Ask HN: What would attract you to attend a 1day course on a tech of your choice?

I went to an infection control course once that had pens that doubled as spray bottles of alcohol gel. Also got a key ring that’s a bottle of alcohol gel.

I also went to a blood transfusion course one time and got fridge magnets that had important facts you need to remember for blood transfusions, a reusable bag, that when folded back into its pouch takes the shape of a drop of red blood, I got a stress ball that is a big red blood cell, a note pad that has the blood bank logo and contact details at the very bottom, a red blood drop plushie, and I also got a really useful little book with all the information I could possibly need for doing blood transfusions. It’s still sitting on my bookshelf 6 years later and I still look at it from time to time to remind myself of stuff.

The transfusion book is probably my favourite freebie because it’s really relevant to my job. But some of the other items were still novel and also bring a little moment of joy acquiring them.

One point I’d make is that you can’t use random objects to be the main attraction, or main value of your course. The value still has to come from what it is you’re actually teaching, it needs to be really relevant, and teaching stuff that people in the industry actually want to know about, and take value from.

That said, I still probably wouldn't want to spend a whole day + significant travel expenses just to learn D3 :( It's the kind of thing that's not very efficient to learn in a classroom, IMO.

I'd prefer a lot of examples with good documentation, not a classroom where you spend an hour getting everyone set up with a basic IDE just to get a single circle drawn on the screen. The pacing of such a class would likely vary too much between students, depending on their JS and visualization experience, and it's not a good use of time in a professional setting.

If I had to go to a workshop like this (or if work was paying for it), I'd at a minimum hope that there are different tracks/curricula, like one for boot camp beginners and another for professional devs with some industry experience. I don't know how you'd do it for beginners (I probably wouldn't start with d3 in that case).

As a working dev, I'd really want something that exposes me to experts in the field working on complex projects that have undocumented or non-obvious "gotchas". I don't want to sit in a room listening to someone talk about something I could've learned in 5 minutes of reading the docs. I'd want expert wisdom, like actual firsthand extensive experience using D3 in the wild and the resultant experience. Something like "Here's one project we did. We chose D3 because of X, and we used these specific visualizations because of Y and Z. It turns out our first attempts failed and confused people, so we ended up doing A and B instead, and had to solve for problem C that the docs don't mention at all." etc. In other words, real-world problems and real-world workflows.

I also think a real-world Q&A would be helpful, if you're able to collect questions (and ideally code samples) from participants beforehand and then go through them live for the entire audience to learn from. Like "We got a question about using a treemap interactions on mobile, and this was the demo we got. I thought about it and tweaked it like this..." or "how do you do a good heatmap with accessibility considerations for colorblind users?" etc.

At the end of the day, I think some live coding time with no required pre-set agenda, but available 1:1 time with instructor(s), would be helpful. Like people could bring their own projects they're working on, or tweak an example you provide (ideally in some easily cloneable environment / web IDE that doesn't waste time on pipeline setup), but have experts on hand to provide guidance. Or if not, they can just leave the workshop early or mingle in the break area or whatever.

Hope that doesn't seem overly negative... was just trying to be honest about what would get me excited to attend such a workshop. I guess the TLDR of it is that I'd prefer it to be more able "sharing expertise from real-world professional usage" rather than "here's how you make a bar chart".

Would you happen to know what it's called? I don't know which guy, or what the mom test is, but would love to read the workshop book.

Anyway your idea about collecting questions ahead of time is great. I would love to just react to the audience with questions and allow people to get on with things but not everyone will be self directed.

Having questions or topics of interest up front could help strike a balance though!

great distinction here, thanks!