be very careful, I've even seen people from places like Microsoft showing code at conferences that would fail even a decent code review process.

I think for this reason conferences are a complete waste of time. Talks are too short to go into anything approaching useful detail, and s spend an hour talking about pointless demo quality code.. Or the talkers arent experts in what they are talking about. Waste of time.

I would say the same for the majority of blogs. Most are garbage and it can be difficult to tell the code is garbage if you're a beginner. I dont know a single development blog worth reading...

The blind leading the blind? Most conferences have lineups of well respected people involved in an ecosystem. From language authors to open source maintainers and such.

It seems you don't seem to understand the purpose of conferences and blogs. These talks are not to showcase the best quality production code that can pass any review process. They are to showcase new developments and new approaches to do things in a specific field. It's meant for people already in the field (or starting to get into it) trying to learn more.

If such talks have high quality production code in slides the message would get easily buried under stuff that isn't important for conveying the message they are trying to say.

This often happens when conferences and blogs are used as a marketing outlet. There is still plenty of gold, but you have to sift through all the garbage of people using it as a way to make themselves more visible.

It depends on which conference you are looking at, if Brian Goetz had a talk on concurrency best practices then it would definitely be something to think about.

It's true. The best way to learn is to do. Second best, look at production quality source code. Third best, buy a book written by an actual authority on the topic.

What was the last conference you attended and when?

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