Next steps for the tutorials

[brunogirin]

The current tutorials are great and there are a few more in review (SQL, PHP, SVG) to the point that it may become quite unwieldy and daunting for new students. On the other hand, we've had students ask for even more (APIs comes back regularly, WordPress, React, python pandas, mobile development). WordPress is an interesting one because it is a common "gateway" tech for under-represented people in tech.

The points I'd like to address are:

1. Do we need to streamline the review process?
2. How do we rationalise the tutorials while allowing them to grow?
3. How do we add more tutorials and how do we decide what's a good idea and what's not?
4. Do we need to review the existing tutorials, update and extend them?
5. How do we support the WordPress people and help them move further?

Regarding point 2, my initial suggestion would be to

• Add a "get started" tutorial that directs students to different strands
• Create high-level strands:
  • Front-end (HTML+CSS+JS)
  • Back-end (Ruby+SQL)
  • Data science (Python+SQL)
• Add follow up links at the end of each tutorials (e.g. at the end of HTML, direct them to JS or SVG)
• Add an APIs and data formats tutorial to link it all together

Regarding point 5, it could be as simple as adding WordPress specific pages or paragraphs into the existing HTML/CSS and PHP tutorials.

[brunogirin]

I forgot: it would also be really cool to have a source control tutorial as a lot of people are interested and it would help support 24PR.

[richardwestenra]

I am nervous about the prospect of investing a lot of our time and energy in writing and maintaining new tutorials, when there are already so many great free resources out there that are actively maintained - far more than when the tutorials were first written (five years ago). We have enough trouble keeping existing tutorials up to date (e.g. JavaScript, which is in a pretty bad state), and each new tutorial creates a maintenance requirement.

Furthermore, we often have coaches suggesting tutorial topics on subjects that very very few students actually want to learn (e.g. SQL, PHP, SVG, Wordpress). We get loads of students wanting to learn React, and React tutorials would be great, but there are great React resources out there already. Same goes for each of the above topics, tbh.

Instead of writing a bunch of new tutorials, I would advocate for the tutorials microsite to focus more on curating links to the best tutorials for each field (e.g. freecodecamp). This would work well with your excellent point about creating some information about getting started, and what to choose to work on.

btw we do have some source/version control tutorials:

[brunogirin]

Following the February meeting, Cassie did a review of my SVG tutorial and Kristian agreed to help bringing the JS tutorial up to date. In doing that, I reviewed what we had in the tutorial repository today and here are my suggestions to be discussed at the next meeting:

1. Fix the process. There are 20 PR dating as far back as 2014 against the tutorials. They are currently blocked because they need approving reviews. Some of the older ones are superseded by newer ones so should be closed. I'm happy to become an approving reviewer and fix the immediate bottleneck by reviewing all PRs. We should have at least one other person who can do approving reviews so that my own PRs can be independently approved.
2. Structure and update the core. As discussed here and in the February meeting, I'm happy to take responsibility to structure and update the core tutorials with a view to focus on 3 career paths (front-end, back-end, data science) once the previous point is addressed. In practice, this would implement small changes to what we have today, namely:
   • Expand the "Getting started guide for students" to introduce the different career paths and provide guidance both for students who want to start a career in tech and those who are just curious;
   • Update the main page to classify the tutorials according to the career paths with Ruby as the core of the back-end one and Python as the core of the data science one;
   • Bring the existing tutorials up to date and improve them based on coach and student feedback.
3. Beyond the core. There are a number of subjects that the wider community is interested in that goes beyond the core of what we coach, things like React or PHP being some of the most widely asked for. We don't have the capacity to maintain good quality tutorials and we often don't have the coaches at events but we have demand and we have passionate community members who are happy to coach and write tutorials. To leverage this, I propose we create a "community" area in the tutorials where we can include more varied content with a warning that it may not be up to date and that we may not be able to coach it at events. If possible, those pages should be written in a way that introduces general concepts and points to existing tutorials rather than being full on tutorials.

[brunogirin]

Update from last meeting: we did step 1 above so I'll be working on step 2.

[kplawver]

I think having a basic "how the web works" tutorial would be really helpful. A lot of our students don't know how the web works at all, so we spend sometimes a whole session walking them through it.