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Developer Skills Report

research.hackerrank.com

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Re: Developer Skills Report

#11

Post by catmanjan »

meritt wrote: post #2

> And new generations are opting for YouTube to self-teach over books I'm definitely in the older generation because it's completely mind-boggling to me how someone effectively learns to code from watching a video tutorial. You can't flip back to a page, bookmark a link, copy text, zoom-in to see exactly what was done, etc. It feels like you're inherently missing out on so much you gain from a book or a text-filled w…

There are lots of secrets you can pick up watching videos. Books glaze over some details like IDE choices and how to set up dev environments, but you get to see all that watching someone code from scratch

Re: Developer Skills Report

#12

Post by baron816 »

meritt wrote: post #2

> And new generations are opting for YouTube to self-teach over books I'm definitely in the older generation because it's completely mind-boggling to me how someone effectively learns to code from watching a video tutorial. You can't flip back to a page, bookmark a link, copy text, zoom-in to see exactly what was done, etc. It feels like you're inherently missing out on so much you gain from a book or a text-filled w…

Don’t knock it until you try it. I’ve learned a great ton from YouTube videos or just watching the videos in sequence on Frontend Masters. Watching them at an increased speed let’s me cover a lot of ground very quickly. I also like writing down headers of important topics, and then going back and doing research on those topics and essentially trying to write a brief book in my own words on everything. Helps me get a deeper understanding, ensure I’m actually learning stuff, and be able to come back to things for reference. See: https://baron816.gitbooks.io/good-stuff-to-know/content/

Re: Developer Skills Report

#16

Post by bob4444 »

Being an Emacs enthusiast myself, it always surprises me how much more popular VIM is. Is this because VIM is taught more in schools? Maybe because VI/VIM is typically installed by default on Linux systems?

Re: Developer Skills Report

#17

Post by JimDabell »

meritt wrote: post #2

> And new generations are opting for YouTube to self-teach over books I'm definitely in the older generation because it's completely mind-boggling to me how someone effectively learns to code from watching a video tutorial. You can't flip back to a page, bookmark a link, copy text, zoom-in to see exactly what was done, etc. It feels like you're inherently missing out on so much you gain from a book or a text-filled w…

I'm not sure it's generational. I've always encountered developers who prefer to learn from people rather than words. I think the difference here is that now that YouTube has come along these developers are catered to more, so the people who prefer to learn this way have a better choice.

I don't really see any advantage to video over text / rich documents for learning development topics, and I see several downsides. But perhaps I'm biased, because I'm like you and very strongly prefer words.

I expect improvements to the technology will help alleviate some of the downsides to video in the long run as well. Are there any video platforms widely used for developers that let you do a full-text search over the transcript for code and then jump to a point from a list of results? Because that at the very least is a dealbreaker for me.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#19

Post by zdfjkhiuj »

bob4444 wrote: post #16

Being an Emacs enthusiast myself, it always surprises me how much more popular VIM is. Is this because VIM is taught more in schools? Maybe because VI/VIM is typically installed by default on Linux systems?

It's tiny and ubiquitous. Even tiny VMs and embedded devices have Vim.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#20

Post by bob4444 »

zdfjkhiuj wrote: post #19
bob4444 wrote: post #16

Being an Emacs enthusiast myself, it always surprises me how much more popular VIM is. Is this because VIM is taught more in schools? Maybe because VI/VIM is typically installed by default on Linux systems?

It's tiny and ubiquitous. Even tiny VMs and embedded devices have Vim.

Despite this, in my experience, Emacs provides a more feature rich environment, comparable to an IDE, rather than only a text editor.
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