Ask HN: Why are there almost no intermediate-level learning resources? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why are there almost no intermediate-level learning resources?

#11

Post by Galichev » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 1:15 PM UTC

They are much more scattered through the web. There are more of such articles for devops and high load architecture, but some topics are well researched, for example Mozilla have published very thoughtful article about app localization: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Localizatio...

Unfortunately, I can’t remember any source that is publishing such materials on regular basis, seems that this type of knowledge is tightly connected with exact company best practices and it takes a lot of work to make this knowledge useful for the general public.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there almost no intermediate-level learning resources?

#12

Post by hackermailman » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 1:35 PM UTC

Universities all have these kinds of intermediate courses: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ckaestne/17313/2018/#schedule is an example of general software architecture like how to identify requirements. Notice all the books on architecture and design being referenced as well. There's startup architecture courses floating around too: https://cmu-17-356.github.io/

For exploring some huge codebase where there is no design documentation one way is just to use a fancy ide and sabotage something to see what it breaks in your ide, then you can trace what code is relying on. Some open source projects have books written about their architecture, you could also start with those then everything you see there is often similar in undocumented projects in my experience, in terms of organization of code like where is the directory containing all the core functionality, where are the feature addons.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there almost no intermediate-level learning resources?

#13

Post by saddestcatever » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 1:37 PM UTC

jamil7 wrote: post #5

One theory of mine is there is far more self promotion in the developer community now than there was when I started. In particular javascript and web development juniors writing blog posts and dev.to articles as a form of self promotion. On the other end of the spectrum are domain experts who make video courses or books on advanced topics. In the intermediate level you have a big gap with not a whole lot of informati…

I like this theory a lot.

If you're looking to self promote, you can either target the larger audience base of beginner content, or provide domain expertise with advanced topics.... with the gap in the middle then being underrepresented

Re: Ask HN: Why are there almost no intermediate-level learning resources?

#14

Post by topkai22 » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

pennyintheslot wrote: post #4

kashfi wrote: post #2

https://hi.hyperskill.org/ ^This might be a good place to learn the intermediate stuff. Python, Java, Kotlin. More intermediate stuff goes into the data structures and algorithms. https://sp19.datastructur.es/ ^UCB's Josh Hug is a good lecturer, also provides course textbook, hw, side projects. For best practices, try to get the Head First Design Patterns PDF. Common mistakes? Search for "Effective " and you should f…

Thank you for sharing those! After looking through your suggestions, I think I better understand what I actually meant with 'intermediate-level learning resources'. I suppose what I am looking for are videos where people walk you through some really advanced open-source applications and explain the application structure and design decisions they have made. That could be relevant for all sorts of tech stacks and combi…

Pluralsight has videos/training series that do that. It might still generally be below exactly what you are looking for, but it’s pretty good and where I go when I have to ramp fast.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there almost no intermediate-level learning resources?

#15

Post by jl2718 » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 3:07 PM UTC

I like textbooks for this. I can’t find them anymore for new things I’m interested in. For instance, there is no decent textbook on modern machine learning. Prior to 2014 they were great. Programming books in general seem way too narrow and quickly become obsolete.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there almost no intermediate-level learning resources?

#16

Post by topkai22 » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 3:24 PM UTC

ansgri wrote: post #3

True. This didn’t seem to be the case 10 years ago. Maybe this is the result of commercialization of information: much finer optimization of follower count inevitably leads to oversimplification and overselling. And experts are increasingly less motivated to share knowledge with non-experts, like in academia where clarity of explanation to outsiders is sometimes valued negatively. Also, most of the useful beginner to…

I suspect the increasing dominance of open source and free (as in beer) software for the last decade is at play, too.

Companies selling development software/libraries can pay for teams of content developers and evangelists. They also would serve as single source of truth for the canonical way of doing things. And they would give away the content in order to get license sales

The rise of the free (as in beer) software doesn’t have the same incentives, culturally or economically. The documentation of the better libraries is often great and better then the what I remember from closed source vendors in the past, but it normally stops at the boundary of the library. It’s rare to see teams of evangelists/content on OSS projects directly creating integration level content (although some of the bigger projects see that).

Re: Ask HN: Why are there almost no intermediate-level learning resources?

#17

Post by chatmasta » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 4:04 PM UTC

At a certain point, it's more efficient to read the primary source of educational material, which is the documentation of whatever project/language you're working with. With some exceptions for complicated domains, it's usually much more efficient to read the docs rather than some tutorial that has probably drifted out of date. If you're interested in how other projects manage things, just read their code on github.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there almost no intermediate-level learning resources?

#18

Post by craftinator » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 4:46 PM UTC

pennyintheslot wrote: post #4

kashfi wrote: post #2

https://hi.hyperskill.org/ ^This might be a good place to learn the intermediate stuff. Python, Java, Kotlin. More intermediate stuff goes into the data structures and algorithms. https://sp19.datastructur.es/ ^UCB's Josh Hug is a good lecturer, also provides course textbook, hw, side projects. For best practices, try to get the Head First Design Patterns PDF. Common mistakes? Search for "Effective " and you should f…

Thank you for sharing those! After looking through your suggestions, I think I better understand what I actually meant with 'intermediate-level learning resources'. I suppose what I am looking for are videos where people walk you through some really advanced open-source applications and explain the application structure and design decisions they have made. That could be relevant for all sorts of tech stacks and combi…

Would "best framework practices" tutorial or bootcamp be a good summary of what you're looking for?

Re: Ask HN: Why are there almost no intermediate-level learning resources?

#19

Post by nthacker » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

I've been pondering and working on this exact problem for over 4 months. I agree with you. The amount of time that engineers spend at work to teach themselves, test or experiment with frameworks, libraries, architectures is really high. Personally I've spent hours of unproductive work before a breakthrough and certainly there's a component of the difficulty in searching, piecing together ideas that are not basic.

You mention video walkthroughs and that you would pay for something like this. I'd love to do a video call and chat to learn more: nirmalthacker@gmail.com

Re: Ask HN: Why are there almost no intermediate-level learning resources?

#20

Post by s1t5 » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

jl2718 wrote: post #15

I like textbooks for this. I can’t find them anymore for new things I’m interested in. For instance, there is no decent textbook on modern machine learning. Prior to 2014 they were great. Programming books in general seem way too narrow and quickly become obsolete.

> For instance, there is no decent textbook on modern machine learning. Prior to 2014 they were great.

Do you mean books on theory or on language-specific libraries? Either way I can think of many examples. Also, the pre-2014 books are still very relevant - it's only deep learning that has seen significant developments since then.