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One odd thing about software engineering culture is that almost all instructional material is introductory. It's rare to find screencasts aimed at deep problems experts encounter in production systems. Gary's videos are a glorious exception—I'm really thrilled that he's back!

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Gary Bernhardt

@garybernhardt

· Oct 28, 2020

New YouTube channel! The first video is "End-to-End TypeScript: Database, Backend, API, and Frontend". It shows our end-to-end type guarantees from the backend database all the way to the React props. Demoed live using @exec_prog's codebase as the example. youtube.com/watch?v=GrnBXh

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4:41 AM · Oct 29, 2020Twitter Web App

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Incidentally, the demo project in that video, Execute Program, is itself super fascinating. It presents lessons in the context of a REPL, alternating prose with exercises, then reinforces the content via spaced repetition. My notes on its design here:

notes.andymatuschak.org

If you haven't seen his older talks, they're available at destroyallsoftware.com. I learned more about software architecture from these than from any other resource. For a taste, see "Boundaries," one of my favorite talks on engineering, available free: destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundari

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I feel this too! I’m glad that things like dev.to exist, and I find the enthusiasm people have on there uplifting, but when I browse sites like that I rarely find advanced level tutorials, and I wish there was more content like this out there.

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The quality of tutorials as they go from Introductory to advanced can be perfectly represented by that horse drawing meme

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For sure. This is one reason why I wrote a book on building distributed systems:

pragprog.com

Distributed Services with Go

Master the techniques, tools, and tricks that skilled Go programmers use every day.

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I think it's because there is a much higher amount and variety of deep problems than introductory problems, which dilutes the amount of documentation the deeper you go.

Hernan Moraldo

@hhm

Oct 29, 2020

Plus specialized subjects have a more niche audience the deeper you go, and fewer people can write about them.

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This is not just a factor in sw eng. Compare the number of intro Calc videos to those of graduate topology. More expert /focused content simply has a smaller potential audience, and its production is not rewarded to the same extent by the like-economy.

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Oct 29, 2020

And it’s actively disincentivized by e.g. tenure boards etc!

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I wouldn't say that's odd, it makes sense to me. It's easier to write introductory articles, it's easier to consume and (I think) it generates more clicks/likes/whatever. IMO, it's much harder to extract lessons from real (large) projects and present them well.

Jeroen Leenarts

@leenarts

Oct 29, 2020

Sounds like first hand experience

@chriseidhof

Worst part is people start writing code in a way that resembles the sample code… On iOS specifically I think it’s the source of most huge view controller, Apple does it in their sample code, so why shouldn’t I in my production code?