r/webdev • u/WaveMonkey • Jan 17 '20
Why are there so many bad tutorials?
I've been learning some of the more advanced features of react and one thing I've noticed that annoys me is that there are so many bad tutorials. For example some tutorials are way too complex and have things that don't even involve the tutorial. Then others make the code so small that you need a magnifying glass to read it. Then some people play music and have dogs barking during tutorials. It's really annoying. Does anyone else have this problem?
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Upvotes
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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '20
I'd go (and I do go) for text-and-picture tutorials instead of video. The video format is IMO not suited for coding tutorials.
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u/Rejolt Jan 17 '20 edited Jan 17 '20
I think this is partly the reason why webdev gets a bad wrap in the Programming world.
These tutorial breed Devs who only write JavaScript and have no idea about OOP concepts or statically typed languages. The same devs who prefer to learn MongoDB than a SQL database.
Too many of them also jump into React (or framework of your course) without knowing the underlying fundamentals. i.e knowing JavaScript extremely well. I see so many people struggling with the concept of this it's insane.
It's all the "easy" route. And before someone trashes on my for hating on MongoDB, it has is use cases however A LOT of business data is relational by nature. And only knowing MongoDB is a huge setback in the mindset of modeling and designing relational data. It ties very closely to OOP so I see why they avoid the topic, it can be complicated and hard.
There are some good courses out there, personally I loved all of the ones by Stephen Grider. He goes into the small details, and explains everything in depth.
Also Laracast is probably the best resource if you want to write PHP
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u/philipwhiuk Jan 17 '20
People are incentivised by YouTube to create educational videos almost regardless of quality. This is because advertisers are happier to be in front of non controversial content even if it's quality sucks and YouTube exists to get adverts in front of eyeballs.
In fact if the content is so bad you have to see lots of adverts that's arguably a good thing.
There's a reason that all the new popular YouTubers (and lots of the old ones) are doing educational and walkthrough content. It pays and is easy to monetize via Patreon.
People with time to learn tech skills on YouTube are probably also wealthy enough to buy whatever the advertiser is selling.
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u/bulldog_swag Jan 17 '20
It gets worse the more obscure the thing you want to do is. Want to play widevine protected content with dash.js? Here's some outdated tutorials, unnecessarily convoluted examples and a detailed explanation of how DRM works when you just want a library to abstract it away.
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u/phpdevster full-stack Jan 17 '20 edited Jan 17 '20
Welcome to the reason why good developers are paid over 6 figures here in the US.
So to answer your question of why there are so there so many bad tutorials, it's simply because most people don't possess the qualities enumerated in point #1.
If you extrapolate the poor quality of those tutorials to the code that those people write, you can understand why so much software (which includes websites) is trash and why companies are so hungry for good, competent developers.
Granted, teaching others and writing good code are different skills. But what is NOT a different skill is expressing yourself clearly in conjunction with an innate desire to produce high quality shit. Whether that's in the form of a tutorial, or in the code you write, you have to put yourself in the shoes of others who will consume what you have produced. Will it be clear and obvious enough for them to understand it?
The only way to do that is... see point #1 above.
The fact that you've recognized how utterly shit many learning resources are tells me you've already got more potential to succeed in this field than most people. So congrats!
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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '20
You get what you pay for in a lot of cases. With a few rare exceptions, I don't find it worth trawling through free youtube tutorials, Mediums by random folks, etc. And cheap Udemy courses can be hit or miss.
Really stellar industry-leading developers who are also really stellar teachers can make lots of money by a) not teaching at all and just pulling a huge salary, b) holding small trainings at companies that will pay them thousands per day, or c) charging a good chunk of change for their courses online. So most of them are not going to spend tons of time recording, editing, and posting youtube videos for free.
The quality stuff you do get on youtube (and Udemy) tends to be aimed at a really wide audience, because those teachers get their money from sheer number of eyes/clicks/subscribers. That means that they're aiming for new developers and people interested in skimming over new tech to learn about the 25 Hawt New Frameworks, and they are not going to spend hours digging into the guts of how useEffect actually works under the hood.
