I've been reading @swyx's book "The Career Coding Handbook". It launched on July 1st. Although I am not finished the book, I have thoroughly been enjoying it so far.

Launching the Coding Career Handbook!

swyx ・ July 1, 2020 ・ 1 min read

• #advice

I'm at a point in the book where the focus is about writing. One of the references is to the chapter Obvious to you. Amazing to others. from Derek Sivers book "Hell yeah or no".

I related to this, because like many, I debate whether I should write about something that is probably obvious, or that I think is obvious.

So of course I Tweeted that out.

I'm reading @Coding_Career and just came to the point in the book that references Derek Sivers' "Obvious to you. Amazing to others.". I can definitely relate to that. https://t.co/bDrAVV4xBX

— Nick Taylor (he/him) (@nickytonline) August 2, 2020

Hint, it may be obvious to a subset of people, but not everyone, so there is definitely an audience.

This sense that things are obvious is so prevalent, that hotels.com created the character Captain Obvious, a hilarious character in their commercials. Also, it helped me make a great title for this post. 😎

Ben has posted about this before as well.

Nothing in Software Development is Obvious

Ben Halpern ・ February 22, 2018 ・ 2 min read

With so many concepts, patterns, tech stacks and new stuff popping out all the time as well as all the tech and business jargon out there, everything is not obvious and that's OK. We just need to learn from each other and keep spreading the knowledge.

For example, did you know that in JavaScript you can get an array with unique entries by using a Set?

const arrayWithDuplicateValues = [1, 2, 3, 3, 1, 5];
const uniqueArray = Array.from(new Set(arrayWithDuplicateValues);

or

const arrayWithDuplicateValues = [1, 2, 3, 3, 1, 5];
const uniqueArray = [...new Set(arrayWithDuplicateValues)];

Side note, check out Have a Handy JS Snippet You Want to Share?.

As a fun exercise, I thought it would be cool if people commented with stuff they think is obvious. It can be anything. A trick/tip in a programming language, something about a tech stack, a concept, jargon or whatever comes to mind.

Who knows? Maybe what you post in the comments could be your next blog post?

Go!