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by james_s_tayler
2708 days ago
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It's interesting to watch people make inferences about the capacity of individuals to develop software based on the utterances of a 19th century Irish playwright. My theory is that exposition is hard. Most people are shit at teaching. |
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To summarize them, people write free tutorials because they cannot do (they're bad developers), because they reap some sort of financial gain, or because they actually want to ruin an HNer's day who demanded amazing, free content.
I encourage all of you to try and write a tutorial. You'll see that it's simply hard. You have to decide on what level of skill to aim at, you need to think what this hypothetical person already knows vs doesn't know, you have to keep your tutorial aimed at this balance, you have to resist the temptation to yak-shave, and you have to resist the temptation to adulterate your tutorial with production concerns.
It's not clear-cut at all. Do you add this package because it's how you do it in production? Or do you show how to do it without it? And if you go for the latter, you probably want to at least point out that the package exists. And while you're there, why not include a quick example of how that package can sponge up some of the tutorial code? Maybe that would be more encouraging/illuminating? Are you going to help more people with this example than you're going to confuse? Is someone on HN going to call you meandering and incompetent because you chose to?