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This is amazing and really useful, love the idea; but let me tell you a story, it's a bit of a tangent but relevant enough: In an online language class we were
by hks0 2y ago
This is amazing and really useful, love the idea; but let me tell you a story, it's a bit of a tangent but relevant enough:
In an online language class we were sending the assignments to our teacher via slack, the teacher would then mark our mistakes and send it back.
I, as a true hater of all the heavy weight text formats for everyday communications, autonomously fired up the terminal, wrote my assignment in my_name.md and happily sent it without giving it any thought. This is what I hear the next session:
"... and everybody did a great job! Although someone just sent me their assignment in a stupid format. I don't know what it was! I could neither highlight it or make the text bold or anything. Don't do that to me again please".
Before that I never dreamed of meeting someone who preferred a word document _after_ opening a .md file, and I also learned if I had chosen product design as a career, everyone would've suffered immensely (or maybe not, I would've just ended up jobless).
- EasyMark 2y agoIf you are talking about an online language class as in "I'm learning Yiddish" then I don't understand why it would confuse that that someone who isn't a coder or writer (and they're a big if) who doesn't know what the heck markdown is and hence wouldn't want to deal with it since they're used to MS Word or other word processor app. that's probably like 95% of the population at least.
- hks0 2y agoIt doesn't confuse anyone, quite the opposite. The irony for me was my own isolation with the non-tech folks.
- powersnail 2y ago> Before that I never dreamed of meeting someone who preferred a word document _after_ opening a .md file That's like 90% of the people I know outside of computer/engineering circle. Most of people probably have never opened a plaintext file in their life. They would have no idea what to do with a `.md` file. In fact, some older engineers would not know what markdown is either, since it's only been around for two decades or so, but they can probably work with it anyway (the strength of plain text).
- hks0 2y agoExactly! Hence the "please don't try product design role" advice for me. I seem to live in an all-engineers bubble.
- zelphirkalt 2y agoEngineers are people too. Engineers use products as well. Maybe you would have gone into a saner direction than most products go.
- ciscodz 2y agoi got into a similar predicament helping format some course outline documents for a university friend of mine with rsi issues... I foolishly assumed a series of documents that are to be viewed online would be better as a markdown or html format... before realising by the end of the day i had unwittingly thrown myself into the gears of war between paper and digital. Modern universities are essentially an elaborate microsoft word shilling scheme with an obsession with virtual paper!