I'd like to read about developing in the post JavaScript web
Sorry, what's the post JS web? Are you talking about WASM?
Perhaps. I am not sure if WASM is going to be it.
It certainly could be
Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?
61–70 of 93 posts
Re: Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thousands of hours have gone into building Molecule.dev over the past year, which itself is the culmination of tens of thousands of hours of experience, honing in on the absolute best tools and approaches. It makes no sense to give it all away for free. As much as I would love to live in a world where we could all freely share our hard work like this, people need to make a living somehow. Starting this week, however,…
I understand that, but it makes it seem off-topic for this thread. There are other off-topic (but possibly great) for-profit courses and such too, and no one's bringing them up because that's not what the Ask HN is about.
Maybe we can release the documentation and tutorials separately, and possibly some of it for free. It's much better if you have all of the code though!
Re: Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?
#63It does not matter what one likes to read or watch. What really matters is what you can teach or share. There will always be a market of any niche, especially related to dev.
I myself maintain a blog and run a Youtube channel in local Urdu language. When I started, I did not think what others want. I shared what I loved and could do on my own.
As long as you are original, authentic and honest, people would enjoy even a Hello World video by you.
Re: Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?
#64I think an under-served market is "intermediate to advanced programming for people who didn't study computer science but can already write half-decent Python and maybe some SQL, JavaScript or Matlab/Julia/R". People who are fine with control flow, git, unit tests etc, but who would be lost if you start talking about things like state machines or depth-first search. I'm largely talking about myself here, but I've work…
“I think an under-served market is "intermediate to advanced programming for people who didn't study computer science…””
I find this too. I’m self taught and have made a lot of good projects with blog tutorials and SO. Python has let me do a lot quickly, but I get stuck on some odd things.
Last time it was data structures. For a project I was expanding, the data structure was insufficient. I imagined there must be more complex data structures to solve the challenges, and I asked people for this. Lack of response helped me realized my thinking was wrong. Then I realized I could do what I needed with SQLite. Haha.
Right now I’m stuck on an aspect of Django. Django is a Python module. When I want to add another module to modify how Django behaves I need to override in my code. It’s all too complicated to imagine for me. Example, adding wiki pages to django by adding django-wiki module, then adding tags to the wiki pages by adding danio-tagulous. I know this is some kind of class override, but I just can’t imagine it.
Also, How to think through adding API data to your project? Like swagger.
For me it’s about thinking or visualizing how to put my code together with other people’s code. And once in a while I ‘imagine’ what a solution should be, and I make everything more complicated than it need be.
Re: Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like there are so many of these tutorials. The problem is that a person who wants to learn React generally does not care about Debian and something like apt update && apt install nginx . Then depending on who's writing the tutorial, the content ranges from "create a VM and issue these commands" to gcloud commands to spawn VMs. Usually, when a student doesn't know anything about React, they won't know anything…
The difference to the other tutorials is that this one would not have prerequisites in terms of tools and services. It would not require anything but to copy+paste lines to go along. And that the format of shell commands makes the different approaches very easily compareable. And reproducable. You can put all of the commands into a script and have your own automated template to start new projects. A single Docker con…
Docker is a tool prerequisite. For example, on a SELinux system, docker run -v $(pwd):/var/www will cause issues (because you need -v "$(pwd)":/var/www:z). Also, isn't -v deprecated?
What I'm highlighting is:
* The knowledge depth and time required on your part to maintain the text such that it works on all supported systems
* The fact that you're depending on a number of tools that might become obsolete quite fast, which might throw a wrench into your text.
** For example, Docker stops supporting CLI due to licensing. Linux splinters off to podman, Windows creates its own tool, macOS users will generally continue working with Docker. You'll then be forced to migrate to a different tool, like Vagrant.
Rather than create a text that's a "bring your own developer workstation", create a webpage that I pay $15 for monthly, you record a video explaining a concept, and then you have a button that says "spin up a lab for X". This throws me to a controlled environment, e.g. in AWS, where you tell me the exact steps that will achieve what I want to achieve.
Re: Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?
#66Earlier tonight I was making a programming challenge list for experienced programmers. These are all small tasks but the question is can you do them. Create a 1. Mandelbrot 2. Julia set 3. Ray tracer with shading and shadows of a few simple spheres 4. A simple virtual machine 5. Rewrite the first three programs in the virtual machines assembler 6. A simple language such as Forth for the virtual machine 7. Rewrite the…
I'm curious -- is this realistic? Can most experienced programmers really do all this? I've been coding for a few years and I can do maybe one or two of these.
I can't speak for other experienced programmers, but for me (28 years experience)... I could do all the things listed, but I would not finish any of them in less than an hour.
Re: Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?
#67What I would find interesting is a page which lists all steps to be performed on the command line to create a web application from scratch. Say we start with a fresh Debian install, the first line might be apt update && apt upgrade The second line might be apt install php Or Python or Node. And then the commands to create the project directory, switching to it, installing a webserver etc would follow. At some point t…
Writing code as a sequence of "echo ... >> ..." lines would be awful. It should at least use a text editor (doesn't lose the copy-paste functionality).
With a Texteditor you need to "describe" the process. Like "Open your text editor and create a file called /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf then put the following code into it ... then save it, make sure the access rights are... make sure the file encoding is..., make sure it does or does not contain a final carriage return ..."
With the shell, all of this can be combined in one command that you can easily read, understand, copy and paste and which is exactly reproducable:
cat /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf
WSGIPythonPath /var/www/mysite
WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/mysite/mysite/wsgi.py
Require all granted
EOFRe: Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Writing code as a sequence of "echo ... >> ..." lines would be awful. It should at least use a text editor (doesn't lose the copy-paste functionality).
With a Texteditor you need to "describe" the process. Like "Open your text editor and create a file called /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf then put the following code into it ... then save it, make sure the access rights are... make sure the file encoding is..., make sure it does or does not contain a final carriage return ..." With the shell, all of this can be combined in one command that you can easily…
But no one will want to exactly copy and paste everything from the tutorial (e.g. you'd put the name of your thing instead of "mysite") so by doing it that way you're forcing people to copy and paste it into a text editor, make the edits, and then copy and paste into a terminal. It all seems overly complicated. To be editable and equivalent to your example, all you need is two instructions:
1. Run this:
$EDITOR /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf
[file contents]
Re: Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
With a Texteditor you need to "describe" the process. Like "Open your text editor and create a file called /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf then put the following code into it ... then save it, make sure the access rights are... make sure the file encoding is..., make sure it does or does not contain a final carriage return ..." With the shell, all of this can be combined in one command that you can easily…
But no one will want to exactly copy and paste everything from the tutorial (e.g. you'd put the name of your thing instead of "mysite") so by doing it that way you're forcing people to copy and paste it into a text editor, make the edits, and then copy and paste into a terminal. It all seems overly complicated. To be editable and equivalent to your example, all you need is two instructions: 1. Run this: $EDITOR /etc/…
To test it, I would copy all commands verbatim and play around with the running web application afterwards. Say to try Django or some other framework which I have not used before.
Even just reading it would give me an unambiguous insight into the concepts of the framework.
To "fork" it, I would copy all commands into a shellscript and then change something like "mysite" via search+replace. In vim it would be: :%s/mysite/yoursite/gc to change all occurances of "mysite" to "yoursite" and be shown each replacement before it takes place.
Re: Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?
#70More "Build X from scratch" tutorials, not those downloading 500Mb dependencies at the start.