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Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?

by bartq on 12/12/21, 9:48 AM with 92 comments

• by ciarcode on 12/12/21, 11:18 AM

  I would be glad to find an integrated guide on how to build a state-of-the-art website and how to deploy/maintain it on a server like AWS or DigitalOcean.

  I mean, I'm not interested in a html/css/javascript tutorial, we have enough resources on that. What I found really missing on the internet (maybe I'm not that good at searching), is a step-by-step detailed guide on how to deploy/update/maintain a website. An unordered list of thing that came up to my mind:

  - How to deploy the website on a server

  - Which server should one use

  - How to expose it on the internet (buy domain name)

  - Version control and hosting the repository (GitHub vs gitlab vs ...)

  - Updating your website (CI/CD like Jenkins?)

  - Reproducible environments (Docker?)

  - How to integrate analytics

  - How to integrate ads respectfully (of your users)

  - How to integrate paying contents

  - How to address security

  - Ho to address scalability

• by onion2k on 12/12/21, 10:16 AM

  I like to read articles by people who feel they have something that's important to say. If you don't know what you should to write about, then anything you write is probably going to be pretty uninspiring. Good writing comes from a place of passion and urgency, a real drive to inform people about something that the author thinks is worth reading.

  This might be an answer you don't like very much, but seriously, all the best articles that I've read and shared in the past have been been things that the author would probably have felt compelled to write even if no one bothered read their work. I can't imagine that soliciting for ideas really works.

  I think this is the main reason why I've always failed to be the blogger I aspire to be. There are few subjects that I care enough about to write consistently on. It's weird, because I post on the web a lot and I feel like I'm pretty passionate about web stuff. It just doesn't manifest in the form of blog posts though.

• by mg on 12/12/21, 10:23 AM

  What I would find interesting is a page which lists all steps to be performed on the command line to create a web application from scratch.

  Say we start with a fresh Debian install, the first line might be

      apt update && apt upgrade
  

  The second line might be

      apt install php
  

  Or Python or Node. And then the commands to create the project directory, switching to it, installing a webserver etc would follow. At some point there would be a line

      echo "<h1>Hello World</h1>" > index.php
  

  At this point, we accomplished serving a static page.

  And then line by line, a full web application is created, with routing, templating and user accounts. With no other tool than the command line. So the page would never say "Click on this then click on that..." or "Depending on your environment...". No, you could simply copy every line, paste it to your terminal and thereby create the exact same application.

  Ideally the page would have one column of commands for every typical approach like Django, Flask, Laravel, Symfony, NextJS etc.

  I would expect this page to start with just one approach - say Django. And then accept pull requests from experts for the other approaches.

  So we would have side by side examples of what steps are needed in different environments to create a typical web app nowadays.

  I had this idea for a while but so far did not get around doing it. If someone wants to collaborate on it, hit me up.

• by ploika on 12/12/21, 10:57 AM

  I think an under-served market is "intermediate to advanced programming for people who didn't study computer science but can already write half-decent Python and maybe some SQL, JavaScript or Matlab/Julia/R".

  People who are fine with control flow, git, unit tests etc, but who would be lost if you start talking about things like state machines or depth-first search.

  I'm largely talking about myself here, but I've worked with dozens of colleagues in several different jobs who would also match this description.

• by kristopolous on 12/12/21, 10:58 AM

  Earlier tonight I was making a programming challenge list for experienced programmers. These are all small tasks but the question is can you do them.

  Create a

  1. Mandelbrot

  2. Julia set

  3. Ray tracer with shading and shadows of a few simple spheres

  4. A simple virtual machine

  5. Rewrite the first three programs in the virtual machines assembler

  6. A simple language such as Forth for the virtual machine

  7. Rewrite the first three programs in your implemented language

  All of these 7 tasks together will likely take under 2,000 lines of code, maybe even under 1,000.

  If you know what you're doing, each one individually should take under an hour.

  Doing a write-up about your experience with this would be great. Each one of these tasks has tradeoffs and can reflect personality and approach.

  This is version 1.0 of this, and I just came up with it a few hours ago so I'm open to slight modifications (perhaps an extremely easy game instead of one of the fractals)

• by OliverJones on 12/12/21, 10:46 AM

  "How to read an error message."

  This would help countless people new to development. Lots of systems (I'm looking at you, Java) throw up vast splats of tracebacks. Others chunder out great chunks of poorly digested code. Sometimes daunting even for experienced people.

  An article with basic advice about looking for the one or two useful lines in error messages would be great.

• by kulikalov on 12/12/21, 10:27 AM

  Case studies. For instance, Apache spark real life case study, why it’s the best, what are alternatives and what would be the cost breakdown for using it on bare metal vs SaaS like Google Cloud Dataptoc

• by xtiansimon on 12/19/21, 5:35 PM

  One more thing, as a self-taught programmer, I struggle to understand other people's code. I would therefore like to read more about how programmers _inspect_ code so they may modify how it works. For example, let's say you find a third-party package (I'm using Python, so we call these modules), and you want to fork some particular package so it uses a database instead of config files.