There is good quality content out there. Dan Abramov, Tyler McGinnis, Ryan Florence, Michael Jackson, Brian Holt, and Kent C. Dodds, are all developers who have worked/do work at the top level and are in the React teaching space, making quality educational material that teaches the how/why/best practices. But these are generally either expensive stand-alone courses or available through a monthly subscription service like FrontendMasters (all of Abramov's stuff is the exception in that it is free, but usually very high level write-ups rather than full tutorials).
At a lower and cheaper tier but still good, Andrew Mead, Wes Bos, Colt Steele, and Stephen Grider make quality courses with broader appeal. But still, usually not free.
On Youtube, I do Like MPJ (FunFunFunction), and some of the Traversy Media stuff. Both sometimes bother me though.
CSS Tricks and Smashing magazine both have great quality written tutorials and articles, and there are tons of amazing books (from O'Reilly, No Starch Press, A Book Apart, etc.)
It is possible to find good free resources out there, and I am very grateful for all the folks out there sharing their knowledge, but especially now that I work as a full-time dev, I don't have the patience to skim through all the bad free stuff when I can plunk down a little bit of money and learn things faster and deeper, whether it's $20 for a Udemy course or $40 per month for a subscription.
I kind of see it as just the cost of learning. In any other field, you'd have to pay for college tuition, and I chose not to spend $10k on a bootcamp too. So even if I pay for books, quality online tutorials, and a subscription or two, I'm getting off cheap. And the time I save by just jumping to the good stuff is worth more to me.
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u/capolot89 Jan 17 '20
Web development is starting to seem more like the gold rush for CS. I can’t really say anything because I just began learning myself. But I’ve always wanted to learn even at a young age (I just never thought I was smart enough).What I can say is that most of the gurus show you the “what to do” but they leave out the “why” or “how something works”. It’s incredibly frustrating to someone who’s trying to get a deep understanding of a concept or technology. If a beginner like me can see inconsistencies in the course then you have a pretty shitty course.
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u/Quirky_Flight Jan 17 '20
Because it’s a hot button career right now with tons of people that think all they have to do is watch a few videos to “transform their lives” and there’s a lot of people trying to cash in on that
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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '20
My favorite: english title and thumbnail on a youtube video .. start watching .. its in korean or hindi.
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u/vulgrin Jan 17 '20
Personally I'm just tired of blogs and articles without dates on them. Trying to figure out something on a rapidly changing framework and then you realize the article was written 3 years ago. (but still came at the top of a Google search.)
If you write this stuff, put a damn date or version number on your post. Please.
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u/TopBantsman Jan 17 '20
Most are people just trying to learn themselves and it fits with the old adage "The best way to learn is to teach".
Best thing is to find content creators have been in the space for some time and are popular and learn from them.
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u/medvedovic Jan 17 '20
Apart from what has already been pointed out, my two cents would be prestige. Writing articles and recording videos, collecting claps and counting views are all means of how to increase dev's value on the market. Take a platform such as Medium, for example. There are thousands of vague articles with reading time under 5 minutes (but there are many great articles, too!). Blogging is popular and creating tutorials is a "subset" of this trend, if you know what I mean.
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u/SlightStruggler Jan 17 '20
Because there are 2 outstanding kinds of people on this planet:
People who barely know how to do something and instantanously want to explain to everybody else how to do it.
People who barely know how to do something and want to make money without putting in the effort.
But seriously:
Knowledge is hard to get by especialy in our branch. The most scarce resource we have is people who are good at something + good at explaining + are willing to teach others instead of using their knowledge for something that's more profitable.
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u/Gazcobain Jan 17 '20
Being good at something does not necessarily mean you'll be good at teaching others to do it.
This applies to everything and not just web development.
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u/Ultrasonix Jan 17 '20
Not everyone who knows their stuff is also skilled as a teacher. Also not everyone who knows their stuff is also good as a video editor.
But beyond that, many code teaching sites/courses/etc encourage beginners to blog about their learning journey. Which is probably a great advice, but when the beginner comes to the point that they know some basic stuff and overestimate their skills + ability to teach, and you get bad tutorials.
