The title of the blog post currently is:
> How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
The HN title is:
> How I, a beginner developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
Those are different things. A "non-developer" reads as someone who isn't supposed to understand any of this. I am imagining a human resource person, a customer completely unfamiliar with internals, someone from a completely different area of expertise. They shouldn't have to know what snarfus are, or how to fisterfunk the shamrock portal. In that case yes, let's mock the developer for completely missing the mark with a 6 paragraph long joke.
A beginner developer, however, is someone completely different. This is a person who will eventually have to juggle snarfus, and as unfortunate as it may be, even need to fisterfunk the shamrock portal. It is partially on them to put some effort into figuring out what fisterfunking is, and how it applies to the portal. If they are particularly good, after figuring out what those things are, they may even volunteer to update the documentation as to make it easier for the next beginner developer to understand it instead of replying with a 6 paragraph long joke about it.
FWIW, I submitted it as "non-developer" but a moderator seems to have changed it to "beginner developer."
The author is a non-technical blogger, and she probably has to navigate lots of technical guides in order to fiddle with her website or CSS. I think a more relevant discussion would be about making website publishing easier for everyday people, or about the lack of documentation written for that particular demographic. But HN took it in a different direction, which is fine.
> FWIW, I submitted it as "non-developer" but a moderator seems to have changed it to "beginner developer." The author is a non-technical blogger, and she probably has to navigate lots of technical guides in order to fiddle with her website or CSS. I think a more relevant discussion would be about making website publishing easier for everyday people, or about the lack of documentation written for that particular demographic. But HN took it in a different direction, which is fine.
That makes sense, thanks for clarifying. That's why made sure to point out the difference to avoid confusion. I think folks, including myself have been on all 3 sides of the situation: as a new developer who is supposed to learn confusing terminology, non-developer who is thrown a bunch of jargon to look at from a completely different domain that's not their responsibility, and the developer who write stuff and then wondered why other can't comprehend the "easy" tutorial.
This is an important clarification.
Checking out the homepage, Annie says her job is "content & documentation things", but also mentions CSS as a hobby, so I think it's a safe assumption this is the "non-professional hobby developer" niche which I think we'll see continue to grow.
It's a hard balance to get right. I've seen "install this tool" sort of tutorials which literally introduce the concept of opening a terminal and pressing Cmd+V and others which expect cron and Make knowledge as very basic table stakes. It's a wide variety!
I think if we're writing for an audience which will contain some amount of beginners or non-developers, it's maybe ~2min of effort to add a little collapsable (straight from Claude if you want) going into what exactly we mean by "cd into ~/.snarfus, creating it if it doesn't exist"
I donno. I remember being 13 trying to install Debian on my dad's old laptop. Any nuggets of knowledge helped.
> It's a hard balance to get right
Not really. With the wide availability of AI, you can dumb down almost any text to any any level you want.
The site that got me into programming as a teenager was called "FromZero" and explained how to write programs in C for non-developpers. From installing the IDE, to how to open the console, it carefully explained each step, sometimes saying "don't worry about Snarfus, we'll get into that later". It was amazing, and I owe this website my career.
That being said, I agree writing doc is time consuming and it might not be your priority, in this case partial docs is better than no docs at all. But if your target is beginner developpers, imo you should consider them as non-developpers, as you correctly descibed them.
Site du Zéro mentioned!
I always assumed it meant "a website for 'zeros'" as in "complete noobs"
I owe so much to that website. I first had access to a computer at 13, some nights of the week and only some of those nights did I also have internet access. Somehow I still discovered le Site du Zéro at that time. While I barely touched a computer the year before, I still was able to go through the whole C++ class and learned most of the basic things and reflexes I've ever needed to work in software development. That makes it really hard to listen to people who dismiss C++ because it's "not beginner friendly".
They used to have "users" who are more advanced in a class review the work of people who are behind them, and that's how you got credits to get your own homework reviewed (based on what I remember). I still daydream about building something like that, not just to learn programming, but for everything.
Now openclasssrooms is really weird, no idea what's going on on there. Their landing page is like a synthesis of every corporate website ever made. But I found an archive of the content of the old website here: http://sdz.tdct.org/
SDZ should have been Heaven for me, but even as a teenager, I just couldn't get past the omnipresent enthousiasm and the smileys at the end of each sentence :)
:)
Guess I've always been grumpy.
Oh and yeah it's probably been enshittified nowadays, everything has. Wouldn't surprise me if they partnered with Ecole 42 to inundate the job market with programmers without degrees and drive the salaries down even more.
It says "me, a beginner"
The hn submitter presumably edited for length
By changing "non-developer" to "developer" (moving "beginner" from the end to the beginning doesn't really change the length). That's quite an intrusive change, it seems to me.
The edited one is longer. Why would you want to edit the title to make it longer?
No it isn't:
We are kind of both correct.
GP mentioned:
> The title of the blog post currently is:
> > How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
> The HN title is:
> > How I, a beginner developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
So GP cut off , a beginner ending which in turn falsified my claim of it being longer, and I didn't verify blog title.
My apologies, SoKamil, for cutting off the ending in the comparison. I wanted to highlight the difference and figured the first part is where the difference was. As in, they are still a non-developer and shouldn't have to learn all the details so it doesn't matter if they are just a regular non-developer a beginner non-developer.
That changes everything
It would be crazy for a beginner developer to expect a technical post made for other developers to dive into explanations of What's Hoobijag/jabbernocks/ABCDE++++/Shoobababoo/a shamrock portal.
We've all been through that phase where you have to google the words you don't know.
Also a lot of beginners skipped a lot of (cultural?) foundational knowledge. A basic understanding of filesystem, network, and os commands would go a long way for communication efficiency. Instead, they’re cargo-culting.
There really is a huge gap between a programmer and being capable at using a computer. I work in the data space and while im good enough for my own needs with Python and grew up in the 90s with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1/95, the second i have to use something that is build by and for programmers i too end up feeling like the blog post describes.
The difference is merely how this thing works vs how this thing is used. And the glue factor between the two is ops.
Between the developer and the user, there should be the maintainer role. Someone that took a software and make it run on a specific system. That requires familiarity with the system internal and build systems.
This is why packages managers like in linux distributions are a great solution. A working solution is often just a command away. App stores could be good too, if not for the gatekeeping effects.
> We've all been through that phase where you have to google the words you don't know.
I hope I'm not the only one who for a moment thought those were real terms in some esoteric new age programming language like LOLCODE [1]. ABCDE++ gave it away.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE
For me the issue is some people expect everything to be simple/easy to do without any prior knowledge and then claiming it is not really hard but you are gatekeeping and only if you could explain it easier they would definitely grasp it instantly.
Also, it really depends on what the tutorial is about.
There's a difference between a tutorial on how to set up a wordpress on a shared hosting or how to add aditional debugging capability to kernel application core switching routines by patching the linux kernel.
In the first example, "unzip it" might need an additional explanation on how to do it in the command line... in the second,.. well... if you can't even unzip a file without the tutorial, you won't be able to use the software anyway.
In the end, lots of people who try to accomplish their goals writing some code don't see themselves as beginner developers but non-developers.
They just want to accomplish some well-defined and scoped task that happens to require some coding, but they have no interest, at least for now, on becoming developers.