Codinghorror is the personal blog of the founder of Stack Exchange. He left that company and later founded Discourse. Why wouldn't he talk about the things he's built and working on on his blog?
I know, I know who he is. It's just I am not convinced at all that the examples used are the best (or even good for that matter) in the field of code reuse etc. He's clearly just advertising his products which can be done in more honest ways.
I don't understand this at all. This is a personal blog. That means that the people who read it do so for no other reason than that he's interested in what he has to say. A blog is a platform to say whatever you want to say. If that's thinly veiled advertising, then so what? What you consider advertising someone else with a different background might consider insightful. I don't understand the dishonesty charge. There's nothing he's 'supposed' to be doing with it. So how could someone say he's pretending it's something it's not?
And I don't fault the authors, because of course they want their creations widely known. But it isn't generally conceived as "I have this great epiphany and I must share it", but rather "I need to get some product pimping out, so what should I write about?" I've done it enough times myself.