I've been curating some of the last few personal blogs in one place for a couple years now (http://boredreading.com).
It always makes me happy to see more people bring back blogging. I hate that everything is on platforms like substack, and would much rather see a million wordpress or ghost installs.
Registering is free though. People use their email to signup for newsletters all the time. So I feel like it's a fair ask to signup to read some really high quality curated articles with an unparalleled reading experience.
It's funny, you (the user, and everyone else that commented about registering) say it's not worth your time registering, but if you look at it from my perspective, it's not worth putting in all this effort for someone who isn't willing to even register for free, let alone pay for the service that cost months to build.
The articles update every hour, so please check back again. The articles are from blogs that were deemed high quality, but even high quality blogs can churn out filler content. But in general, I think you'll always find one or two really interesting things to read at any given time, if not on the homepage, then on the blogs you follow.
OP here: I'm considering it. Can you email me please? (email in profile)
Would love to figure out a way I can work out a self hosted version for those who want it, given there is enough interest in it. This goes to anyone else who's interested in self hosting, please email me! Thanks!
I like people trying stuff like this. The web is too large and too broad for everyone to hangout in the same place. There should be communities and sub communities that are distributed. We used to have forums, but maybe it'll end up being thousands of niche social media sites like yours. Kudos on the launch!
It doesn't matter if the solutions exist if engineers don't think for themselves. The last project I worked on was about a dozen or so forms and the code base was thousands of lines of react/redux boilerplate nightmare. That project didn't need to be an SPA, and it could have been built much simpler. Heck it could have been hundreds of lines with jquery & node/express.
I love this quote and I think its apt here, “Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.”
What's incredible is how software engineers have failed over the last decade to truly advance the creation of CRUD apps.
Making a CRUD app in many ways has become much more complicated than it was when I started programming 10 years ago.
Today when I want to build an application, I often find myself frustrated and bemused at the state of things. Not because I find it difficult to write TailWind, or connect my Redux state to a component, but because I would have imagined the increase in the number of engineers would have led to more abstractions that would have simplified the creation of a CRUD app, which is are just glorified web forms.
I wonder if ChatGPT had even stood a chance if engineers were good at engineering. But engineers are really mostly good at boiler-plating code complex enough to ensure job security. Which ChatGPT might excel at one day.
What I would have liked to have seen is a world in which we were good at creating abstraction layers to solve an entire class of problems. But alas, I might have asked for too much.
I've been looking for a remote design + engineering role, but it really seems like most companies are not hiring or just have way too many options to choose from!
I've got 10+ years as a design who is also a full stack engineer (node stack). If you're hiring for a role that is well-rounded product, please message me, I'd love to talk.
I built BoredReading.com a few years ago because I enjoy reading but hate having to curate my own feeds, so this is a done for you kinda app.