Hey folks, I would love to know what do you prefer when it comes to learning about packages or whatever related on how you learn.
I want to put together a bunch of content out there for some packages I did. The only issue I have with articles is that sometimes I could miss that somebody doesn’t know that much what I am talking about and I would need to explain too many things.
On videos, at least you can see what I am doing and keep moving forward but then, SEO is lost and people that just want to come back to specific sections will no find useful the videos.
I love videos because they make things almost effortless to follow along.
You could split them up into small 5 minute segments and include a transcript for SEO purposes - as well as for those who prefer to read something. Best of both worlds
Maybe do the video where I just do the article and use the article for short description of steps on how to use?!
I am not that good written, either I under-write or super mega over-write that you get bored (I know I need to work on it) but at least on videos I can explain things in more details and you wouldn’t get bored by it, listening is easier than reading for sure.
Do what your heart is in most first, then create the other version perhaps as a summary?
Personally I (and due to its success - lots of other people) loved how Ryan did things at Railscasts - concise screencasts with a transcript, as well as code blocks for ease of copy n paste.
Articles. Videos tend to bo boring 99% of the time. Can’t skim them, can’t go back to exact moment you where, can’t listen to your music when watching videos… Milion reasons why articles are better, and none for videos.
(and for the content creator I also think they’re better - if a part is not clear, wrong, wtv, a comment from someone and you can just edit it and it’s immediately corrected)
100% articles, every time. Text is the superior medium.
I like to say that for learning and documentation purposes, images/videos are to text as compiled binaries are to OSS code:
Cross-platform: can be authored and consumed on all architectures, and renders just as well raw, pasted into a tweet, telnetted over a wire, grepped from a man page, or presented inline with markdown, HTML, TeX, etc.
Backwards-compatible: text plays well with every copying, pasting, and editing tool on every computer since the dawn of time.
Extensible: content created as text can be trivially updated without a build process or heavy software, and it can be meaningfully checked into source control and diffed.
Added to the fact that I’m often not in a scenario conducive to consuming audio content, and I can’t Ctrl-F through video content, I pass on all but the most heavily recommended videos.
I’m so reluctant to watch dev videos that often I will spend more time trying to find a good article, than watch a short video that appears in the search results
Also for accessibility reasons: I’m assuming that visually impaired people will probably struggle with video content which is text-heavy.
Articles are searchable.
Articles are indexable.
Articles keep up with my pace.
Asciicast’s inside articles are great though, essentially those are terminal movies that you can copy/paste out of!
Videos never follow my pace (universally slooooow).
Videos tend to give less information.
Videos don’t have clickable links and interactable elements (no not even youtube annotations work on what I watch videos on).
And just so so so many more reasons…
@OvermindDL1LOL my new hobby is to watch conferences and tech videos at 1.5X or 2X sometimes, highly recommended.
This is what I am gonna do then.
Write an article explain the minimal information about the packages and stuff like that. Link to a video for more advanced explanation about it. Talking is faster and you can listen without having to pay that much attention.
Provide as much code snippets as possible for the user to follow but without boilerplate code, assuming that the user understands where things go. Link to the video if they wanna see how I did it for confusing steps.
Also, probably the same steps I follow on the videos I will add it to the readme of the package anyway.
Already do that, but that’s not really what I’m referencing either, not just the speed of the video, but rather how things are described, text always just flows better.
Uh… Shouldn’t that be the other way around? The video should be a summary and the article should be detailed? Never seen it be backwards with a detailed video but short article… o.O
because they make things almost effortless to follow along.
anyway, I think that format is good.
