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> Many things heralded as the best thing since sliced bread in presentations and video tutorials are hardly every opened, let alone used. This reminds me of so
by NAR8789 5y ago
> Many things heralded as the best thing since sliced bread in presentations and video tutorials are hardly every opened, let alone used.
This reminds me of something I heard once... that the first half of Portal (the video game) is basically a giant playable tutorial, and that a lot of video games start off with a tutorial disguised as gameplay, and that this is actually pretty pleasant.
The world's gotten pretty good at crafting tutorials disguised as gameplay. Could we do this with dev tools? Has anyone tried to make "VSCode: the game"?
Maybe "tip of the day" popups could be restructured as minigames?
Possible hurdles I can think of off the top of my head:
- a fancy tutorial probably runs into exactly what the author mentions on the next few lines: that adding more documentation doesn't fix things, because most people don't go to the documentation.
- In a game it's very easy to tune the tutorial to what you'll later encounter. A dev tool tutorial... every dev's needs are different. I imagine you'd have to structure it as a tutorial for "core functionality", plus separate tutorials for each extension.
- In the game context, I'm expecting to do certain actions repetitively. This has the side-effect of refining those skills. In a dev context, repetition is often considered a smell (though, I'd argue even in dev work we pick up a lot of little katas without thinking about it).
- Harping on repetition some more... what about the debugging tools that I only need to use once in a blue moon?
- hutzlibu 5y ago"Has anyone tried to make "VSCode: the game"?" No, but something along that line. It is actually very hard, to do so in a consistent way, that is fun and useful.
- dylan604 5y agoHas anyone ever written a set of documentation solely by asking questions on StackExchange? I mean make an outline of exactly how you would do written docs, but pose each one of the sections in the outline as questions. You could have another user designed to be an expert for this app answer the questions. I'm not trying to game SO for points. I'm trying to head off the fact that nobody reads docs, but will head straight to a web search.
- hutzlibu 5y ago"I'm trying to head off the fact that nobody reads docs, but will head straight to a web search. " On average I would say, this is because the average SO answer about some API call, is usually way better, than the average doc.
- HWR_14 5y ago> I'm trying to head off the fact that nobody reads docs, but will head straight to a web search. Is that why everyone loves SO? I've found it so hard to get questions answered on there. Most answers I find are just regurgitations of documentation, which is just annoying when you are asking about an obscure edge case.
- dylan604 5y agoI can't speak for everyone, but...sometimes it's easier to ask a question in a search bar than heading off to the docs and navigating their menus in order to find where in the docs you need to be looking. Maybe SO links come up first, maybe the actual docs do. However, with the back-n-forth exchanges, it is sometimes easier to grok an SO link than dryly written docs. The first example jumping to mind is AWS related questions.
- HWR_14 5y agoThe search bar is more convenient, and sometimes the docs are hard to find. That said, I find a lot of docs are quite easy to read, and often have to take the second step of omitting SO or otherwise restricting the search to docs and kicking myself. Some documentation is wonderful. I try to use documentation quality as an important consideration when choosing software. The AWS docs have big issues, but they are similar to the big issues with SO - it's so easy to find old documentation. Also, they are horribly organized.
- nine_k 5y agoThe web search should ideally show the relevant section of the docs as the first hit. Actually, it often does for me. Good search is hard, and adding search to your docs, especially with some fuzziness like synonyms and common typos, is not trivial, unless you defer it to web search.
- vichu 5y agoGames as teaching tools is definitely an interesting topic. You might get a kick out of https://vim-adventures.com/ https://vim-adventures.com/ or https://cssgridgarden.com/ https://cssgridgarden.com/ or http://www.flexboxdefense.com/ http://www.flexboxdefense.com/ These are just off the top of my head - would love to see other examples.
- DylanSp 5y agohttps://deadlockempire.github.io/ https://deadlockempire.github.io/ is a good example, focused on multithreading.
- CardenB 5y agoI learned vim back in college using this: https://vim-adventures.com https://vim-adventures.com