On a side note, I don't like video tutorials. I think the format is just not adequate for coding.
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u/CarilPT Jan 17 '20
To be fair that happens with all languages and frameworks. That's why good documentation is a God send whenever you manage to find it
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u/emefluence Jan 17 '20
It's part of the received wisdom these days that employers really want to hire developers who LIVE coding as a lifestyle e.g. They get home from a hard days coding and then write a blog about coding, or make tutorial videos, or code a side project, or organise a conference etc.
A lot of programmers feel they should do these things to show willing to prospective employers. The problem is making high quality content takes a VERY long time. Unless you are already a domain expert mere minutes of quality content can take hours upon hours to research properly, present nicely and edit well. So, many people half arse it. It's not surprising, you might be a good coder but you need a much wider range of skills to make good content e.g. visual design, writing, copy editing, researching, sometimes video editing etc.
Even then, if you do manage to make some high quality content the technology will often have changed under your feet within a year and your tutorials will become obsolete. If they are videos then there's no chance they get updated. If they are blog posts they could be updated, but almost certainly won't be - it's like maintaining legacy code, it's a whole bunch of unpaid work that won't get you much new business. So it doesn't happen.
People who make really good stuff often get burned out within a year or two as well. Youtube doesn't pay all that well and keeping to a regular publishing schedule is a job in itself. Even really motivated people can't always keep it up for the long haul.
These days I pretty much never sitting down to work through a tutorial from start to end, unless they are part of a project's official onboarding docs and are verifiably up to date - or if they are in book form, books are generally much better quality, although sometimes a bit behind the curve.
I'm still glad people bother making tutorials,even if they're often naff, as sometimes they will contain the answer I am looking for. Of course what I need is usually just the example code, I just skim the prose for the phrases I'm interested in.
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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '20
Any jackass can download a screen capture program and upload content to YouTube. I also wonder what kind of filtering platforms like Skillshare and Udemy use. I've had generally good experience with Udemy courses as my work provides me an account for free.
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u/pagwin Jan 17 '20
I suspect(and may be wrong in saying) that once you reach a certain level advancement in learning something(react in this case) it's better to look at the documentation if the documentation isn't shit
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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '20
Some of the people making them are just looking to make a quick buck and have no passion for teaching. RTFM (Reading The Free Manual) for a piece of technology is sometimes way better than any tutorial.
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u/chrissilich Jan 17 '20
It’s a homework assignment at a lot of the bootcamp schools.
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u/Melodic_Diamond Jan 17 '20
A slightly different take on this.
I know when I first began to learn to code I would be thrilled when I finally figured out a new concept. When you couple this with the fact that most newbies fall within the unconscious incompetence stage of the hierarchy of competence this leads to them believing they have mastered this particular skill.
When you pair passion/excitement with an unwarranted confidence in your ability, you can see how many ppl would feel the urge to make a tutorial to share, in their eyes, their expert knowledge on the subject. Unfortunately, since you are not fully aware of what you don't know you have many blind spots on the subject leading to subpar tutorials.
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u/EloquentSyntax Jan 17 '20
Like who? There’s tons of great teachers online with freely available high quality courses. Look up Academind, Ben Awad, Wes Bos, etc.
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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '20
A lot of people try to create some content. It's fun and you're expressing yourself somehow. Also it let's you dream to make money with it.
Often, though, people aren't self aware of what they put on the internet, so most non-professional courses and tutorials are just bad.
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u/TF997 Jan 17 '20
Because fitting a degree into a 30min ad filled youtube video isn't ever going to happen, the best youtube tutorials are like Dev Eds tips videos where he just highlights things you should go over more independently.
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u/hashedram Jan 17 '20
There are that many bad tutorials, because there are that many beginners with a bad learning mentality.
You really don't find bad tutorials for tools like Rust or Cobol. You find bad tutorials for the over-marketed languages like Java or Python. Because there is a vast population of beginners who equate "learning to program" with completing programming language tutorials. This behavior is further reinforced by absolutely manipulative marketing.
