I think your general point is true but the personal blogs of devs angle is maybe not the most illustrative one.
We tend to apply industrial strength tools to our personal projects because it's some combination of what we already know, or we're trying to learn or refine an unfamiliar skill.
If you just gave me a linux shell I would not be able to confidently provision a secure webserver for static hosting. But I do know how to write cloudformation and deploy it. Sure this is a personal moral weakness by the standards of HN whatever, but it's where my career has led me so these are the tools I have.
> If you just gave me a linux shell I would not be able to confidently provision a secure webserver for static hosting. But I do know how to write cloudformation and deploy it. Sure this is a personal moral weakness by the standards of HN whatever, but it's where my career has led me so these are the tools I have.
I wouldn't say it's a moral weakness, maybe more of a failing of the tech education ecosystem. It seems bizarre to me that in software, we teach complex high-level things before we teach simple low-level things. Programming students learn very complex high level languages in year 1, and then maybe by year 3 or 4 learn assembly, or what a CPU register is, or how RAM and cache works. It's like teaching a carpenter how to build a high-rise apartment building before teaching them how to measure or use a hammer.
Well I didn't have any formal tech education, just what I picked up on the job and through my own curiosity.
But I mean you don't teach a car mechanic metallurgy and aerodynamics, except to the extent they'll need to apply that knowledge towards specific goals. At some point the discipline is mature enough that people genuinely don't need to, and can't, know every level of it from the ground up.
I think coding is approaching or already at the point where "cs/fundamentals of computation" should be a different degree from "professional software development."
We tend to apply industrial strength tools to our personal projects because it's some combination of what we already know, or we're trying to learn or refine an unfamiliar skill.
If you just gave me a linux shell I would not be able to confidently provision a secure webserver for static hosting. But I do know how to write cloudformation and deploy it. Sure this is a personal moral weakness by the standards of HN whatever, but it's where my career has led me so these are the tools I have.