21–30 of 38 posts
(Judging from your comment would I be correct in guessing that you are doing mainly JavaScript stuff? If you are, then the Python world is generally a lot nicer.)
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…
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…
Sadly the tech industry seems to encourage lots of shallow learning rather than deep mastery these days. 90% of stuff could be built using classic MVC, server side rendered with a bit of JQuery and would work just as well. Instead we have a shambles of microservices on Kubernetes and constantly changing front end frameworks.
There's only so far one can get by looking at Quickstarts and tutorials. If you do find a tutorial online, a big struggle is replicating and getting it to run. There's quite a lot of Open source software now, thanks to Github, but getting to a point where you can run the code, understand what it does and replicate parts of that are super time consuming. If companies knew how many man hours are dedicated towards this, they'd be shocked at the loss of productivity.
My main thesis is that intermediate stage learning is self-driven, and there needs to be an ecosystem of tooling that can provide & enable replication, remixing of software with sufficient walkthrough of what the code does
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'll fire up a tutorial on something and 20 minutes into this and I'm all "yeah this does what it says, but it can't be used to do almost anything else..." and I fear the actual person doing the tutorial doesn't know.
Heck I've commented on some Medium blogs where they mention how to do a thing and I'm 100% sure in any real world that code won't do the thing. I post and ask about some aspect of it and the blog author ... doesn't know.
Like outside this one off tutorial and everything working perfectly ... the code is useless.
There's valid reasons to simply code for illustration, but at the same time, without exposing even how to handle an error... what have you really taught someone?
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…
Unfortunately, signaling games are difficult to avoid in any burgeoning ecosystem. The problem is that our signaling schemes are almost as crude as “spray and pray” and our information seeking methods are as crude as “click and pray” (to the search overlords, or to the algorithmic feed overlords).
Both sensitivity and specificity are increasingly impoverished in online information communication. Maybe this is a fundamental caveat to large one-size-fits-all platforms... they cannot serve a variety of needs beyond a simplified representative.
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.
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.
-Just my thoughts.