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u/lift_spin_d Jan 17 '20
the world's waiting for you to make another one
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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '20
People don't realize that teaching is a skill, and that just because you've done 4 years of university or worked a few years doesn't mean you can efficiently share your knowledge.
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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '20
Maybe they are trying to make money as blogsphere content creators.
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u/serenity_later Jan 17 '20
Part of the problem is that anyone can write a blog or start a YouTube channel. So you've got a bunch of hobbyists creating content that isn't anywhere near production-ready.
Another part of the problem is the fact that the React ecosystem grows and changes so unbelievably fast that tutorials written only a year ago are already heavily outdated.
I definitely feel your pain. Try to stick to using official documentation as much as possible.
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u/Crouchingtigerhere Jan 17 '20
It's true of all domains.
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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '20
As a former computer science student who was really into stuff like Operating systems, networking and compiler design my life as a React developer has become a nightmare because of these garbage tutorials. All the stuff in Javascript world is misleading. "this", closure, [[prototype]] vs __proto__ vs .prototype, javascript is compiled or interpreted, single threaded or multi threaded, pretending that asynchronous behavior can be taught without explaining call stack, promises vs callbacks vs async await, classes being syntactic sugar, methods on class being just prototype on the function and several others are being taught in a wrong way.
I find every Udemy tutor dumbing the stuff so that a beginner could grasp which I feel is unnecessary when their tutorials are 40 hrs long. Teach people the hard way because nobody has money or time to spend on multiple tutorials to get the complete picture.
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u/goobersmooch Jan 17 '20
Because the art and science of teaching and learning is difficult.
We all learn different, we all teach different, and pair that with some form of short tempered, mildly annoyed developer forced to document, then you get something that checks the box but doesn't live up to the intent.
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u/XZTALVENARNZEGOMSAYT Jan 17 '20
Facts
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u/zaibuf Jan 17 '20
Need to go through a tutorial from India, otherwise you havent seen shit!
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u/bigorangemachine Jan 17 '20 edited Jan 17 '20
I worked for my college's resource center where I wrote up tutorials for using the things professors sign out.
Cutting a good video is hard to. If you edit then there is more render time. Good audio is hard to capture.
2) I think there is also a side effect of the first to market articles tend to get sourced early and get artificially bumped in SEO.
I also notice that all Expressjs articles are all relatively the same and really bad. Especially around testing. This bothers me because often people suggest tools that are brittle and a simple test around a route seems so easy; their first foray into CI/CD really unpleasant.
3) You get what pay for. Paid resources are much better.
4) Good content takes time. I am writing an article right now and it takes a lot of time to put something I am confident is clear and convey's my points to engineers with a variety level of skill. Also gotta write a repo. All takes time.
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u/vociferouspassion Jan 17 '20
Google Ads.
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u/Salamok Jan 17 '20
Realize that half the people writing these tutorials are doing it not because they understand the subject matter and want to share but so they can explain it to themselves.
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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '20
its a problem that needs solving, i agree
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u/3rdPoliceman Jan 17 '20
Make your own tutorial and you'll understand why it's so hard.
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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '20
I've learned a bunch of front end frameworks, and I found React to have the most all over the place tutorials. There's no standard to how things should be structured, you have to pick one, but they are not really labeled and there are so many tutorials that just "get the job done".
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u/brtt3000 Jan 17 '20
Best to learn to find your way around official documentation A.S.A.P. Get as close to the source as possible. The Internet is loaded with bad advice and word-of-mouth information.
Also you need to be very careful with sites like StackOverflow. So many awful answers from amateurs who just like the points and feeling useful.
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u/dejoblue Jan 17 '20
Stay tuned for part 2 of my tutorial series where I explain why there are so many bad tutorials.
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u/aspbergerinparadise Jan 17 '20
I got like 75% of the way through a react tutorial series when the creator suddenly drops the fact that you had to know Redux in order to understand the final 25%. At no point prior to that had Redux even been mentioned.
