Null Pointers for All

December 16, 2014 12:23 PM

Dr Dobbs, one of the oldest programming publications announces the end.
posted by blue_beetle (39 comments total)

;
posted by weston at 12:24 PM on December 16, 2014 [28 favorites]

Where is all that advertising money going??
posted by Foci for Analysis at 12:27 PM on December 16, 2014

string bye = "farewell!";
cout << bye << endl;
posted by Schadenfreude at 12:30 PM on December 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

exit(0);
posted by Foosnark at 12:32 PM on December 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Foci for Analysis: "Where is all that advertising money going??"

AdBlock, I imagine.

I wonder if they considered a subscription model at all before shuttering.
posted by boo_radley at 12:32 PM on December 16, 2014

I used to subscribe to the dead tree version of Dr. Dobbb's back in the day.
posted by starbreaker at 12:38 PM on December 16, 2014

According to the article, revenue was down to around $1,000,000. I suspect you could run a pretty good programming website for only a million bucks a year.
posted by blue_beetle at 12:39 PM on December 16, 2014

Too bad! I loved Dr. Dobbs' Journal.
posted by wormwood23 at 12:44 PM on December 16, 2014

I remember learning so much from each issue of Dr. Dobb's. When the Jolitz's started the series on 386BSD I just happened to have a compatible box in my office (benefit of working for Compaq) and spent many late hours after work getting it installed. Having a personal Unix system was exciting, if a bit of work.

Now between my server, phone and laptop most of my computers run a variant of Unix.

RIP Dr. Dobb's, I wouldn't be where I'm at today without you.
posted by beowulf573 at 12:48 PM on December 16, 2014 [3 favorites]

EXIT SUB
posted by localroger at 12:49 PM on December 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Damn it. I was finally starting to understand what they were talking about.

.
posted by lumpenprole at 12:55 PM on December 16, 2014 [8 favorites]

I wrote an article for them once, way back in the day ('89 or '90, I think). Used to eagerly look forward to new issues, but then the web hit and suddenly the discussions I found on the 'net were way ahead of the content in the magazine. And the writing style on the 'net was less formal and more readable.
posted by straw at 12:57 PM on December 16, 2014

So it does HALT after all.
posted by parki at 1:10 PM on December 16, 2014 [4 favorites]

Sad news. I had an article based on a colleague's work published there years ago. It was a very proud moment.
posted by GuyZero at 1:12 PM on December 16, 2014

"Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia" -- Running light without overbyte...
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 1:19 PM on December 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Where is all that advertising money going??

It's hard to say in general.

CPCs and CPMs are, in general, decreasing. But it varies so much from site to site that the macro trends are nearly irrelevant for any one site. I suspect they don't have very commercially-oriented content compared to, say, a travel site. Also, companies don't make any money on developer tools any more. Once upon a time there were lots of ads for editors, compilers, libraries, etc in Dr Dobbs. Today? It's all free, either as in beer or as in speech. The demand for their audience from advertisers has gone away.
posted by GuyZero at 1:26 PM on December 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

In other news, potentially of interest to people of the same electronics-hobbyist vintage, Circuit Cellar is still going strong.

How Dobbs couldn't make it in the same world that CC can is a bit mystifying to me. They still ship a dead-tree edition and everything.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:37 PM on December 16, 2014 [3 favorites]

Criminy, this makes me feel old.
posted by tommasz at 1:40 PM on December 16, 2014

How Dobbs couldn't make it in the same world that CC can is a bit mystifying to me. They still ship a dead-tree edition and everything.

Circuit Cellar has a ton of electronics advertisements which is still a pretty booming business, perhaps more so now than ever.
posted by GuyZero at 1:44 PM on December 16, 2014

According to the article, revenue was down to around $1,000,000. I suspect you could run a pretty good programming website for only a million bucks a year.

You could, but between Stack Overflow and various tech blogs and tutorial sites, that space is probably quite saturated.
posted by acb at 2:02 PM on December 16, 2014

printf(".\n");
posted by dis_integration at 2:04 PM on December 16, 2014

Oh man, I have a lot of their first books, like Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia Volume 1, and I think several subsequent volumes. Wow $121 used on Amazon. People keep telling me to sell all my early microcomputer books and my SOL-20 stuff on eBay now, because it's at peak value and will drop in price rapidly as the potential buyers are old geezer geeks and they are dying of old age.
posted by charlie don't surf at 2:14 PM on December 16, 2014

Looks like most of the ads on Stack Exchange are recruiters. The mortgage broker occupation of the teens.

