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by bostik 2708 days ago
> Most tutorial writers are terrible

Not just writers, most tutorials are objectively terrible.

Trying to find a reasonable example on how to get something moderately complex off the ground is a humbling reminder of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The probability of an internet resource being highly ranked and visible has a near-linear correlation with the resource's unsuitability.

In fact, when it comes to technology, it appears to me that the most prominent authors are barely novices themselves. To make things worse, the instructions and "guidelines" they come up with are invariably as competent as encouraging to use SSL_NO_VERIFY flag because passing CA path is too difficult.

My mechanism for coping on the internet is simple: whenever I see a tutorial on anything non-trivial, I just assume it's been written on Sunday afternoon, after the author discovered the software on Friday night. These tutorials should be considered the modern-day equivalent of their author smiling from ear to ear and shouting "look ma, no hands!".

Which traditionally has been the augur of "look ma, no teef!"

2 comments

Well you get what you pay for.
> encouraging to use SSL_NO_VERIFY flag because passing CA path is too difficult.

And if they did spend extra time on that people would complain they are trying to teach two technologies at once.

Also that’s something everyone unless it is part of their day job has to look up a tutorial on how to do it.

Just a passing “this is for ease of use, don’t do it in production and consult a manual” would suffice.

In the back of my mind I always hope that a new technology I'm using will fail in a spectacular, obvious fashion as soon as I use it wrongly, because that means that a great number of resources will soon appear to cover all the gotchas.

It's the ones where spotting and debugging the source of the problem depends on fine-grained conceptual understanding, that leads to documentation that gives you a metaphorical blank stare and shrug.