dwyl / learn-tdd

:white_check_mark: A brief introduction to Test Driven Development (TDD) in JavaScript (Complete Beginner's Step-by-Step Tutorial)
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Reduce "What to Learn Next?" Section to Lower Overload ? #118

Open nelsonic opened 5 years ago

nelsonic commented 5 years ago

At present there are five links listed in the "What to Learn Next?" section: https://github.com/dwyl/learn-tdd#what-to-learn-next image

I feel that this can be overwhelming to people ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice I feel that we should limit this to three or even two links to avoid "overloading" people with options.

If it were up to me, I would recommend people jump straight to the Todo List App example, but I know that some people will find it daunting ... it's not a 20 minute read, it's more like a weekend worth of focused effort (for a beginner). It took me a month (1 pomodoro per day) to write it, so I'd estimate a couple of days for a beginner to read it and try writing the code ... Which is why I feel we should leave in "Learn Tape" and "Learn Elm Architecture" ... as these are "gentler" and more "bitesize".

Thoughts?

Todo (Provisional)

luqmanoop commented 5 years ago

Don't you think it would be helpful (for intermediate/expert folks) if we add a feeling more adventurous? link to the learning resources we wanna cut out?

nelsonic commented 5 years ago

@codeshifu good question!

While we would like to cater to all levels of skill/experience we really want to optimise for complete beginners.

Imagine you’ve just learned to Kick a football and now your coach says: “good kick! now here’s how we’re going to win the World Cup...!”

Some people are excited by ambitious goals/targets, but others are instantly overwhelmed and thus “turned off” by the thought of something “difficult”.

This tutorial (Learn-TDD) is meant to be beginner-friendly. So including advanced links can overwhelm and discourage them.

I love big challenges, and I can tell that you do too! But we need to nurture the people who haven’t yet built up the (self) confidence to approach the bigger problems.

Our “bigger plan” is to have a complete list of all our tutorials in (roughly) the linear order that people should learn them. See: https://github.com/dwyl/the-book/issues/69

Our even more “ambitious” goal is to help people eliminate the barriers to learning and build the mechanism to let them track their progress!

How did you first learn to program computers? 🤔

iteles commented 5 years ago

I agree with you that the ’paradox of choice’ is real problem and can easily cause overwhelm for a number of people.

But, from both my personal experience and watching many people go through the process of learning how to code, it’s the choice that’s the problem, not the amount of materials. With a bit more direction, people are happy to focus their brains on the learning.

Based on this and on @codeshifu’s great suggestion, maybe we could trial: A) A little into paragraph on people levelling up & challenging themselves B) Swapping out the choice for an ordered list of ‘here’s what we suggest next’, each with a sentence on why C) Noting people are free to jump around to their heart’s desire, it’s not a prescriptive order, just one we have found works