My god, to listen to him on that podcast about NP complete was hilarious. How can someone who writes web applications even consider setting themselves up as an expert on software development? Whenever I was bold enough to actually read his crap on coding horror, the only reasonable things I read were the quotes he took from other people or the apparent unlimited stealing from Mcconnell. I think Jeff wants to have his babies. really.

I was surprised also to hear Atwood does not know C and thinks it is a bad idea to learn it. Maybe dismayed really. I guess though when you read his blogs you just assume someone that is this smart and this opinionated on programming should know C. Maybe not.

I do think that his posts are great just because they are language agnostic. It is clear that he has a good understanding of things to do with computers no matter the language.

I will probably keep reading and listening to him.

I agree it’s a difficult line because he’s ‘just a guy’ but he did seem to be thinking that he was a bit of an expert on a lot of things. When he writes about an area I know well then it’s pretty obvious he’s just a bit of a generalist, and is more or less just guessing for a lot of stuff – this puts doubts in my mind as to if he’s an authority on anything really. He had some hilariously/embarrassingly wrong stuff on security, and he just did the Scoble bail of ‘my readers help me learn’ crap as an excuse for getting caught out.

A lot of his output now has descended into either Dvorak like ‘please react’ fluff or, more commonly, where he takes a semi-well known topic and just dumbs it down as if he discovered it – I see him like a ‘Readers Digest for Tech SemiMorons’ kinda angle. Entertaining regurgitation , but not really a decent writer by any stretch of the imagination.

I hope he does ok in the new site, but I’ve (and quite a few tech people I know) have flipped the ol ‘Bozo Bit’ on poor Jeff Atwood a long time ago… Shame he gave up the day job really.

It happens, people’s blogs get popular and they buy into their own PR – my rules is that people that don’t write software for a living should STFU – either that or be a great writer/entertainer…

As a student I use these Blog’s to give me an insight to what I have not experienced before, and to give me advice on what ‘could’ be worth learning.

That being said, I do agree with you when you say that with his own website he could be propping himself up to be recognised, but with the fame his Blog has given him why shouldn’t he? Whilst from what I know of he hasn’t built anything spectacular that I use on my desktop or online (i.e. Newsvine, YouTube, Digg, etc) I still believe him to be a great developer and a very smart man. He does deserve criticism, just like everyone else that places themselves in the public eye. However, I think even he is aware of his placement in the industry now after leaving his job, and with the popularity of his Blog it’s up to him to prove any critics wrong and provide a fantastic resource in stackoverflow.com.

FWIW, what I gleaned from his weblog is that he started as a Visual Basic guy was last doing C# and VB.NET. He has complained bitterly that Microsoft promotes C# over VB.NET, even despite tool support for the latter apparently being better; he has also gone on record that the prejudice against Visual Basic programmers is just that.

I don’t know what happened with him exactly, but he went from often interesting to occasionally interesting to so boring I felt like he was insulting my intelligence.

I actually initially thought it was me – I was writing a lot more code and getting a lot more done and decided he was just for wasting time, and that the change was that I had become a less time-wasty person. But then there’s this post, and lots of tweets on Twitter.

I wouldn’t be surprised if posts about not reading Atwood any more became its own tiny micro-genre. He was good once.

Don’t even get me started on the irony of someone who doesn’t know C creating a website/forum/whatever it may be named Stack Overflow. Ugh.