March 30, 2019
I’ve been trying to get into the habit of practicing programming more and, lately, I actually have been doing so — thanks to Repl.it’s Discord community for some extra inspiration — but I still struggle a lot when trying to do more complex tasks.
One of my frustrations with a lot of online tutorials is that they can be very uneven in how they teach, often making strange assumptions about the level of knowledge of viewers.
An ‘advanced’ tutorial may actually spend 50% of its run time explaining much simpler topics. A sudden 15 minute aside on html tags in the middle of a tutorial on JavaScript animations.
Or a tutorials that claims to be for beginners will suddenly dump a lot of jargon with no explanation, which means I have to pause the tutorial to go look up the jargon. I now need a tutorial to understand the “beginner’s” tutorial.
The advanced tutorial that crawls is not as bad as the beginner tutorial that leaves a viewer confused, of course.
And there are, of course, other tutorials out there that are just bad — sometimes just badly done, with hard to understand audio, or screen capture at too low a resolution to be useful but otherwise complete tutorials. Some are just outright bad tutorials, with incomplete or even incorrect information in them, though these are rarer.
A friend of mine has been using Egghead.io for quite some time. She likes them a lot and has told me several courses have been extremely useful to her.
We had watched a few of their videos together and, while the topics were, at times, a bit too advanced for me, the lessons seemed well done.
The vast majority of courses seemed to be very short and to the point.
She noticed that they were having a sale that lowered the usual price from $250/year to $150 — I thought the material might be too advanced for me but decided to take a chance and sign up. If I watch as little as 3 hours each week, I’ll end up spending about $1/hour for 150 hours of tutorials.
The first course I watched was Just Enough Functional Programming in JavaScript by Kyle Shevlin
Each video is really short — the longest just under 6 minutes. The content of the course was a bit of a stretch for me — there were a few brainsplosions — but I understood the concepts for the most part.
It’s very short and quick, and Kyle does not waste any time going into details, but I came away feeling like I had learned quite a few things which I can immediately use.
With short but dense videos, for the harder concepts, I just watched it once without following along while coding, then watched it a second time, coding along with the video.
After finishing, I poked around a bit and found a lesson titled Access Props inside MDX within a Gatsby Application by Chris Biscardi. Since I’m in the middle of building my Gatsby based blog that uses MDX for blog posts, this seemed like it could be useful.
The lesson is all of 38 seconds long, but that’s all it needs to be. In the lesson, Chris shows how to grab a prop out of MDX’s frontmatter and add it to a page.
I immediately used it to add a new summary feature to my blog posts. By default Gatsby builds excerpts based on the first 200 or so characters of each post — often this leads to excepts that don’t make sense, because they may contain a header or description of an image.
Here’s what the excerpt would be for this post:
Still learning to program I’ve been trying to get into the habit of practicing programming more and, lately, I actually have been doing so…
It’s a mix of the Still learning to program header and the first sentence of the post. You can probably figure out what I mean here, but it’s confusiing. Most of the time, it will probably be close enough, but now I can build useful summaries to make sure it’s clear:
I joined Egghead.io to improve my dev skills — here are my initial thoughts on it.
So, maybe I could have found this out through another tutorial, or reasoned it out from looking at the structure of the MDX files that were already in the blog, but this was a timely, and very useful, lesson to stumble across.
Seems like it will be worth it to me — the first course was full of new nuggets of knowledge and the lesson was immediately useful.
If you’re looking for structured tutorials, I suggest you check it out. It looks like there is quite a bit of free content available on the site, though most of it is behind a paywall.
If you decide to sign up, please use my referral link: https://egghead.io/?rc=h545mn. I get a free month of access and you will get my gratitude!