Teach What You Do At Work

[00:00 - 00:17] One of the problems we're trying to solve in our material is to teach how you really would do it at work. So doing this effectively means that you need to remember what it was like to be a beginner. One of the main ways the beginners try to learn is by reading blog tutorials, but a lot of the tutorials that you see on popular platforms, they're short and they stop when things get interesting.

[00:18 - 02:29] Also, a lot of them are written by people who are pretty inexperienced. But as a beginner, when you come across blog posts, it doesn't. You don't necessarily know how experienced the author is, and you don't know if the code will work until you try it. So learning from blogs, it can be time consuming and frustrating, and it always feels like a bit of a gamble. On the other end of the spectrum, we have the API docs. And the problem with API docs and official documentation is that the authors, they draw a very small circle of responsibility around what they're going to teach you. So for example, let's talk about React. It's widely used. The docs are awesome as far as they go. And it's a good example because the React docs, they are way better than your average open source project. But the problem is is that even though the docs are good, they only teach you react itself. React is purposefully designed to have a small core and writing good docs is hard. And so the maintainers of React, they want to focus their efforts in the documentation on just teaching that core. But the problem is, is when you sit down to write a real production React app at work, there are a million other things that you're going to have to figure out. There's all sorts of third party libraries that you're going to use. You know, there's the tooling that you have to install NPM dev tools, VS code extensions. And you have to figure out how to deploy it and learn about webpack and performance tooling and on and on. So I think even beyond the technical details of if the code runs, there's also just conventions about how to think in react style when you structure your components or what the culture and the conventions are with organizing your files and how to think about data architecture. So there's all these things that they're not part of the react core per se, but they're totally required for writing and shipping a production app. Also being able to understand this culture and just speak fluently about it is almost required just to get the job in the first place. So it's this programming meta conversation that we're trying to bring into our teaching. It's not just about the code, but also about the culture and the concepts around it. I'm just using react as an example here. It's not just react and web development that has these conventions. Every topic in programming has these deep layers.

[02:30 - 03:06] And you often find that in blog posts, it's either taught in a trivial way or it's just not taught at all. And teaching this properly involves teaching a lot more or like a lot more than just showing an API call. So at Newline, we're trying to teach programming like you really would teach it at work. Even if this includes hacky workarounds, even if that includes something outside of your normal circle of responsibility, our goal is to help people at work and if they want to get a better job. So in the next few videos, I'm going to talk about the process of writing a book or course from an author's perspective. We'll talk about what it's like, how it works, how much money you can make.

[03:07 - 03:15] That's one view of what we're doing. But ultimately, what we're doing is we're trying to help people at work. And we never want to lose that focus.