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How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me

anniemueller.com

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Re: How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me

#111

Post by SoKamil »

f33d5173 wrote: post #87
rdtsc wrote: post #70

The title of the blog post currently is: > How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me The HN title is: > How I, a beginner developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me Those are different things. A "non-developer" reads as someone who isn't supposed to understand any of this. I am imagining a human resource person, a customer completely unfamiliar with internals, someone f…

It says "me, a beginner " The hn submitter presumably edited for length

The edited one is longer. Why would you want to edit the title to make it longer?

Re: How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me

#112

Post by general1465 »

Tutorial is effectively a list of written orders. Problem is that if orders are not written in a detailed and specific way, person on the other side can interpret it in wildly different way.

This has been, and still is, a huge issue for military. Whole battles has been lost because order from a general was too vague or too open to interpretation (General Lee has been infamous for issuing vague orders which screw him up on Gettysburg). Prussians has invented whole wargaming which effectively has been generals writing orders in one room and officers pushing model armies in another room and reporting back to general in writing.

LLM is very good at filtering who can ask a correct question - order LLM what to do. People who can express themselves and describe problem will always get more mileage from LLM than people who will just throw vague request on it.

Re: How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me

#113

Post by lukan »

lintfordpickle wrote: post #109
lukan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Most tutorials are not for non-developers" That has been repeated in the comments many times now, but the very headline says that this tutorial was indeed also intended for non developers. Like some open source Github project that the author merely wanted to install, not starting to mess with the code. Basically, it is complaining in a satirical way about installation readmes, that maybe they could be made easier, t…

> "That has been repeated in the comments many times now, but the very headline says that this tutorial was indeed also intended for non developers" tbf, that's not how I read the headline. The headline is: "How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner" The author is a beginner, which puts them in the field - so the parent comment is valid no?

The headline has been edited, in its current shape I tend to agree to you.

Re: How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me

#114

Post by shmerl »

mirekrusin wrote: post #106
shmerl wrote: post #6

The funniest part, lol it might be in library/library/library/llibrary/liiiiiibrarrrary/llllliiiiibrary/hidden/hidden/hiding/you can’t find me/hidden/nope/never/hahahahereiam.file.

sususudododo baby shark ...looks scary as well in hands of inexperienced.

That is true, especially when instructions are spooky like

   curl blah-blah | sh
And people run that without thinking.

Re: How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me

#115

Post by Waraqa »

qnleigh wrote: post #37
evanjrowley wrote: post #9

I followed this tutorial but ran into an issue where shamrock portal kept crashing. When I checked the logs, I found it would start a beep but never finish a boop. After a few hours of Googling I discovered my Debian 12's Klingon troglodyte emulator had a known centipede reported in 2013 that's never been squashed because hoobastank 34.100-6x00 actually requires it, and Debian can't move to the newer version of hooba…

Wait really?? I also wound up migrating to Fedora 75bit for basically the same reason (TopHat doesn't even support hoobastank). But then I couldn't find `file` in the specified directory. I have `library/Lib/library/llibrary/liiiiiibrarrrary/llllliiiiibrary/hidden/hidden/hiding/you can’t find me/hidden/nope/never/hahahahereiam/file` and `/hahahahereiam/file.`, but neither of these boop. Any help would be greatly appr…

It was moved to a new path so you have to create symlinks in both locations to the new path under /usr/lib/newlib1.2/newfile.so otherwise, You can download a script that will make that for you but it will only work if you have all the dependencies for that script installed and their version numbers match the ones that the script owner had when he wrote the script.

Re: How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me

#117

Post by dayvster »

This article begs a more important question, is the burden of understanding the article / tutorial on the reader or is the burden of making it understandable on the writter?

I think a reasonable amount of knowledge about the topic being discussed in the tutorial should be expected from the reader but this should also be communicated by the writer.

Re: How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me

#118

Post by arkh »

The hidden files >_But a part which is not mentioned in this blurb is locality of information. A good example would be traefik documentation where every part of the doc is written like you've already read all of it. Usually with not even a link between the different parts mentioning each other so don't expect something like a table of values where an option is mentioned.

"But you should learn all of it if you want to use it". Sorry but nope. Most people using your documentation will be of 2 types:

- they want to check what your software can do and will just try to get something running fast. So you need a good "get started" and some "how-tos" showing what it can do - something is burning in production, they need a solution fast and it seems the problem is your piece of software which they don't know. You may want a guide on how to debug your thing. At least you want relevant information to be fast to get and easily googable.

Re: How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me

#119

Post by card_zero »

SoKamil wrote: post #111
f33d5173 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says "me, a beginner " The hn submitter presumably edited for length

The edited one is longer. Why would you want to edit the title to make it longer?

No it isn't:

  How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner

  How I, a beginner developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me

Re: How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me

#120

Post by JohnKemeny »

marklubi wrote: post #43
Swizec wrote: post #4

Most tutorials are not for non-developers, they’re for other developers who are also in the ecosystem. They’re more like academic papers (peer-to-peer communication of new discoveries) than they are like a pop sci book or show meant for a general audience. And that’s okay! Great even! As a fellow peer I benefit greatly from those tutorials. Sometimes even from my own notes published and forgotten years ago. This is w…

> Beginners have to be nurtured through lots of context that builds up slowly. My son is 17 and very interested in programming. Had to explain to him public, private, internal, and also static the other night. I then joked, you should ask your teacher about recursion tomorrow. He's with his mom this weekend, but I'm anxiously awaiting hearing how that went.

I think Java is dying.

If you want to teach algorithmic thinking, teach Python.

If you want to teach hardware and low-level systems, teach C.

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