I've been meaning to post this for a while, but this mention of Jeff Atwood being annoying brought it back onto the radar.
Jeff and his site Coding Horror have been maligned as "script kiddie", "never done anything worthy of respect", and probably lots of other awful things that people would never say face-to-face. (And those are both from one set of comments!)
I had similar opinions (though not so rude or boorish) for a while. But I later had a few realizations that brought me around to Jeff's side.
First, after dropping off the blogging map for a while I have a much deeper appreciation for the amount of effort it takes to keep a blog going. It's relatively easy to write on the set of ten or twenty topics that you start with. But to publish non-trivial articles, week-in and week-out, shows real discipline and desire. And one of the things I've grown to understand over time (even before reading Outliers) is the value of discipline over intelligence/talent.[1] In one of the few interviews I've done I wasn't able to include Sim's thoughts on people hiting him up to publish their comic. He said something along the lines of (going through his side of the dialogue), "This looks nice. What else do you have? Oh, a few full-page drawings? Tell you what, go home and do a fully penciled, inked, colored and worded page a day for two months, then call me back." Nobody ever did. Doing anything creative on a regular basis is hard.
Put another way: it's easy to bitch from the cheap seats that something is dumb or simple. Fine, where's your output? Oh, you don't have time? Or you have a few drafts that aren't quite ready to publish because of your high standards? Yeah, thought so.
Second: When you write there's pressure to always have something new to say. But Jeff ignores that.[2] That's not to say he just copy-and-pastes other peoples' work. Instead, he looks at the things he does in his daily work or play and writes about them in his own voice. Is it "new" that running an antivirus program slows down your machine? Or making concrete some of the benefits of multiple cores? Of course not, technical hardware sites have done this stuff (dryly) for ages. But following through with numbers (along with how they're gathered, also useful), collecting information from other sites around the internet and weaving them into a narrative is valuable.
Third: the dude has a thick skin. In the typical net fashion people talk as if they know him and malign his work and personality, spewing out bile that you know would never be vented in the real world, face to face. Me? I'd probably get sick of the bastards after a while, tell everyone to go pound sand and close up shop. But he keeps chugging along, banging out short items on twitter and long blog posts.
Finally: you'd barely know from his output he's got a new infant in the house. I was just able to keep up with my day job and have an occasional adult conversation with my wife for the first month or two after Ella came, much less actually write something in my spare time.
I don't agree with everything he says, and his Windows-centrism can get annoying (particularly when it's combined with ignorant Java-negativism), but I appreciate his work for what it is and hope he's able to keep it up.
[1] Don't willfully misinterpret this to mean that I think Jeff is stupid.
[2] And rightly so, in my opinion. People wind up either not publishing because they think they don't have anything original to say, or saying something 'edgy' but stupid because it has to be original. There are very few people doing anything original. Most of us are working on the same shit as everyone else, with minor variations. You are not a unique snowflake.