I'm fairly new to reading dev.to articles and I'm seeing something often that is kind of strange and I'm curious to know feedback from people of varying experience levels.
I have 7 years of professional dev experience and was a casual coder before that. I am "self taught" which really means I had a lot of generous mentors and
other people that I learned from. I mention this info because it will be relevant to the question.
So what are the thoughts about #Beginners articles that are clearly written by a beginner? I'm talking about the ones that as you read the article you pick up on wrong terminology, odd or wrong syntax, etc. that just give that beginneresque feel. Now listen, I have always stuck to the saying "never think you are the smartest one in the room because the moment that you do, you have just become the dumbest one." so with that said, I think there is some grey area where you might be able to tell the different experience levels in the room but as we know experience doesn't equate to intelligence directly.
So, the problem I see with "beginners" writing How To's or Introduction to ... is that there really isn't anything that tells me whether or not I'm learning the right way to do something which comes from experience from seeing many different ways of doing X thing. Obviously I'm reading the article because X thing is new to me and I want to start at the beginning but I don't want to waste valuable time learning the wrong way or feeling like the person writing it barely has any idea based on how they write about programming.
I really wish there was some badge or area next to the author's name that said what their experience level is or how many years they have been programming or something. Honestly I know it sounds bad but I don't want to read an article where I wanted to learn something and feel like I came out of it needing to teach the author about programming fundamentals that are missing.
I know I can learn tons from beginners and beginners can have good ideas and I still consider myself somewhat of a beginner in certain areas but the difference between a good idea and executing on the good idea is the person's level of experience with programming fundamentals and the syntax of the given language or framework or whatever the topic is.
I also understand and still experience that happiness when you figure out something new and you want to tell people about it, I get it, they want to teach everyone what they themselves just learned as a beginner but I'm not sure they should be "teaching" without disclosing or somewhere identifying their experience level with the given subject. I know I personally would be skipping articles where the person's years of experience or experience level were below a threshold of 2 years or intermediate just for example but that's because I don't have the time to spend reading articles just to feel like my time was wasted and I still don't know whether what I learned was correct or not.
There is a lot of grey area on this one and I'm conflicted in certain ways. What are your thoughts?
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