I'm only recently getting into some of the dev influencer stuff (and enjoying watching some!), I've discovered Primeagen and Theo but that's about it. Are you willing to name some names? I am trying to still form my mental model about these people and what I should pay attention to and what I should ignore.
I agree with the other comment. Ignore them all, go with the fundamentals. Heck, ask chatgpt what do they think are the fundamental ideas in computer science and go from there. Look for classic books written on those subjects. There have been plenty of smart people around the sw field who took years of their lives to write succint and valuable technical books! Use them! Ignore the poison-mixers who probably didn't write a single line of code in their whole life!
Go for a decent text editor, learn how to type! It's incredible how we use ai tools to write code for us but some don't know how to actually write themselves! Again, look it up, there are plenty of resources out there. If in doubt, search for said resources here on hn. If still in doubt, ask chatgpt what does the hn community recommend for x or y.
You should ignore all of it. They mostly sell the idea of a developer to you, the same with any marketing. That's what an influencer does, they make you feel good about buying a cheap identity.
They're just entertainment. Like throwing on a movie or tv show.
I found value in a handful of Primeagen's videos (he inspired me to relearn C programming in a roundabout way) but the vast majority are fluff and I skip them based on the title or within the first 5 minutes.
A couple exceptions are Low Level Learning and Tsoding, who both generally stay technical, and any guest appearance by Casey Muratori will be worthwhile.
But even those, you're better off with a book or your own project to work on.
He's actually the opposite of the "trendsetter" kind that is being criticized here, and is more of an educator with lots of experience in both education and business.
Yeah, I dig what Casey is doing. Subscribe to him instead of these other clowns. I like how his stuff isn't glossy or overproduced—he just gets down to the content.
Idk Theo reminds me so heavily of a "freelance frontend developer" I had to bear with on my team for a while. Eventually even my manager caught on to how pretentious and incompetent he was, so luckily it was a short intermezzo. An opinion on everything but not a clue of anything
The best programming videos I've seen are ones where someone just pointed a camera at a teacher in a classroom setting, like the Programming Paradigms series Jerry Cain did at Stanford some years ago. No attempt to add entertainment value, just a teacher, students, and chalkboards. I wish I could find more content like that, especially about newer stuff.
I truly enjoy the Primeagen. I've watched him since he started on Twitch. I don't ever really see him pushing any particular agendas at all. Mostly he's either trying new things, or working on projects. That's pretty much been his jam since day one. He has opinions, sometimes they're counter to the typical dev takes. Theo is much more likely to have a commonly shared opinion. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you're into NextJS (I'm not). I just don't feel like either of those guys are trying to get me to buy stuff.
If you think they are fun to watch, watch them for entertainment, but don't fool yourself into believing that this is "learning".
Their content is the definition of "video on the most googled keywords of the day" and the quality is about what you would expect. just consider how much content they pump out and how much time it takes to actually get into any of the topics they "cover" on a daily switching basis.
If you're watching for entertainment and, importantly, they're not selling you courses or a project they have a vested interest in, I wouldn't worry much.
Remember to take them as another perspective, not a source of truth.
The most problematic influencers are the ones who have pivoted to selling courses. If you find yourself thinking about dropping hundreds of dollars on someone's video course, spend a couple days reading free learning materials first so you can realize that it's almost always not worth it, no matter how much the smiling cheerful influencer pretends they're only trying to help you.
Prime is almost an anti-influencer. He promotes not adding dependencies more often than not. He's the guy making fun of the Ai craze, while also genuinely reviewing the recent releases and saying people should just learn to code instead. I really wouldn't put him in this general category of fe influencers discussed here.