  Now I get the general idea of what I could do--clone the code, start editing it, setting breakpoints, walking the code execution, and essentially rewriting making their code my code. But it's a tangled web, no? Not easy. And then there must be (?) shortcuts? Plus, I'd like to read about the terminology and methods so I can search for other people's tutorials.

• by dcminter on 12/12/21, 10:27 AM

  It seems that Nix can be used as a build tool for building e.g. rust applications. A good step-by-step for that would be interesting, particularly one that spelled out the advantages over existing tooling like Cargo.

  Most things I found when my interest was piqued were from the perspective of building or running NixOS, which is (for now) much less interesting to me.

  (Edit: If anyone feels like they have the technical knowledge but not the writing skills, I'd be happy to team up!)

• by mastah88 on 12/12/21, 10:50 AM

  I don't know exactly how to name it but... Something along the lines of tutorials/courses how to make code for Error Handling (front/back), Defensive Programming, Observability, Tracing, Contexts/Stores at the Airbnb/Spotify/Basecamp level. That means, instead of hello world, show the best practices and all of the things that makes those things perform well, be maintainable.

• by marttt on 12/13/21, 1:24 PM

  A blast from the past: I would love to read about deliberate use of Perl 5 without CPAN, or with as little CPAN as possible.

  Being a fan of minimal, clear languages, Lisps, Forths, Rebol etc, I've somewhat unexpectedly found myself immersed in the stuff by Perl community (perlmonks.org). I seem to like the free-form madness that surrounds this language (and the Monks), and Perl's linguistic roots and Larry Wall's thoughts on this are very interesting. Sigils and the verbosity strangely make sense to me, etc.

  But, installed Perl is Big, at least compared to Picolisp, Rebol, or Lua.

  I read about Microperl [1], but seems like it hasn't found (didn't find, in its day) wider usage. This philosophy -- deliberately writing Perl with a minimal amount of external dependencies -- doesn't seem very popular, aside of one-liners, which is a different thing imo. I wonder why. I've found a few contemplations [2, 3], but not much. Are people who have loved Perl first and foremost because of its syntax, semantics, TIMTOWDY etc, a tiny minority as compared to those who were dug in primarily because of CPAN?

  And I wonder if Perl 6 (Raku) will be any different in this regard -- will its design encourage or favor minimal uses or systems a little more?

  1: https://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol5_3/tpj0503-0003.html

  2: From 2018, "I want Circuit Perl now!": https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1210076

  3: From 2003, on Microperl: https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=228040

• by karmakaze on 12/12/21, 9:20 PM

  SQL.

  I'm continuously surprised by the ad-hoc manner in which devs use frameworks not understanding what the syntax they wrote means to the database. Many are confused by joins, or vs left-joins, and if a query runs slow have little idea how to index or change their schema to be more appropriate.

  While we're here I'd also say data modelling. The DB is not meant to have a row-to-screen/page cardinality matching, unless you're a startup using MongoDB (or other document store).

  The third one would be about API design. There are many blog posts that discuss one or two specific aspects of a particular API type (REST, gRPC, GraphQL) but it would be great to pick one of them and have it all lair out.

  There may be print books that cover the above, but certain important topics always seem to fall in the gaps, like how exactly does one bound their microservice context? Most books gloss over this with a hand-waving trio of Order, Product/Widget, Customer.

• by srvmshr on 12/12/21, 12:02 PM

  Coming from a ML domain, I feel there is so much terminology and its duplication floating around which could be better explained, maybe with an example or a picture (or even a simple howto). The technical debt is just too high.

  For example, hundreds of papers talking about 'inductive bias' or 'SE(3) operators' and what not. There isn't even a general boundary between unsupervised and self supervised learning (Remember Yann Lecun stepping in one such debate but without a conclusively clear demarcation). Very few actually try to explain a view that general practitioner can connect (with some basic exposure). Google maintains a ML glossary but that sorely needs some updation beyond the very basic stuff.

• by Adrig on 12/12/21, 12:28 PM

  I wish there were more good courses on AR and VR development, especially for non-gaming applications. I'm not an engineer but managed to learn web dev thanks to amazing courses and YouTube channels, but find it difficult to kick start my AR projects

• by csours on 12/12/21, 12:11 PM

  Something I've seen multiple times from junior developers is an expectation that the technology will tell them how to fix their errors/exceptions/unit tests/problems.

  The technology in IDEs, the things you Google, the bugs you get, stack trace messages, none of these things TELL YOU WHAT TO DO OR FIX. They are clues or evidence. You have to bring the understanding and intention.

