Time is this really scarce thing that technically apt people often have a limited supply of. He can spend days rolling his own blog app from his own super custom optimized framework and then do all the additional work of getting that content indexed on Google and sprinkle SEO black magic all over it, or he can just put up a blog post on a service where somebody else does all of that for him.
Unless you're really into that sort of thing or are not fully employed, the time saving option is the most sensible one to do if it's "good enough." Which medium is, as evidenced by the fact that we're all talking about it.
As to why he chose medium over his existing blogs only he can tell you. My guess would be that he is using Medium to reach a bigger audience.
The confusing thing is when he he says we and us (talking about his team) it's confusing since it's on Medium. This really should be up on the Google dev blogs if it's official.
Or choose one of the many open source blog engines out there and maybe contribute to it.
It was, of course, a retorical question. We all know the answer.
People publish on Medium because we messed up. RSS died/was killed and we turned to these centralized solutions, instead. Even its name "Medium" is telling.
No, people publish to Medium because it's very easy to do, and looks great. RSS doesn't solve the problem of having to create your own blog, host it, maintain it.
When your blog isn't your main job (or anything close to it), I really don't see the problem with using a service like Medium. We're all busy.
But is the audience for his post the same as the audience he's talking about in the post? I'd wager: no. Not only do developers tend to have more high-powered machines, this is a post we're much more likely to be reading on a desktop that a mobile device, compared to average. Plus, the post makes the point that a delay is hugely detrimental to any UI on a page, like buttons that won't do anything. Blog posts don't have that issue - you can start reading the article without JS having loaded yet.
The blog post repeatedly makes the point that you should measure everything you do and that you shouldn't apply blanket rules to your coding. I think the same logic applies here. The post being on Medium just isn't that relevant.
So we should only care when it's our job to, otherwise we're just too busy?
Even if one agrees with that attitude, which I don't, I'd argue it is the author's job to care.
Contributing to a bloated centralized service is not healthy for the Web. Making sure it remains a relevant platform is in his best interests, even from a purely egoistic point of view.
You still have to either create a template from scratch or modify existing ones to your needs, configure the generator, set up hosting, domain and many other things. Things that take time which could be otherwise used for something better than devops if that is not your are of work :).
> Time is this really scarce thing that technically apt people often have a limited supply of. He can spend days rolling his own blog app from his own super custom optimized framework and then do all the additional work of getting that content indexed on Google and sprinkle SEO black magic all over it, or he can just put up a blog post on a service where somebody else does all of that for him.
Or use one of the existing Google portals they use for sharing content about their products, research, technical findings...
Time is this really scarce thing that technically apt people often have a limited supply of. He can spend days rolling his own blog app from his own super custom optimized framework and then do all the additional work of getting that content indexed on Google and sprinkle SEO black magic all over it, or he can just put up a blog post on a service where somebody else does all of that for him.
Unless you're really into that sort of thing or are not fully employed, the time saving option is the most sensible one to do if it's "good enough." Which medium is, as evidenced by the fact that we're all talking about it.