• she/they
  1. enby. Retrotech. Demoscene. Programming. Drum & Bass DJ. Amiga Junglist. Autistic. Trans. Adult by circumstance, not by choice.


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

here's some offhand thoughts that take too much effort to glue together

  1. it sucks having to explain to some rando how to do something in its entirety. it's extremely natural for anyone to feel like replying "just google it" to an overly broad request for help on a forum, reddit thread, etc.

  2. simply reading about something, beginning from first principles, can be valuable but is often incredibly inefficient compared to learning from an expert who will tell you what you need to know rather than everything, and will give you errata that wouldn't be in the formal literature, and will help you head off errors before you make them, and may even give you feedback and approval.

  3. it is extremely natural to want to learn everything through apprenticeship instead of "rtfm"

  4. the only reason anyone disagrees on any of this is because the internet put so many people looking for a mentor in front of so few mentors that everyone rejected these truths in self defense

  5. that's a bummer


lynndrumm
@lynndrumm

this really hits because I found that I really struggle to learn things in a non-interactive way (i.e. reading a document rather than being able to directly engage with something or ask questions). There are things I spent hours struggling to understand that clicked for me in 5 minutes of talking to someone who could explain the exact part I'm interested in.


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

I mean, not having been there, but only having read about it, I think it is important to observe that almost everybody on it at that time was at a college or university, so... It was kind of expected to be a learning environment, and I imagine people tended to think of exchanges in that sense before any other

i can only speak for the demoscene irc channels i was in, but we cultivated a rather harsh vibe of "anything goes" criticism, which involved stuff like taking other people's tracks and rewriting their solos to "improve" them unprompted. having smaller communities where people know your name and build report is probably a big part of it!

Hahaha that's fascinating! I'd never really thought about demoscene making the jump to the early internet I always just thought of it as mostly passing floppies around at meetups. Must have been crazy to actually get to talk to a few people you'd only seen in the credits on a copy of a copy of a copy of a floppy lol

Yeah. As a mentee, you don’t know what you don’t know, so in addition to knowledge, you need wayfinding points or goal posts to find new pieces of knowledge. That also can be hard for mentors to provide if they can’t yet communicate those goal posts.

For instance, as a Ren’Py learner, I read the manual and looked at the source code for the tutorial projects and it did very little for me until I saw other devs putting those tools together in context!

I personally really enjoy reading manuals- but whenever I need to get something done instead of just flipping through endless pages as if it were tvtropes, I am usually disappointed by everyone who just assumes the manual covers something when it doesn't.

My personal least favorite repeated experience is when they tell you to go look at something that doesn't contain what they say it does and then get hostile when you point it out.
I also hate how people keep insisting in putting stuff in zipped text files that should be gists or some format people can access without downloading shady zips, or when there's red tape about updating documentation but not about breaking the documentation.

Good documentation is often like an expert is teaching you, and bad is like someone who doesn't understand something trying to sound smart. For the best example of this, look at the sun microsystems/early oracle docs vs the super awful SEO nonsense google tries to drown you with if you search anything Java.

Oh, and there's also a clear difference between apis and documentation that I think javadocs highlight well. They often have a section up at the top explaining how to use something and then the bottom is just plain api with occasional commentary for important functions.
A lot of newer stuff just does API and acts like that's the whole deal.

That said I once approached someone with a step-by-step guide to implement steam cloud saves complete with pictures and the file mask they would need, and they didn't do it despite saying they would- which I expected but c'mon I even worked out the file mask for you!

in reply to @lynndrumm's post: