Top all-time · #1140
Eric Holscher
Personal blog · ericholscher.com/blog · on HN as forsakenprogrammingwriting
Eric Holscher's personal blog at ericholscher.com covers programming and writing. Since 2007, 61 different Hacker News readers have linked it 105 times, most often “Why you shouldn't use Markdown for documentation (2016)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (24) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for Django deployment walkthroughs using Fabric and Chef, documentation writing advice, and the case for reStructuredText over Markdown.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 24 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Hi! I’m Eric. I build documentation tools and communities, and otherwise spend time outside. I co-founded Read the Docs, Write the Docs, EthicalAds, and PyCascades. This site covers a long history ...
Most-linked posts?
- Why you shouldn't use Markdown for documentation (2016)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-11-30
- Don’t Use Markdown for Documentation5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-03-15
- How I Judge the Quality of Documentation4 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2014-02-27
- Building a Django App Server with Chef: Part 14 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2010-11-09
- The Pac-Man Rule at Conferences2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-04-30
- A simple rule for breaking cliques at events2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-12-04
- One percent for Open Source (2018)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-01-07
- /blog/2008/sep/12/screencast-django-command-extensions/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-05-18
- One Percent for Open Source2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-09
- Big list of Django tips (and some python tips too) | Surfing in Kansas2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-10-08
What Hacker News says?
If you'd like to suggest another way to make OSS sustainable, I'd be all ears. A bit more color here: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-ma...
Comment linking /blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-marketing-money/
on “Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies”Submitted How I Judge the Quality of Documentation as a story · 123 points
HN discussionhttps://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2025/jan/21/stack-overflow... It was dying well before AI and while a knee happened coincidentally to chatgpt release, I don't think you remember correctly what gpt answer looked like for programmers questions back then. It was much later where it started assisting development.
Comment linking /blog/2025/jan/21/stack-overflows-decline/
on “StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month”Submitted Don’t Use Markdown for Documentation as a story · 121 points
HN discussionI had a similar moment where I almost gave up on Read the Docs, going as far as writing a similar post but never publishing it. I wrote about that experience here: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2018/feb/7/the-post-i-neve...
Comment linking /blog/2018/feb/7/the-post-i-never-published/
on “Sorry everybody, I failed with you”Submitted How I Judge the Quality of Documentation in 30 Seconds (2014) as a story · 93 points
HN discussionThis is exactly why we're building EthicalAds. It's an ad network that only targets based on the content of sites, doesn't allow any third-party media, and is currently only focused on a developer audience: https://www.ethicalads.io/advertising-vision/ We had the same choice on Read the Docs, but didn't really have any other way to make money but advertising. We decided to build ethical advertising, so that we could…
Comment linking /blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-marketing-money/
on “Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea”Submitted “My Code is Self-Documenting” as a story · 87 points
HN discussionThis is great -- lack of a standard that was actually used (unlike CommonMark) was one of my main issues with Markdown ( http://ericholscher.com/blog/2016/mar/15/dont-use-markdown-f... ) -- It's really great to see GitHub leading in this department, and it gives me hope that one day we might actually have Markdown that is portable between implementations.
Comment linking /blog/2016/mar/15/dont-use-markdown-for-technical-docs/
on “A Formal Spec for GitHub Flavored Markdown”Submitted Required Reading (for pythonistas) as a story · 83 points
HN discussionNeat. I wrote about a similar idea a while back, which might add some other arguments if people want to pitch it to their own company: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2018/mar/9/one-percent-for...
