Practical Outline Research Example

[00:00 - 00:20] So, for example, what I'll do is I'll go through all the top stack overflow questions. I'll look up the relevant tags and I'll sort by most upvoted or most views and I'll try to capture, I'll write down in the Google Doc what topics I think are relevant and I'll just start to do some basic organization.

[00:21 - 01:05] I'll go through the sub-readits for this community and I'll sort by like, you know, top by all time and scan through and I'll see like what topics, you know, get tend to get a lot of upvotes and that's a good indication of the sort of topics like people have questions about, you know, depending on the community, you might find value in sorting by most controversial. Sometimes you can find interesting ideas there that are worth talking about.

[01:06 - 01:10] It depends. And then I'll try to find like the awesome repos.

[01:11 - 01:22] Awesome repos are so helpful for this, you know, so look up awesome rust, awesome node, you know, awesome reason, whatever. Like whatever your topic is, look up for the awesome lists and find, you know, the most popular one.

[01:23 - 01:41] And what I'll actually do is I will tend to click on like almost every single link in the awesome lists, especially and I'll especially try to find like open questions that aren't necessarily being answered. And all it's this weird thing where you'll be going through these lists and you feel like, oh, there's so much material.

[01:42 - 01:44] There's like so much blog material out there. Like I never even realized before.

[01:45 - 01:55] And you like your first few minutes will be overwhelmed. And then like as you get like 50, 75, 80% through it, you'll realize that most of the blog posts are really shallow.

[01:56 - 02:05] And you'll realize that you've came across a bunch of blog posts that maybe they're like not really accurate or they're not really thorough or they're not really that helpful. So like don't get overwhelmed by volume.

[02:06 - 02:22] You'll have this like Zen moment when you're almost done going through the list where you will you feel like you've actually looked up like every blog post there is on GoLang that's like on the internet that's like popular. And then you'll also kind of see like, oh, you know what, they like actually really didn't talk about, you know, how to do load balancing or whatever.

[02:23 - 02:33] Like you'll actually get a vision in your mind for like what is missing in the community by the time you get through doing that. I'll track down the package manager or like community site that tracks the stats.

[02:34 - 02:40] So like NPM, for example, like I'll try to sort by like most popular JavaScript downloads for all time. And I'll make note of the top libraries.

[02:41 - 02:50] And like these top by number packages are almost certainly something that we want to integrate into the course. I'll search for the term on hacker news or related terms and I'll take note of what's there.

[02:51 - 03:01] You know, you might find like the state of articles, like the state of JavaScript in 2018 or, you know, the state of rustling or whatever. And these are really great data for like where the community is going.

[03:02 - 03:24] It's so helpful to be able to find those articles and you can see like what's up and coming, what's super popular. We often have to make a decision of like, you know, what routing library are we going to cover or like what style guides are we going to follow being able to leverage those surveys that other people have already done is so helpful because because the decision, the community decision has already been made.

[03:25 - 03:30] Like we're not trying to really influence community opinion. I'll talk about that more.

[03:31 - 03:42] We're really trying to just follow the community. We're not necessarily like we're trying to set the pace in terms of showing best practices, but we're not necessarily trying to like convert anyone.

[03:43 - 03:53] Like it's easier to just ride the wave of where the entire community for this tech is going rather than like try to convert everyone to our view. So the state of articles often are super helpful in that way.

[03:54 - 04:00] And then of course, if you know any other community specific watering holes, like include them. I mean, don't be limited to what I suggested above.

[04:01 - 04:09] Like you're the expert in this area. So you're going to know a lot better than I do about like the pulse like where the pulse of the community is and like where everyone gathers around.

[04:10 - 04:24] And lastly, the official docs, they're worth looking over, but I mean, I put them last because I think they're like least important. Well, they're important because we need to know like where they're at, like where the official docs are at and kind of like where they position themselves in the world.

[04:25 - 04:41] But just keep in mind that anybody who is buying our book or course, like they 've almost certainly read the official docs and they're looking for more, right? Like they've been through like, if you're trying to learn Angular, you're going to go through the official Angular tutorials and you're, you'll feel like, okay, I did that already.

[04:42 - 04:46] And like now I need more. I need more on like how to actually really build my app.

[04:47 - 05:18] So the docs are like maybe in some sense like an anti guideline or at least like you need to know that you have to go beyond what the docs already have that we're actually going to teach like more opinions, more of like the full stack more of like what libraries to use, like we're just going to go further about like opinions and guidelines in real world examples than the API docs are. So like look over the API docs, but like we certainly wouldn't want to structure our like course, you know, according to the same outline that the docs already exist, you know, they already exist in the world.

[05:19 - 05:18] And so we need to go past them.