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by Sheeny96 686 days ago
This.

Show me how to connect to a database.

Show me how to unit test something that does an external api call.

Show me how to build a generic file store package in such a way that the interface at the top level can be implemented for several providers.

Hello world tutorials are an absolute grift and I'm suspicious that anyone peddling them has never actually built something real.

4 comments

I totally agree! I really liked https://lets-go.alexedwards.net which walked you through creating a web api with a database. When I did it, I decided to use SQLite instead of what was in the course, which meant I could follow along but still had to understand and choose the right dependency etc myself.

(I’m not affiliated, just a happy customer)

True.

Write some ultra basic stuff, title it like authoritative state of the art on current subject matter.

People are writing not because they have something to write but they have to write something.

He who pays the piper calls the tune, as they say.
There's a general misalignment of incentives in educational writing. As an author you want the maximum audience, which is gotten with a mixture of banal content and a bit of FOMO. This is because there are more beginners in almost anything, than there are more advanced people. There's overall no real incentive to make these people to actually learn something, as that would remove them from the audience.
The amount of YouTube tech grifters support this claim. Any seriously skilled dev will barely have an audience but channels skimming the water grow to millions.
This is my same complaint about interviews. I’m never asked to write some fancy algorithm and then figure out how to take it from O(n^3) to O(n). I’m asked to figure out why we’re fetching the user’s email from the db 6 times in one http request.