Do you have any experience with Pelican? Will you tell us about it?

I saw “Phoenix” got really excited and though it was a book on the History of Firefox. Looks just as interesting !

I enjoyed reading about the goals of the Postage project, but I don’t see an actual response to the content of electron/flash, whether acknowledgement or disagreement. The performance numbers listed don’t address that article’s content. Criticism: electron applications are bloated in application size, memory, cpu. Response: install time, startup time, query time compared to another application. They’re related but different subjects.

+1 for KeePass2

I will HIGHLY recommend you make backups of your keepass DB though. They do corrupt sometimes.

No, get the pitchforks.

People only put this kind of energy into something if (a) they’re angry, (b) they are incentivised, or © easy and they get a psychic reward of some kind. We want positive reviews to belong to © but it just doesn’t seem like we can make it easy enough, and we put a lot of energy into (b), but this is really about (a). So when we see a post like this, we know that it’s unbiased, and all the benefit of the doubt we can offer it isn’t enough.

And yet, the Company has the upper hand. As long as they can (d) pull the bait-and-switch, and force us to sue them to get the value that we (consumers) are expecting to get, they have an incredibly strong upper hand. The legal system is hard to use (cost) efficiently, and companies know it.

We’ve given it to them; We no longer expect software to be delivered finished. It’s for this reason that we need companies to fear negative reviews. We need the creative director to ask himself is this good enough? before he releases this software. Before they release more fucking bullshit.

When I’m sifting reviews to help make a product choice, an overwhelmingly-negative review from a smart voice who isn’t personally aggrieved will make me look for the next option (product). Less applicable here since it’s so narrow, but true in general. Of course, the vendor is acting on that information incorrectly, but I get it.

It drops npm into the existential-reflection shell, presumably.

There’s a clickbait blog article waiting to be written titled npm isntall that

Wait, I thought this was for checking the height of a dependency tree.

My advice here is pretty standard, not just for writing, but for any field, but I think it’s standard because it works. Get good feedback and practice incorporating it. Don’t try to fix everything at once; add skills one at a time.

In my experience, it takes a while to find people who will give you good feedback for free. Most people don’t come up with substantive writing critiques, but if you ask for advice on a lot of drafts, you’ll eventually find a few people who come up with meaningful critiques and not just spelling and grammar corrections.

And of course you don’t have to only get free advice. If you’re a programmer, you can certainly afford to hire a professional editor to help you. I don’t want to post what’s basically an advertisement for an editor on lobsters, but if you’re interested in this, contact me privately (see my profile) and I can recommend a good editor.

My process is to get good feedback about something (often a blog post), incorporate the feedback in the current thing, and then try to write something from scratch that incorporates one specific thing from that feedback. I then get feedback on that second thing to see if I was able to improve that one thing. When I’m able to consistently write something that doesn’t get the same critical feedback, I move on to another problem in my writing and try to eliminate it.

I don’t claim that my writing is good, but when I look at how my writing has changed over the past year and a half, it’s certainly improved a lot. For a given level of effort (30 second email, 15 minute blog post, 3 hour blog post done in 3 sittings, etc.), my writing is a lot better. I’d say that my dashed off 15 minute blog posts are as “good” as my serious 2-4 revision blog posts were a year and a half ago, when I started this blogging/writing improvement experiment. Considering the time investment (a few hours a month), I’d say that improving my writing using this method is one of the highest ROI things I’ve done lately.

Does anybody have any advice on how to become a effectively become a better writer?

Yes.

Yes, you want to write as much as possible, that’s a given,

That is a given of course. Read too. Read as much as you can on as much as you can. It really is a shame that our modern lives are so strongly aligned towards any other form of recreation than reading, given reading’s relatively lengthy time requirements to get much out of it. Beware the shysters who claim they can “speed read” at some exorbitant number of words per minute. The act of reading requires more than merely pushing and popping groupings of words into and out of your brain’s mental queue as fast as possible.

but can you get meaningful feedback from someone who’s much better than you at it?

Absolutely. Editors exists for more reasons than merely finding typos and other grammatical errors.

Is there quality coaching of any sort that you can get?

There are several communities of critiques, readers/writers, reviewers, editors, teachers and so on. In my experience, their eagerness to help is typically proportional to your own reciprocity in helping them in turn. That being said, finding an audience can still be difficult given our desire to become ever more efficient schedulers of our limited (and in some cases decreasing) free time.

I agree with the posted essay. Writing can bring great clarity and you can grep it.

A few observations from good essays / blogs

1. Put your personality into it.
2. Give a strong purpose to each essay / blog.

I consider zenhabbits.net to be a good representative of the above said points.
Words like good and better are however, subjective.

Hope that helps :)

And it’s never too late …

I don’t know, to me it seems he should at least have a private chat with the guy in question, at least as a first step. If that fails to achieve anything, I hate to suggest to take it up a level but maybe a private chat with the immediate superior could help.

At least that’s the order in which I’d attack things.

[edit] At least to me that way seems like it would respect the chain of command without making the guy feel under attack, which is probably something that wouldn’t help the team dynamics, even if it ends well.