OK, the name-dropping and too frequent bolding of text makes for a bit of a grating style, but I enjoyed the enthusiasm of discovery that is at the core of the essay. Getting discovered on Github will seem just superficially cool to those who've been doing open-source development for awhile, but it's hard to comprehend how fun it is until you've "made" it. Kudos to the author.
Thank you, sir. As for the bolding, I use it because many people (including me) at first scan the text looking for important stuff and then decide if it's worth to read the whole article. I'll see what can be improved in that matter :).
Note: take the following with all the grains of salt you take when reading any pedantry...just soapboxy but not meant to be too tone-policing.
I personally prefer headings for the purpose of signaling the main topics of an essay...the main headline, of course, but then the "deck" (usually what would go into the webpage's meta description), and then subsections. The headings do double-duty -- emphasizing key points and visually separating sections -- without adding too much gratuitous weight.
Keep in mind that you can use physical priority to signal emphasis. The first few words of any paragraph are likely to be noticed by a skimmer, so adding extra weight to the type can be redundant. IMHO, this also applies to the closing words of a paragraph.
Also, in-paragraph hyperlinks also serve as a kind of emphasis (while providing useful outbound references). In your current style sheet, hyperlinks are underlined. Again, everyone sees things differently, but I personally notice hyperlinked text and mentally treat it as "kind of important", particularly for proper nouns and keywords (e.g. "New Relic" and "Nagios")
Here's a sample graf of yours with how you emphasized it:
> I’d say that the most difficult ones were the first few weeks. After that period I’ve known pretty much everything in terms of the project structure that I will be following. Once I’ve established my design patterns it literally became a no-brainer to create new __Watchers__ or __Integrations__. I’ve also made it quite easy to create your own extensions which is described __here__ and plug into the overall pipeline seamlessly. The key was to design the very simple interfaces and let the other part of the framework do the heavy lifting.
I don't think anything in that graf needs to be emphasized (the hyperlinks are fine). The first sentence speaks for itself. The last sentence, if you feel it's important enough, could be its own standalone graf.
Again, treat these as the curmudgeony suggestions of someone who still subscribes to a print newspaper. But I felt your otherwise great essay was unfairly maligned by commenters...but I could sympathize with them. Your words speak well enough on their own, no need to add the CSS equivalent of exclamation marks so frequently :)
I agree with danso. Your overuse of bold, especially for whole sentences, feels like shouting and not much better than ALL CAPS. Feels like being talked down to as if I can't decide for myself that a sentence says something really important.
> first scan the text looking for important stuff
That may work if you bold a few choice words or phrases, but not whole sentences. Every time I hit a bold sentence it breaks the pace of my scan.
Subheadings would work much better than those bold sentences.
By bolding so much, you've totally diluted the power of the bold!
Anyway, don't take an HN comment's word for it. Ask some writers you respect.
