Vanza Setia - Comments

Technical Writing: A Bibliography, Tips, and Tricks

Niklas Pivic — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Niklas Pivic wrote a blog about technical writing. Niklas focused on technical writing only here. But I think his advice can be applied to writing blog posts for almost all topics.

When I started out, I desperately looked for tips and tricks.

Me too! When I was learning how to write in English—by the way, English is not my native language—I really wanted a guideline to write well. I did not and still do not want to write just for the sake of writing. I want to write as best as I can within my limitations.

Style can be defined as a distinct manner of expression.

True! Additionally, we can start developing our own styles once we get used to writing.

Your audience will not like 'clever'. They like clarity.

Agree! I prefer reading articles with plain language instead of complex and unusual words. I also prefer writing in plain language whenever possible.

Brevity is appreciated by readers.

Yes! I agree with that. I appreciate short, simple, and straightforward writing. I like reading blog posts that get to the point quickly without telling me their long stories. Stories are fine. But make sure you, fellow bloggers, don't write too much about your story unless the post is mainly about you.

Your writing language may not be their mother tongue, which means you should use simple words and short sentences to make your documentation as readable as possible.

That is me! I recommend following this advice if you are a technical writer. In general, I prefer reading plain English blog posts and writing in plain English.

Remember that you can write however you like. But I am one of the millions of readers who prefer reading texts in plain language.

For more details, I recommend reading Niklas' blog now.

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Bloggers, Can We Make Better Titles for Our Posts?

Michael Harley — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Titles are the first things that most readers will read. Great titles for non-fiction writing, in my opinion, are straightforward and clear.

Michael Harley has written his opinions on titles. He also gives us some solutions for better titles.

Let me start my list by saying yes, I understand each person can write whatever they like on their blog and in whatever manner they wish.

I agree. I add this: whatever you write in whatever manner has consequences. Michael Harley's post is one of the consequences.

So even if your post is about something obscure, give me something other than Recent Thoughts... or So Far, So Good. Recent thoughts on what?! What is good so far???

If you are in opposition, you may argue that you want to be able to say whatever you want in such general titles. But I think you write such general titles because you start by writing a title first before writing your thoughts. If you write your thoughts first, which can be about anything, you can get a general sense of what your current thoughts are all about.

If you're trying to exercise your writing muscles and establish a habit, another good way to find things to write about is to respond to what other people are writing.

I agree. The best advice in his post is that. You are better off writing a comment on what bloggers have written. Writing a comment can be easier sometimes than writing a blog from scratch.

Oftentimes, when we can not generate inspiration from our brain, we look at others' work. We take what we like and dump what we do not like. The same goes with writing a blog post. Writing a good comment helps us generate new ideas for our writing. We can write our thoughts about the blog, write an alternative version of it, or expand the sub-topic of it. We can get lots of new ideas for our posts from someone else's posts.

Michael Harley has written a nice and simple post on writing better titles. I like this post. If you disagree with him, no problem.

I recommend reading the full blog post. I hope that I have not spoiled everything.

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Building Websites with LLMS

Jim Nielsen — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When I first read this blog post, I thought, "Is he going to tell me how to make websites with ChatGPT or something similar?"

No.

And by LLMS I mean: (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(S).

Jim used two of the best programming languages ever: HTML and CSS. That is amazing! I never thought about using HTML and CSS in such a way. Very creative!

Jim did a great job tackling every JavaScript thought that came into his mind and replaced it with plain HTML and modern CSS.

Usually I think “Ok, so I’ll have a hamburger icon with a bunch of navigational elements in it, and when it’s clicked you gotta reveal it, etc." And I thought, “What if it’s just a new HTML page?”

HTML, if it is a human, will never think that it can do that.

Simply, this is creative and unexpected for me. Briliant!

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Free Will, Determinism, and Physicalism

Zero Contradictions — Fri, 02 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Some people are weird. Sorry. They choose to be weird. Sorry, again. They are destined to be weird. They have no choice.

Some people are confused because they believe they have no free will. The truth is that humans have free will. All people who reject it will always blame others or situations.

As a Christian, we believe that everyone has free will. This is why God commanded Adam to not eat a certain tree.

¹⁶ And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
¹⁷ But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
—Genesis 2:16–17, King James Version

I found a funny article written by Zero Contradictions. The author is a confused person. How do I know that?

There is a section in the article tried to answer the following question:

Why should people be held accountable for their actions, if they could never truly choose their actions in the first place? Isn’t that unethical?

The question is smart. If we are programmed, why do we need to be responsible for what we are doing? We have no choice anyway.

If we read together the first sentence of the answer, we will see the following:

To the contrary, it’s precisely because people don’t have free will as to why people should be held accountable for their actions (if they knew what they were doing).

Can you notice the madness? I assume that the author is an atheist or a believer in a stupid religion.

Think about the logic behind the statement. A person does not have a free will. This person's life has been set up to do a crime. This person has no choice. But this person gets punished for doing a crime. Where is the justice behind this? That is a very evil statement from the author.

Then, the author states that punishments exist to discourage undesired behavior in the future. This is insanity. If humans do not have free will, how do they stop doing undesired behavior? They have been programmed. They have no choice. This means punishments do not work at all.

If there is no free will, why do we need to have a law anyway? The existence of the law proves that humans have free will. They can choose to do good things or bad things. People who choose to do bad things will get punished. But punishments do not stop people from doing evil actions. Why can that happen? The reason is people have free will. They can choose to keep evil actions regardless of the consequences.

