I'm a total noob, yet the first few paragraphs made me cringe because I felt there were some odd things. I had a weird feeling about it. It wouldn't have bothered me if there wasn't this "A periodical about best practices and advanced techniques in Objective-C"..
Or using the word "great contributors", etc. I mean, one has to be humble because unless one really knows his stuff, he shouldn't talk that way.
If the writing style was more in the "I'm learning and journaling my progress", it would've been more than okay, and knowledgeable people wouldn't have a problem with it.
I was in forums and learning to design my PCB's, I'd post my design and ask for feedback, and people who'd spent 30+ years would comment on them and point flaws on what I thought was nice and would find a thousand flaws in it. And I got back to wrok, iteration after iteration.. Until these really great guys who do that for a living would say "Beautiful work".
Had I posted something like "advanced PCB design" in the "this is how it's done" way, they'd have ignored me and I would've stayed more ignorant than I still am.
There was a question on the Python mailing list asking how long it takes to say that one knows how to program. People with 40+ years actively programming said: I'll let you know when I'm there.
Humility goes a long way. Heck even when I read things on the nmap mailing list, I don't feel that tone that they consider they know more than you do even though they really, really know their stuff.
And of course you can publish it (might be good for feedback), just state that it's a learning journal, not "best practices".
This is a project I did a couple of years ago
http://www.electro-tech-online.com/threads/pcb-etching-tank-...
This is another project :
http://www.electro-tech-online.com/threads/first-pcb-stepper...
There was an update on the site, so images are not available there.. Here they are:
http://www.mediafire.com/view/uu4vsqq8e1yq8/PICTURES#6qj25tt...
Bear in mind that this is what my first attempt with PCB design was [PDF] in French, but you can see how ugly it was:
I was on the forum chat, and I'd send pictures and they'd help me see, they'd open my eyes and explain things. Why 90° tracks are a no-no, etc.
People are tremendously generous with their time as long as your attitude is okay. I learned orders of magnitude more on the internet than in college, and still do every minute I'm online.
That's why I find the whole "blind leading the blind" way of teaching to be counter-productive. Not that it's really serious or anything; nobody's going to lose a leg if you screw up your tcp connection. But when extended to other more serious topics, it can be dangerous to teach things to people if you're not sure about the subject matter. For example, something as simple as jumping a car battery actually isn't simple at all (when done correctly).
And I also think, to a degree, it actually is the responsibility of the reader to judge what to use that supposed new knowledge for. Trying to make sense of tcpdump output when debugging some application software bug? Why not? Writing an IP stack? I hope any sensible person would pick up a book and some RFCs first. Unreliable knowledge can still be useful and harmless in figuring things out, you just shouldn't use it to try and build things.
Then again, practically, we can observe that people do build systems without ever having looked into the relevant standards, and I would actually argue the effects are worse than one superficially might think. I mean, if you look at how ridiculously insecure the web/web browsers are, for example - how did that come to be? I would think one major factor is exactly that people didn't (and often still don't) read the relevant standards, something as apparently uncritical as the HTML spec or the HTTP spec, but instead just wrote what they thought was HTML, and wrote books about what they thought was HTML, and so on - resulting in a need for browser vendors to accomodate all this crap out there that isn't HTML or HTTP but that people still expect to be rendered by their browser in some way or another, and so, due to end-user market share pressure, we now have security vulnerabilities in browsers that are there only because fixing them would break stuff that noone really ever had any right to expect to work, but they thought they were just creating some totally uncritical website using the "knowledge" they learned from some other clueless person, and those security problems can have quite serious consequences.
I wrote an IP stack, of sorts, and used Wikipedia to do it. I'm aware that it's probably crappy, but only because it was basically designed to be. If I had tried to design it well, I might lead myself to believe I had done it correctly, for example because I found no problems with it in my testing. But as you're aware, there's plenty of problems with tcp/ip stacks that only come up as edge cases. So even if I was being sensible I might end up with shitty code and push it into a product, and then we're screwed. But if I had learned the stack correctly I couldn't be in that mess.
A kind of solution lies in forums like HN, though. Sure, the posts are fallible and are often upvoted merely because they are perceived as authoritative. But we have the comments section, and knowledgeable persons who can speak up and educate. So it may not matter at all who's teaching, as long as somebody picks up the slack.
