You are not a niche, you are smaller

No, smaller than that

(This article is so short there is no summary)

Regularly on Hacker News, some comments have to remind other posts that they are living in a bubble.

First an American bubble, of course, because a lot of HN's users are living in the US. But above all, the bubble of users of Hacker News itself, the place that is famously known to have generated the "dropbox can be trivially replaced by FTP" comment when the service came out.

The funny thing is, a lot of HN users don't realize how much they are in a bubble. You can regularly read there absurd assumptions of the technical level of the average phone user, or human reactions that demonstrate the empathy of a stone. And when you answer that it's not how "normal people" (from a Gaussian point of view) behave, the reactions can be really funny.

Despite this, HN is still an excellent forum, one of my favorite to hang out on, year after year, when other places come and go.

Yet I can't help but compare this blindness to a lot of comments I see here and there about Python users.

As a Linux user myself, I was always well aware that the majority of Python users are using Windows or Mac, not Linux.

Also, as explained in other articles, a huge chunk of the community is not made of professional Python devs. They may be artists, bankers, geographers, mathematicians, teachers…

There are many profiles of coders, many reasons to write code, and the Python community is particularly diverse because the language is very accessible and popular.

But guess what? No matter how many Python devs exist, the sums of devs that write C#, Java, Ruby, PHP, Lisp, C and JS, but not Python, is much bigger.

And more importantly, if you produce code, you are already in a niche.

The vast majority of humans don't write any code for most of their life!

Now, if you take the subset of professional Python dev, using Linux, and being in the particular situation where they have to deliver software not for yourself, but for a third party user, you are very much in a niche within a niche.

We are a drop in the ocean.

When building a product, or producing technical communications, you would do well to remember that.

Not to avoid acting.

Not because you can't have an impact.

Certainly not because you don't matter.

Just because it will smooth things out.