Comment linking /blog/2018/mar/9/one-percent-for-open-source/
on “Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue”Submitted Large Problems in Django, Mostly Solved: Delayed Execution as a story · 58 points
HN discussionReST is really big in the Python ecosystem, thanks to Sphinx (docs generator), and the read-the-docs website. The main advantage for ReST is that it is well defined and consistent. It's a bit heavier than .md, but I think it will pay off for large projects. Here are some articles about it: https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2017/restructuredtext-vs-markd... http://ericholscher.com/blog/2016/mar/15/dont-use-markdown-f...…
Comment linking /blog/2016/mar/15/dont-use-markdown-for-technical-docs/
on “AWS documentation is now open source and on GitHub”Submitted Don’t Use Markdown for Documentation (2016) as a story · 55 points
HN discussionThis is exactly why we're building EthicalAds. It's an ad network that only targets based on the content of sites, doesn't allow any third-party JS or images, and is currently only focused on a developer audience: https://www.ethicalads.io/advertising-vision/ We had the same choice on Read the Docs, but didn't really have any other way to make money but advertising. We decided to build ethical advertising, so that w…
Comment linking /blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-marketing-money/
on “International coalition calls for action against surveillance-based advertising”Submitted Help fund Read the Docs as a story · 53 points
HN discussionSure -- it's a neat story. Happy to share it.. Digs through some emails Looks like it was 2015. We did a fundraising campaign on our site (wrapup blog post here: https://blog.readthedocs.com/fundraising-wrapup/ ), which was our first big attempt at fundraising. To be 100% honest, we didn't reach our goal, and we padded the numbers with a Python Software Foundation grant, and the Twilio ad sponsorship to not fail in…
Comment linking /blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-marketing-money/
on “Show HN: EthicalAds – Privacy-first ad network for developers”Submitted Hacker Book Club as a story · 32 points
HN discussionI definitely appreciate the negative view of ads. I had some similar internal conflict around building on ads, but it was the only way for us to sustain the project we worked on.. Read the Docs was a huge part of the open source community, but all the other ways we tried to fund it didn't work. I posted about this at the time, and still think it makes a good argument for why we should be investing to fund open sourc…
Comment linking /blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-marketing-money/
on “Show HN: EthicalAds – Privacy-first ad network for developers”Submitted You should stay for the sprints. as a story · 30 points
HN discussionYou shouldn't feel that way at all. I don't think I've ever had a bad experience meeting people at a conference. It has actually been the opposite. Many people are there to make connections (and have their own doubts as well). You might be surprised at how receptive they will be. Also, many conferences actively promote inclusion. See the "Pac Man Rule" attributed to Eric Holscher which was referenced at PyCon US. ht…
Comment linking /blog/2017/aug/2/pacman-rule-conferences/
on “PyCon US 2024 Recap”Submitted Announcing Django Crawler and django-test-utils as a story · 27 points
HN discussionhttp://ericholscher.com/blog/2017/jan/27/code-is-self-docume...
Comment linking /blog/2017/jan/27/code-is-self-documenting/
on “Keeping track of technical debt in source code”Submitted Building a Django app server with Chef: Part 2 as a story · 21 points
HN discussionI don't know for puppet but Eric Holscher has a nice tutorial/walkthrough[1] with Chef with a repo of examples. [1] http://ericholscher.com/blog/2010/nov/8/building-django-app-...
Comment linking /blog/2010/nov/8/building-django-app-server-chef/
on “Django Advice”Submitted Why you shouldn't use Markdown for documentation (2016) as a story · 19 points
HN discussionSome good points for reST instead of markdown: * Markdown has many flavors, reST is standarized * reST is extensible * reST is semantic, Markdown is just text. http://ericholscher.com/blog/2016/mar/15/dont-use-markdown-f... reST is marginally harder than markdowns, so is it really worth sticking with MD ?
Comment linking /blog/2016/mar/15/dont-use-markdown-for-technical-docs/
on “The LaTeX Fetish (2016)”Submitted Django tests are now fast as a story · 19 points
HN discussionI've been using a simple Fabric script from http://ericholscher.com/blog/2010/nov/8/building-django-app-... to automate Chef deploys. Blueprint tried to install a lot of nonsense on my box, and I decided that learning Chef proper would be a much better investment of my time.
Comment linking /blog/2010/nov/8/building-django-app-server-chef/
on “Fabric hits 1.0”Submitted One Percent for Open Source as a story · 18 points
HN discussion
