Kent is a great resource in the frontend community, giving a way tons of content for free, including several very popular open spurce libs. Nor sure why you’re being so negative towards somebody you obviously don’t know
Because every inch of this website is dripping with scummy MLM language around his courses and we as an industry have seen scams proliferate around preying on people trying to make it in tech. https://cryptobriefing.com/youtuber-techlead-accused-of-scam... for ex. It offends me morally.
Like, look at https://kentcdodds.com/clubs for example. Doesn't this read as patronizing at best and one step away from being a pyramid scheme at worst? All it takes is to add a financial incentive to the "Learning Club Captain" position for this to literally be a pyramid scheme.
Honestly, and I mean this as no insult: it sounds like you have been some kind of past bias/trauma on this subject or are else taking a really pessimistic view of these things.
Ultimately the courses this dude does are “produced” via EggHead.io and the guy has a well documented open source career.
And hey if his stuff doesn’t provide value to you that’s fine. It’s not hurting anyone and if anything is helping people with their careers.
P.S. I follow him on Twitter and he frequently offers discounts and purchase power parity. So it’s made about as financially accessible as reasonably possible.
But it also feels like there was a similar discussion on his other articles just a year ago on /r/reactjs, which I’m going to generalize and say might be less jaded than HNers:
Many people picked on the distributed nature of the app, along with auth, but I was personally taken aback at the pushing of a pretty obscure, heavy handed state machine library in ‘modern frontend in 2021’, especially just as we are exiting the Redux era into more ergonomic solutions to state management.
There’s a lot of reasonable feedback here, and it all kind of falls under the theme that this guy is pushing a misguided curriculum. I’m not even a fan of Redux, but modest usage of the useSelector hook is far more sensible than xState (or even better, the myriad of newer alternatives that boil Redux down even more to something even simpler). This an important discussion to me personally because I always wonder how newer developers get these concepts fed to them, and voila, here it is.
It’s not hurting anyone and if anything is helping people with their careers.
Unfortunately, I think a good deal of working professionals on HN can agree that it is hurting our codebases, and the overall Frontend community has achieved consensus for some time now that we’ve been feeding bad guidance to everyone.
All I actually saw on his Twitter, and probably the Discord too (if I were to look), was a fanbase providing support. Objectively, all one can take away from that is that his paying customers like the product. That has no bearing on if the product is actually good, just that some people were either accurately or inaccurately assessing the value of it. HN can certainly be full of haters, but it does have a pretty solid group of shrewd experienced developers that won’t appease and ordain things indiscriminately. In this case, as tough as the feedback was, I think HN got it right.
But there are many, I’m doing them an injustice by not mentioning them. Recoil is another that came from the Facebook team. A lot of thought went into simplifying state management.
There are thousands of people in his Discord going through his courses. He’s simply helping people form remote study groups, like students do in school.
Please don't do promotional upvoting and commenting on HN. The community considers that spamming, and we ban accounts and sites that do it. We want users to upvote and comment because they personally ran across something they found intellectually interesting—not because they or their friends have something to promote.
Wow that was super cool to follow from beginning to end. I’ve always wanted to create art this way, perhaps with a physical user interface to tweak its parameters
