Well, while I do hate conical tips, the actual size of the tip is fine for drag soldering. But of course, what he did is neither drag soldering nor "classic" soldering. (German has a great saying for things like this: "Weder Fisch noch Fleisch!" — 'neither fish nor meat' 
)
The standard English version of that phrase is "neither fish nor fowl" which nicely keeps the alliteration and is at least medieval in origin.
The thing is, I almost feel bad calling him out on it, insofar as he's got great ideas and creativity, and unlike me, usually sees his stuff through to fruition (whereas I get hung up on some detail and don't finish until everything is perfect). And he seems like a genuinely nice guy. Also, his wire routing on perfboard is truly a thing of beauty, if you ignore his giant "Hershey Kisses" solder blobs.
But at the same time, he shouldn't be teaching such bad techniques to novices. They have no way of knowing that his soldering technique can damage chips, or that mains AC on a breadboard or veroboard is insanely dangerous. I wish he would limit himself to the things he's good at, and simply not address the things he's not good at.
The problem here is amateurism. Many years ago, in a midnight Kaffeeklatsch, a friend and I came up with a classification of amateurism and professionalism (for subjects that can both be hobbies and paying occupations) that, in retrospect, has stood the test of time and I offer here for your consideration.
Amateur amateurs
People who do what they do for the love of it, but lack skills and training that mark the product of their work apart from true professionals. They may produce good work, but it lacks subtle features that mark it apart from the work of a true professional. In our endeavours that often comes down to things like fit and finish, soldering quality and so on the mechanical side of things and temperature stability, insensitivity to component values, EMC compliance and so on the design side of things. What they lack in training and experience they often make up for in enthusiasm.
Amateur professionals
People who do what they do for pay, but turn out work no better than, and often worse than the amateur amateurs. They often turn out work that 'could be better' and also turn out work that is plain wrong or dangerous despite supposedly having the necessary training and experience. This category also includes amateur amateurs who have started taking money for their work, or even started a career as a professional based on their amateur experiences without fully grasping the limits of their knowledge and experience. People from either route of entry are dangerous, even if only to the reputation of the final two classes. The class most likely to fall back on an argument from authority: "I went to MIT", "I"ve been doing this twenty years", "They gave me a seat in the House of Lords because I'm so good*".
The worst boss you ever had was probably one of these, and indeed, the original discussion that lead to this set of classifications started with discussing my then boss who had "Twenty five years experience"; unfortunately all that experience was a year of the same experiences, repeated twenty five times in succession.
A discussion of this class wouldn't be complete without the obligatory reference to the
Dunning–Kruger effect**.
Professional amateurs
People who do what they do for the love of it, are often self taught, but turn out work that meets and frequently exceeds the standards one would expect of a professional. Most people would have great difficulty telling the work of a professional amateur from a true professional. The biggest fault of this class can be aiming for a perfect result as compared to an 'engineered' result.
Professional professionals
People who do what they do for pay, and produce work that fully meets the standards of their profession. Sometimes their work will fall short of the standards of the professional amateur, but that is because they know when to stop to achieve a job good enough for the brief or budget.
*
Yes, I'm looking at you Martha Lane Fox.
**I'll just point out that we discussed exactly that effect in the conversation that lead to this homily at least twenty years before Dunning and Kruger put their names to it and somewhere in the Usenet archives is a summary like this one written in the mid 90s by the other party to the original conversation. I'm not going to accuse Dunning or Kruger of plagiarism, but perhaps a name change is in order.
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