[Events] "just hacking around" vs "software engineering" tutorials

[Sumana Harihareswara]

My friend Jed posted
http://www.kith.org/journals/jed/2014/08/07/14956.html on the difficult
experience he had learning how to make a Rails application. He writes:

> Or possibly the real moral here is that this particular tutorial
> isn't the best option for hobbyists—or to put it the other way
> around, that I'm not part of its core audience. In chapters 2 and 3,
> it provides a fun and accessible entry point for test-driven
> development and Heroku, and those parts are certainly suitable for
> hobbyists; but in chapter 1, it provides an extraordinarily high
> barrier to entry. So maybe someone like me who just wants an easy way
> to set up a toy web app for my own use should stick with the more
> basic Rails tutorials, like the abovelinked Getting Started.

I thought it would be good to share this here, to remind us that as we
write curricula and tools for self-paced learners,
1) not everyone will need to learn high-octane software engineering
practices
2) we need to give the hobbyist crowd explanations that help them
understand what they can skip
3) we run a risk of intimidating the toying-around crowd if we foist big
giant syllabi on them that includes stuff they don't need

-- 
Sumana Harihareswara
http://www.harihareswara.net/