On Circuit Cellar vs Dr. Dobb's: A good portion of modern electronics is just knowing which parts to put together. A lot of advertising, and giving free parts samples to people who'd write articles about your product line, is about saying "hey, if you're building a ZigBee device, we have parts for you". And Atmel showed that there's a huge market out there by targeting the hobbyist first, their STK500 programmer was a very strong "Sure, we'll sell quantity 1" salvo in a market dominated by players who were only interested if your minimum order was 20k units, and those older players are still playing catch-up. And they're playing catch-up by targeting hobbyists (ie: the really fun TI MSP dev kits at less than the cost of shipping them).
posted by straw at 2:19 PM on December 16, 2014 [3 favorites]

A long, slow, sad decline. It ended print in 2009 but seemed mostly irrelevant then.

The publication like this I miss the most are the various O'Reilly web publications. I used to write for them back in 2000, 2001 and it was a great place to publish a thoughtful 2000 word piece on a technology. I have no idea where to do that any more. Current practice seems to be a blog or GitHub page and then hope you get upvoted on Hacker News.
posted by Nelson at 2:48 PM on December 16, 2014 [3 favorites]

goto BUMMED_OUT;
posted by Golem XIV at 3:11 PM on December 16, 2014

Looks like most of the ads on Stack Exchange are recruiters. The mortgage broker occupation of the teens.

Facebook mostly wants me to know about upcoming seminars on house flipping.

Nothing is forever, yo.
posted by ocschwar at 3:21 PM on December 16, 2014

I didn't realize they were still around after the print version died. But I'll always be grateful, a few letters to editor Ray Duncan led to my first publication and ultimately to a book deal. Salut, DDJ.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 3:54 PM on December 16, 2014

the really fun TI MSP dev kits at less than the cost of shipping them

*googles* No kidding.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 4:22 PM on December 16, 2014

I've got "Dr Dobbs' Toolbook of C" on my shelf. Like an Elf.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 4:40 PM on December 16, 2014

A lot of ad money is going to Facebook, video and mobile advertising. Also you can buy ad inventory that targets readers of a publication without buying the more expensive ads on the publisher's site. So if I want to target people who read Dr Dobbs and like publications it is more cost effective for my ad agency to target those users with various ad networks.
posted by humanfont at 4:51 PM on December 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Great work as usual by whoever decided to sell revenant ad space on the first content website to networks. HEY WHAT IF WE JUST THROW OUT ALL THE LEFTOVER CONTENTS OF THIS BATH?
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:22 PM on December 16, 2014

}
posted by adamsc at 6:45 PM on December 16, 2014 [2 favorites]

Circuit Cellar has a ton of electronics advertisements which is still a pretty booming business, perhaps more so now than ever.

People still pay for hardware. People increasingly don't pay for software.
posted by Slothrup at 6:49 PM on December 16, 2014

awk: bailing out near line 2015
posted by Sebmojo at 7:03 PM on December 16, 2014

I'm amazed it was still going. For as long as I can remember - and I remember long - writing about software has been a pig to make money from, and writing about dev thrice swinely. For a while in the UK, there was a title called .EXE ("rhymes with 'not sexy"), which had a lot of bright people and a lot of bright readers and did a lot of good things, and never made a red cent for anyone. People loved reading about software and programming, but you had to put that stuff in a format where you could also attract hardware adverts, or you weren't going to do very well and you weren't going to do it for very long.

I'm sure that Dr Dobbs could make a go of it as an events/online info/community/special interest animal, but certainly not at UBM. And I would love that to happen - I'm convinced that a very great deal of good journalism can be done by small outfits with a strong focus and a crofter mentality, and that this would avoid a lot of the pernicious commercial pressures that corrupt a lot of online content outfits. This is my world, and I hate what's happened to it, and I'm doubly angry that it should be so much better now than ever, given the tools we have.

If I were the Dr Dobbs team and I still had a stomach for the fight - so many of my old muckers do not, and I so do not blame them - I'd go to management and talk MBO. UBM can't be expecting to make much hay out of the legacy content, and there's no reason it couldn't get a lot of that having ceded control of further developments. Talk to some events people about reasonable expectations and commercial environment, find a business model that looks OK, sort out where to get some money from that doesn't screw the pooch, work out what the brand's worth, decide what it is you actually want to happen (become the focus for really solid self-education about dev? What can you do that StackOverflow, Spiceworks, and the various language/environment/company specific online resources don't do? What are the big problems with writing software that nobody's doing the right thing about?), and if it still looks like you're in with a chance - go the fuck for it.

And if not, then fine. Everything has its time. Switch off and walk away. The online world is full of broken statues and ruined temples from once-great empires - and lovely little jewels that shone for a while under long-gone summer skies.
posted by Devonian at 7:16 PM on December 16, 2014 [4 favorites]

Also, companies don't make any money on developer tools any more. Once upon a time there were lots of ads for editors, compilers, libraries, etc in Dr Dobbs. Today? It's all free, either as in beer or as in speech. The demand for their audience from advertisers has gone away

I was thinking about that the other day. I work in a 200+ person development shop and we use almost zero non-free development tools. It's so different than the world that I was working in fifteen years ago with a license for everything.
posted by octothorpe at 7:38 PM on December 16, 2014

The publication like this I miss the most are the various O'Reilly web publications. I used to write for them back in 2000, 2001 and it was a great place to publish a thoughtful 2000 word piece on a technology. I have no idea where to do that any more. Current practice seems to be a blog or GitHub page and then hope you get upvoted on Hacker News.

