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

anniemueller.com

301–310 of 455 posts

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

#301

If anyone has an open source project and wants a review of their README and docs, please get in touch. I enjoy providing this type of feedback, and I think every project can benefit from it.

I once was asked to teach a class in beginning C++ that was put in the paper as beginning programming in C++. Some of the students really weren’t ready for the class they found themselves in.

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

#302
post #19

When I was at the head of the jailbroken iPhone ecosystem, I put together a tutorial for how to get an SSH daemon set up on their phones. I put a lot of effort into making it something that anyone could follow, step by step, and achieve the result, making sure to skip no steps, assume no knowledge, and with screenshots showing the interface. I soon thereafter received an e-mail from someone saying that they had excit…

Brilliant to see something from you here - a long time ago, I was there as well using your products and making a mess of things with stuff like afc2add and iPhoneBrowser

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

#303
post #156

As a developer, this is how I feel when I open a higher math textbook. Even though I understand that, in principle, mathematicians are using a syntax and lingo that shares some common features with computer code, my eyes slide over the words and symbols like they’re a foreign language.

But you are starting at a level that assumes you are no longer a math beginner but rather a beginner in this particular area. If you were reading a high school algebra textbook, you shouldn’t have the same issue.

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

#304

This is primarily the reason why I stopped writing books and started making tutorial websites. There are so many interactive tools like element that can make tutorials accessible to more people without inflating the content itself. I'm still incredibly annoyed how constrained our web knowledge is to the feature set of ancient paper technology. We can click, hover, collapse areas, play videos and react to user actions…

Hello, I am just now trying to upgrade my blog. Can you please point me to sites that do this right?

An extreme example would be gwern.net -- specifically you might want to read https://gwern.net/about and https://gwern.net/design

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

#305
post #199
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good job, you missed the point

Great job, you've failed to document the point.

You’ve assume your beginner knows that In the Terminal meand open the Terminal application, knows how to open the Terminal, knows that the Terminal uses typed commands, knows that typed commands are followed by Enter, and knows that the text following Terminal are the typed commands to be entered.

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

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AVMetadataKeySpace A structure that defines a metadata key space. source: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/avmet...

That’s just a C enum interfaced in Swift. You can’t instantiate it, and it has no methods or any kind of functionality. It’s effective a list of numbers. What are you expecting the documentation to say here? It will make more sense when you find where it’s used. Edit: First link on the bottom explains exactly what it’s used for. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/retri...

struct AVMetadataKeySpace - a unique unit representing each of the metadata key spaces supported by AVFoundation.

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

#309

This is such a good point. I've changed jobs a lot and one thing consistently bad (to varying degrees) is documentation and tutorials specifically. "Download X and setup" "It's not working..." "Oh yeah, you're supposed to do it on the remote access VM" "It says access denied" "Oh right, you're supposed to use the Yubikey for access" "I don't have a Yubikey, its pass + authenticator" "Ok, I'll email Jeff from this dep…

I've always this attitude that the one after me should not face the same issues as I had and so I update all wrong documentation, this also helps me remember how stuff works. But I have had many occasions where I just had to give up. People thought I was being annoying, my PR for fixed Readme (or even a Readme at all at times!) were simply not picked up, etc, etc. I left that company, and left a letter for management…

I prefer to think that updating the documentation isn’t fixing the root issue, and that the working systems are their own documentation if explained properly, so document in such a way that they can’t become outdated, when feasible.
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