I could spit venom over tutorials going ‘here’s each word you type, with narrative guidance for where it goes!’ instead of showing a complete snapshot to copy-paste. You are providing… an example. Don’t make people jump through their asses just to get there! The goal is understanding what this witchcraft does, not solving a puzzle to construct the syntax that’s equally mysterious to newbies.
There’s a particular kind of bullshit obstacle that bucks people straight into apathy. If someone wants to keep their discipline mysterious and exclusive - there is no better moat than a seventeen-step installation, setup, and type-in process, where an entire hour of parsing technobabble can be diverted into harsh computer-says-no rejection at every step.
People: we are coders. We’re all broken the same way. Be quietly condescending, in delivering the functional minimum start. Lean over and push the buttons for us, if that’s an option. You know damn well step one can be the shallow end and step two can be the Marianas trench, so long as the first step works.
We’ll happily gaze into the Stygian depths in glass-eyed terror, as many times as it takes to comprehend the barest outline of that abyssal well of knowledge, if we can keep paddling back and forth from whatever baby-ass Hello World does one neat thing.
There are levels to it. As things get more complex the problems get infinitely more strange. As you learn a particular technology the strange things you encounter are often because of a misunderstanding about that technology or the way it works.
Once you hit professional level software engineering (think distributed systems), things are strange in large part because the system you’re working on has hundreds of thousands of man hours poured into it, and is often very complex with 10 different technologies backing it to do various things.
The more strange things you encounter though the more you’re learning!
I’m a software engineer, and it never stops. Things just get stranger.
I’m learning GoDot, I followed a tutorial step by step. Somehow I have a different outcome…
I could spit venom over tutorials going ‘here’s each word you type, with narrative guidance for where it goes!’ instead of showing a complete snapshot to copy-paste. You are providing… an example. Don’t make people jump through their asses just to get there! The goal is understanding what this witchcraft does, not solving a puzzle to construct the syntax that’s equally mysterious to newbies.
There’s a particular kind of bullshit obstacle that bucks people straight into apathy. If someone wants to keep their discipline mysterious and exclusive - there is no better moat than a seventeen-step installation, setup, and type-in process, where an entire hour of parsing technobabble can be diverted into harsh computer-says-no rejection at every step.
People: we are coders. We’re all broken the same way. Be quietly condescending, in delivering the functional minimum start. Lean over and push the buttons for us, if that’s an option. You know damn well step one can be the shallow end and step two can be the Marianas trench, so long as the first step works.
We’ll happily gaze into the Stygian depths in glass-eyed terror, as many times as it takes to comprehend the barest outline of that abyssal well of knowledge, if we can keep paddling back and forth from whatever baby-ass Hello World does one neat thing.
There are levels to it. As things get more complex the problems get infinitely more strange. As you learn a particular technology the strange things you encounter are often because of a misunderstanding about that technology or the way it works.
Once you hit professional level software engineering (think distributed systems), things are strange in large part because the system you’re working on has hundreds of thousands of man hours poured into it, and is often very complex with 10 different technologies backing it to do various things.
The more strange things you encounter though the more you’re learning!
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