Moreover, who does love to be punished anyway? If there is no free will, punishments will solve everything. This is the same as machine learning. If you train a machine to complete a game, you instruct the machine to avoid spikes. If they do not avoid them, you write a program that will reduce the score. This way the machine will learn that it needs to avoid the spikes to keep the score.

Can we do that to humans? No, we can not. Punishments can reduce criminal actions to a certain extent. But punishments can not stop people from committing crimes because people can still choose to commit crimes regardless of the consequences. This means humans are not programmed. Humans have free will.

If people truly had free will, then environmental factors wouldn’t influence them.

The author makes a stupid statement. How do people have free will without any challenges? If humans do not get influenced by their environment, humans do not have free will. For example, if everyone around us is a lazy person, we will feel tempted to be lazy too. But we can choose to be diligent.

If a person has been programmed to be unique, the person will not be influenced to wear the same clothes. A person will not feel awkward when this person notices that others wear the same clothes except this person. But why do most people become self-conscious when they are different? Do you know the answer? This is because humans want to be the same. That wish is the challenge. But humans can choose to ignore that wish.

People have free will. This means they have the power to decide. Environmental factors may influence their decisions. But people can choose to ignore all environmental factors. For example, Jane is hungry. Then, she notices a hamburger in front of her eyes. She feels more intense hunger. Her stomach growls. She can choose to eat it right away. But if she is on a diet, she can ignore the hamburger. She can put the hamburger into a refrigerator.

By the way, the article is hard for me to understand. This is because I do not have the free will. I have been programmed this way. I hope someone in the earth is programmed to help me.

Check it out.

Developer Fallacies

Heydon Pickering — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have no problem with Heydon Pickering. He is a great web accessibility expert. I like most of his talks. Personally, I do not care about his life. But when someone makes false statements about the Bible, I feel the urge to rebuke them. I can not do nothing when someone insults my God.

I found his article "Developer Fallacies" when I was doing research about the hypocrisy of web developers. I read his article and right away, I found that this person wrote something wrong about the Bible.

He called the first fallacy "the gospel fallacy." He started with the following statement which has nothing wrong with itself:

I'm going to start on one you've probably heard of already, perhaps under a different name. This is the "we've always done it this way" fallacy.

In web development, this refers to web developers who justify their wrongdoings because they have been doing that for a long time. I have no problem with this. But the following statement is coming from a person who knows nothing about the Bible:

This fallacy is named in honour of The Holy Bible, which is treated as unquestionable by some fundamentalist Christians despite some seriously sketchy advice.

He is an atheist. I understand if he knows nothing about the Bible. He is a great web developer, in my opinion. But when it comes to the Bible, he is ignorant.

First, he named a fallacy in honor of The Holy Bible. This statement has a contradiction. Why did he write "The Holy Bible" and yet it was about fallacy? Was this person saying, "I am honoring this holy book by mocking it"? He did not honor the Bible. He insulted the Bible.

If you do not understand, I give you an example. Let's say you respect someone. This person can be your parents or yourself or anybody you honor. Can I use that person's name for a cockroach? Another example is if I say, "In the honor of your president, this porn actor looks like your president's face." Am I insulting or honoring your president?

Then, he continued writing that the Bible is treated as unquestionable by some fundamentalist Christians. This is false. First, fundamentalist Christians are people who follow the Bible thoroughly without any extra human-made rules. Second, there are no fundamentalist Christians, liberal Christians, or any other types of Christians. Those funny names do not exist in the Bible. A person is a Christian if he follows and worships God only. This means a Christian follows the Bible completely. If a Christian starts accepting LGBTQIA+, this person is not a Christian.

Additionally, we as a Christian learn the Bible with our brains. We can question the Bible. We as a human learn through questions. Then, the Bible has the answer for sure. We do not follow things without understanding.

Moreover, he continued by saying that the Bible has some seriously sketchy advice. He is an atheist. I do not blame him if he thinks some verses are sketchy. Heydon himself is a questionable person to talk about the Bible. He seriously knows nothing about the Bible. Yet he tried to tell people about Christianity. Do you see the hypocrisy?

He quoted only one verse and ignored the rest. Then, he made a stupid claim. He quoted 1 Peter 2:18 as one of the Bible's sketchy advice according to him:

Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward.
—1 Peter 2:18, King James Version

I am not surprised if an atheist thinks that the verse is sketchy. But Christians understand that this is not about allowing ourselves to be treated unjustly. This verse shows that we should not make the character of our leader to be an excuse to abandon our duties. In slavery era, a slave is a person who has no power and no money. The slave can not fight back. If the slave fights back by being lazy, the slave will be killed. If the slave suffers because the slave has done great work, this slave is a good person.

As an example for nowadays, if you work with a client who is a jerk, as long as the client has paid you, and you have no other choices, you have to do your work. You can still talk with your client to behave. But you can not ignore your duty because of your client's attitude. Another example, if you are a student and your teacher is lazy, your teacher's laziness does not become an excuse for you to be lazy too.

An atheist can not see the wisdom of God, as expected. That is why atheist people believe that they are animals that follow the laws. As long as the laws do not forbid an action, they have no reason for not doing that.

Heydon's words prove the following verse:

For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.
—1 Corinthians 1:18

For him, the Bible is a book with some foolishness, which is sketchy. For us, people who believe in God, the cross means the death and the resurrection of our Lord, Jesus. It is a sign of power. Only Jesus can resurrect Himself from the death. Through the Bible, we know God.

Heydon Pickering is a great web developer. He is an atheist. He is an animal. He insulted the Bible and as a Christian, I rebuke him. I do not know him personally. I do not care about him. But if someone insults the Bible, I will wipe the floor with the person.

Give your comments.

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