  I expect that some people disagree about this being a problem, but I've seen it enough times to recognize it. Senior developers need to remember that they were not always senior.

• by jcun4128 on 12/12/21, 10:16 AM

  Making a Pinephone app start to finish/into some app store.

• by roydivision on 12/12/21, 12:07 PM

  I find it hard to read manuals and documentation. I learn much better from seeing real code, and then trying and playing with it myself.

  I’ve had an idea for a while that it would be interesting to document a computer language with a complete set of example code. This example code would exhibit all the language’s functionality. It would be written with best practices in mind.

  The code wouldn’t necessarily need to do anything useful, The goal would be the code itself.

• by rapnie on 12/12/21, 11:41 AM

  There's metric tons of tutorials that would benefit a lot by delving beyond "Getting started" and the obligatory Hello World construct, to dealing with implementing a more real-world use case, and showcasing the various best-practices to the language / lib / framework along the way.

  So many projects list a gazillion features on their site, and then leave you with a "Good luck! The features are in the code base".

• by pknerd on 12/12/21, 1:47 PM

  It does not matter what one likes to read or watch. What really matters is what you can teach or share. There will always be a market of any niche, especially related to dev.

  I myself maintain a blog and run a Youtube channel in local Urdu language. When I started, I did not think what others want. I shared what I loved and could do on my own.

  As long as you are original, authentic and honest, people would enjoy even a Hello World video by you.

• by webmaven on 12/13/21, 5:43 AM

  Some topics that I would find of interest:

  OpSec/Tradecraft for Developers

  The metaphysics of CS/stats/DS/ML/etc. (I have a vague impression that the Bayesian vs. frequentist argument is just one tip of a multifaceted iceberg)

  Protocol design and File format design

  Game Theory as applied to de jure and de facto standards-making (incl. network effects, adversarial interoperability, etc.)

• by chakkepolja on 12/12/21, 9:18 PM

  I am not sure what you work on, but here are some resources I like to see.

  * A in-depth, conceptual explaination of HTML/CSS layout and common UI idioms, so that I don't have to google something every now and then when making a website

  * Back-end security related topics in one place. Various type of attacks and edge cases. (OWASP comes quite close I think.)

  * Using Databases efficiently.

• by jeffwiederkehr on 12/12/21, 10:37 AM

  I’m just a student but I would love some content around how to get started with serverless. Also comparing and contrasting different front end or UI frameworks and what you’ve seen that’s worked well or poorly at scale.

• by hrnn on 12/12/21, 12:39 PM

  this seems like a good thread to piggyback on. Could I get some links to " official development blogs"? I recently bumped into the one by Etsy (http://codeascraft.etsy.com/) and I'm sure there are many others.

  I find the first hand story of how different architectural decisions turn out in real world scenarios are way more valuable than all the blogs out there writing about any new hot piece of tech. I'm curious what you found interesting and even check regularly.

• by chespinoza on 12/12/21, 10:39 AM

  Things like:

  -How to do modern frontend dev without installing almost a Gb of transient onliner JS deps.

  -Modern Frontend development for Backend devs.

  -Mobile apps development without installing huge frameworks and heavy tooling.

• by gefhfff on 12/12/21, 10:02 AM

  I'd like to read about developing in the post JavaScript web

• by zealsham on 12/12/21, 11:58 AM

  A tutorial on modern web Architecture and infrastructure . Something that writes on how to build them using proprietary software and also open source equivalent of each

• by newusertoday on 12/12/21, 6:02 PM

  i am looking for frontend course/tutorial that can show me how to create real world dashboard with javascirpt however all i find is bits and pieces scattered all over the internet. Most of the javascript tutorials want to teach language syntax which if you already know some language is kind of useless. May be i am not able to search properly with the right keywords.

• by hazard on 12/12/21, 7:36 PM

  Hacking open source. I would love to see architectural overviews and code tours of major open source projects

• by lsferreira42 on 12/13/21, 3:51 PM

  Not on your plate, but i would pay some good money to a good course/book about openresty!

• by slmjkdbtl on 12/12/21, 3:01 PM

  More "Build X from scratch" tutorials, not those downloading 500Mb dependencies at the start.

• by micouay on 12/12/21, 10:35 AM

  thorough explanations of FP concepts like algebraic effects, linear programming, dependent types

• by hermann123 on 12/13/21, 6:53 PM

  I wound be glad to find more about Perl and xml parsing for huge file size.

• by neophyt3 on 12/12/21, 10:19 AM

  Electronics, Microcontrollers

• by etiam on 12/12/21, 10:20 AM

  Defining an OS environment beginning to end in Guix or Nix.

• by randomcarbloke on 12/12/21, 11:49 AM

  a really in depth one on developing AI to play computer games.

  It seems like it'd be a fun pet project.

• by ssss11 on 12/12/21, 10:18 AM

  Chromium development