Well, yeah.

I managed a bunch of IT sites from 2000-2011. The dev sites were over in another part of the business, but we all had the same challenges: Tech blogs nearly killed us, and the Q&A sites were coming right up behind to finish the job.

I wrote a bunch about it when I went to work for my current employer, where I'm far away from online publishing:

But the way things are published isn’t the only thing that has changed: The way people solve problems and learn things has changed, and the sort of deference people used to show to an authority who’d managed to write a book (or get published in a magazine) is in short supply. Many who came to the Web from print thought the prestige and authority that came with working for a print institution would somehow transfer. For a few years it was relatively easy to nurture that belief, and then the mood changed as people began to connect and engage. As annoying as early bloggers’ lengthy blogrolls and in-group shout-outs were, you can look back and see them as the Web establishing itself as a social medium. Once those conventions had been established, that assumed authority began to collapse. You still see signs of the process in the form of, for instance, a Salon film critic’s periodic meltdown over the cheek of readers who’d question her authority; or out-of-touch tech columnists who cite a stint at DEC in the ’80s as a good reason to listen to them now. Getting a paycheck to say something doesn’t mean what it used to.

When I moved from covering Linux (which I knew plenty about) to enterprise networking (which I had an understanding of but no practical experience in) I used to spend time thinking about that changed mood and what we could hope to do about it. It wasn’t hard to figure out, just searching around, that self-documenting, technically inclined bloggers — not gadget bloggers like Gizmodo and certainly not John Dvorak types — were doing a lot to erode demand for the product I was supposed to be putting out. They’d have a problem, they’d solve it, they’d write up their solution, and they’d do it as an afterthought, for free, and in a dialect appropriate to their audience — the audience I was hoping to get. I had some success (as measured in terms of consistent traffic and links from relevant authorities) from hiring people who were technical workers first, writers second. They weren’t doing what a self-documenting technical blogger would do (solving a problem, writing it up), but they were coming pretty close: They were thinking back to a set of problems they’d solved recently and writing on that theme. My calls with writers often began with, “so … what interesting problems have you solved lately?” My job involved asking that question and remembering that most of what I had going for me was a title, control of the editorial budget, and access to the site’s analytics. Most of our successes came from making sure those writers helped me set the direction, because they knew more than I did.

At the same time, I had a budget that ranged over the years from $2,000 to $5,000 a month and I didn’t want to pay anyone under $300 or $400 for their work, so it was just me vs. the Web, with me getting to publish something a few times a week. One of my last projects as an editor involved talking to actual network managers and technicians about what I could do to make my site more relevant to them, and they all said I needed something like Stack Exchange, only for networking. They wanted the person doling out 1,000-word/$300 chunks of information that might or might not be relevant to their needs out of the way so they could connect with each other and get their problems solved. They certainly didn’t want “overviews,” “summaries,” “introductions” or “quick guides.”

So, I ended the 2000s in an online publishing division that was unceremoniously sold off to a marketing company, and some of my last conversations inside that company involved talking to people who thought articles longer than 300 words were hopeless extravagances.

posted by mph at 9:24 PM on December 16, 2014 [3 favorites]

some of my last conversations inside that company involved talking to people who thought articles longer than 300 words - and did less than 20k hits - were hopeless extravagances.

B2B and the default assumptions of online publishing managers (let us not even talk about social media) are uneasy bedfellows.
posted by Devonian at 3:25 AM on December 17, 2014

"... I didn’t want to pay anyone under $300 or $400 for their work ..."

And there's one of the problems with tech writing. My DDJ article was published in September of 1990, I was paid $500. Adjusted for inflation that's a non-trivial amount, but relative to the time necessary to put together specific code for the article, code which was outside of my day job, I remember thinking "I'm not doing this for the money".

And industry-wise, that article sank. There was one letter to the editor, one peep from a generic recruiter, but several years later when I talked to folks in the computer graphics field, nobody'd heard of it.

Contrast that to a message I wrote in comp.graphics.algorithms a few years later, a little bit of code excerpted from some stuff I was working on, not edited to anyone else's style guides, and a few months later I'm moving across the country for a job offer I couldn't turn down.

The mass market publications can't spend enough to make it worthwhile to do something for the article, and you get more exposure from a github account, or you write papers for the real journals.
posted by straw at 9:00 AM on December 17, 2014 [2 favorites]