The Catch Block #19 - Tolerance, Overwhelm, Secrets, and RepoDB

Welcome to the 19th Edition of The Catch Block!

In this edition: the Sonmez debate, tolerance, Razor, DI, speaking to the manager, overwhelm, and secrets.

The Sonmez Debate and the Paradox of Tolerance

John Sonmez, AKA SimpleProgrammer, is undeniably a colossal jerk.  All you have to do is check out his Twitter feed for confirmation of this. From giving false equivalencies...

...to being extremely tone-deaf.

And that doesn't even include the stuff he deleted already.

Nothing that I have seen indicates that he feels remorse about using these words.

I am not going to defend his actions or words in these circumstances; they are, at the very least, confrontational and aggressive, and at the most, racist and sexist. He's definitely not someone I would want to hang out with, or be around in general.

So what happens when something that a colossal jerk has written is also something you 100% agree with?

Does The Programming Language You Learn Actually Matter

So in this video, I’m going to talk about why exactly you might want to be very careful in picking the programming language that you learn.

Simple ProgrammerJohn Sonmez

A quick excerpt from this post:

"Don't worry about making a mistake, just pick something and start learning it. Don't try and learn five programming languages at the same time, just go with something and start building an application, something real with it. And then once you have those skills, then you can translate those to other languages if you want to later. But just learning the ability to code is really the critical skill, and it's pretty much universal."

This idea is something I personally have written about several times, and is an idea that I hold dear to my heart: so long as you learn the basics of programming, the actual methods and tools which you learn with do not matter.

But now we have a problem: if Sonmez is a bad guy, does that make his writings and ideas bad as well?

The rebukes of him as a person were public and loud, as they should be:

Sonmez's statements were hurtful, confrontational, and not appropriate behavior for a so-called "software development life coach" or professional of any kind; IMO he deserves to be called out for this, and his unwillingness to tone down his comments or learn anything from his opponents mark him as an arrogant, stubborn individual.

Here's the real problem: I want to see both sides of this. I want there to be a reason, a good solid reason, why this guy behaves like that colossal jerk, because I just don't see how jerks like that can exist in our modern world. And yet he does. In a way, I'm in denial, and because of that denial, I want to see the other side, the side that justifies Sonmez's words and deeds.

I spent a lot of time trying to see that other side, see why we should separate the ideas Sonmez published from the hateful words he spouted. But I can't do it. I can't make that disconnect. He said those things, wrote those words, hit "send". He did it.

But my inability to bridge that divide that appears dangerous, on the face of it. A person may hold ideas that are not agreed with by society, or even in conflict with each other, and that doesn't mean that some of their ideas are not valid or good. An otherwise good person might hold intolerant views. Should we "cancel" a person because one of their viewpoints is intolerant, or disrespectful, or hateful?

How much do we tolerate the intolerant?

We don't.

We don't tolerate people like John Sonmez not because he is the ultimate problem but because people like him lead to said problem. We don't tolerate people like John Sonmez because they hold so tightly to their ideas that there's no space for learning, no space for understanding, no space for conversation; to them, they're right, everyone else is wrong, and the world can go bugger off.

I always try to see both sides, but I can't. Not this time. That might be because there isn't one.

Previews and Announcements

• New experimental Razor editor for Visual Studio (Daniel Roth)

Quality Reads

• When your coworker does great work, tell their manager (Julia Evans)
• Sort Data With ASP.NET Core and Query Strings (Khalid Abuhakmeh)
• ASP.NET Core Blazor components lifecycle (Gérald Barré)
• How to store app secrets for your ASP .NET Core project (Chris Noring)
• How To Spot The Signs Of Team Overwhelm (And What To Do About It) (Kat Boogaard)
• Exploring the .NET open source hybrid ORM library RepoDB (Scott Hanselman)
• How does the built-in dependency injection work on ASP.NET Core? (Alvaro Atias)
• A CSS only “click to animate gif” solution (Christian Heilmann)
• Remote Work: Upgrading Your Workspace (Jonathan Danylko)
• C# 9: Answering your questions (Dave Brock)
• How Do You Comfort a JavaScript Bug? (Elijah Manor)

Catch Up with the Previous Issue!

The Catch Block #18 - Two Days, Alternative Career Paths, and Blazor

Plus a .NET Core vulnerability, campaigns for .NET Foundation Director, and webwaste.

Exception Not FoundMatthew Jones

Thanks for reading, and we'll see you next week!