Ask HN: Why do tutorial writers combine 10 technologies when 1 or 2 would do?

But the whole complaint of the Ask is the tutorials aren't basic, and nobody is writing the basic tutorials because it doesn't benefit them. It benefits them to throw a bunch of stuff in there to show they follow best practices (like putting a complete test suite into your tutorial). Throwing a bunch of stuff in the mix and showing basic competence also causes people to think they have more than basic competence, because who really performs at their highest for a tutorial?

It's not something that you expect an employer to be impressed by in itself, it is part of the whole package - imagine Cuba Gooding Jr. saying 'The Kwan' - a resume of interesting things or maybe just reasonable things, a github profile that has something reasonable in it, writing on subjects that show the keywords we look for that helps them stand out in the crowd. I'm pretty sure I remember reading to write on technology as a recommendation to young developers who want to build 'Great Careers!!! SQUEE!!' (the squee is my cynical, sarcastic side reacting against the pumped up excitement of building great careers)

But writing a tutorial that is a little bit more than basic also does other things that employers, HR, and recruiters might take as being important.

1. it shows communication skills, someone who can communicate in writing will hopefully be able to communicate verbally with our team, customers, whoever.

2. If they can write a tutorial maybe they won't be like all these other developers we hire that don't document anything and then the next batch of developers come in and say damn nothing has been documented.

3. They at least feel comfortable enough with this technology to write something down and publish and I looked at the comments and nobody complained they were a hack or sucked, and some people said thanks so I think they should go into our pile of maybes.

These HN comments are pretty disheartening. What a dreary bunch.

To summarize them, people write free tutorials because they cannot do (they're bad developers), because they reap some sort of financial gain, or because they actually want to ruin an HNer's day who demanded amazing, free content.

I encourage all of you to try and write a tutorial. You'll see that it's simply hard. You have to decide on what level of skill to aim at, you need to think what this hypothetical person already knows vs doesn't know, you have to keep your tutorial aimed at this balance, you have to resist the temptation to yak-shave, and you have to resist the temptation to adulterate your tutorial with production concerns.

It's not clear-cut at all. Do you add this package because it's how you do it in production? Or do you show how to do it without it? And if you go for the latter, you probably want to at least point out that the package exists. And while you're there, why not include a quick example of how that package can sponge up some of the tutorial code? Maybe that would be more encouraging/illuminating? Are you going to help more people with this example than you're going to confuse? Is someone on HN going to call you meandering and incompetent because you chose to?

There's a reason pedagogy is a field of study.

I’ll take a charitable approach to this and say that the authors probably realize that people want to make something visual with this skill. The author only knows a handful of the multiple dozens of ways to do that and so the tutorial has that in there. The chances of those other technologies lining up with exactly what you know are probably slim so it makes you think that they are trying to teach more than one thing.

Another theory I have is that the writer looked at this new tech and thought it would be interesting to make a video on it. Oh and while I’m in the learning a new skill mode I’ll also pick up X. Now X is top of mind so it leaks into the original presentation.

The course is on using Kubernetes, not extending it. I'm unclear where you'd ever have to write Go.

That said, I should perhaps be clear that my course is geared toward someone who is already a developer, they just need some sort of an app to deploy to give the course any value. In my case, I chose Rails. I'll just give them the code, but do a side-course walkthrough if they are interested.