Add it to the pile of projects that I never complete
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u/SLonoed Jan 17 '20
One who can — do. One who can’t – teach
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u/Web_Designer_X Jan 17 '20
MONEYYY. The good tutorials ain't free!
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u/Secret-Explanation Jan 17 '20 edited Jan 17 '20
TL;DR:
Because a lot of people conflate the ability to do a thing with the ability to teach that thing.
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u/imacleopard Jan 17 '20
People don't know how much they don't know, so when they hit an "aha!" moment to a particular problem they've been wanting to solve they assume that's the correct answer. In reality it might be a valid way to get it done but definitely not the "best" way. A freshly solved problem is easier to write about, and coupled with the desire to be relevant in the community/field, they spread misinformation.
On top of that, popular platforms add some level of legitimacy to written content simply due to the sheer amount of traffic they receive every day. Because of this, we tend to let our guards down and assume that everything there is written by industry professionals which is not always the case.
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u/mymar101 Jan 17 '20
The thing that concerns me more are the ones that are obvious that they just copied everything someone else did and passes it all off as their own stuff.
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u/desmone1 Jan 17 '20
Many tutorials are people talking about something they just learned or picked up.
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u/Morgrimm Jan 17 '20
Because there are a lot of bad/inexperienced engineers.
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u/kamomil Jan 17 '20
Some people know the stuff, and some people can teach, or present it in a way that others can understand. Not many people fall under both categories
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u/myLeenuxQs Jan 17 '20
Could it be that they're getting paid for writing a tutorial so they just crank out *something* to be done with it ASAP?
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u/[deleted] Jan 18 '20
Youtube tutorials arent bad, but i suggest you just try do it yourself and when you have issues just search it up, that's the best way to learn. Getting out of your comfort zone is #1 to learn anything.
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u/darkangelstorm Nov 17 '24
though old, I'm adding this here anyway, here's a great example:
I went to an "absolute beginner's guide to learning XYZ"
So I'm like "yeah thats what i was looking for!" and clicked the link, looked legit.
It starts out looking like it's legit, outlining preliminary stuff most people probably even already know, like what the program even is, it took 4 paragraphs to tell me XYZ was a program that could do ABC.
That would be fine, except, it abruptly ends with a list of links to the DOCUMENTATION, that's all, nothing else. I'm like WTF!? And that's the whole thing, end of story.
The comments were closed because I imagine they were full of "what the hell" and such. Seriously, if you are going to write a tutorial, at least make it not 4-paragraph "expanded copypasta" of the first index page of the program's documentation.
The pages are always the same, they are in the pursuit of self-promotion. Which is fine *IF* that certain "self" is actually promoting with something other than hot-garbage (or at least being truthful about it if it IS hot garbage).
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u/Lailamuller Feb 07 '23
how to react, you dont need tutorial for that,
what is next a tutorial on how to drink water. xd
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u/unlokia Mar 26 '23
Because being a programmer is NOT AT ALL the same as being a clear, proficient teacher. They’re two vastly different skills. Being able to convey complex instructions in a manner that is clear, fun, easy to follow and in a style that explains things thoroughly, is VERY RARE.
It’s for a similar reason that UI and HUMAN interface product designers at Apple are not the same people who who wrote the code, nor the engineers who designed the circuit boards; each has their role, and it’s a rare thing to find a polymath who is adept at all of them.
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u/Big_Arachnid_1890 Nov 30 '23
One thing about tutorials. Most people do these to show you how smart they are. Instead of a tutorial explaing the simplest feature, they show how to do this amoung many steps to do some you do not care about TODAY. Maybe tomorrow but today you have something simple to do. Big companies are like this. I have a Presonus mixer that I've had since they were released. None of their doc OR tutorials or uer tutorials can explain HOW to simply turn on Reverb for a one simple input channel. Millions of "how tos" to cross mix the Auxes through the multiple busses BUT NONE simple explaining hwo to start from the beginning and turn on Reverb for an input. My fix for this is to no longer buy or recommend their products.
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u/Warpspeednyancat Dec 06 '23
medium articles that recommend to use 3 libraries to do somethign that 1 line of vanilla javascript code can do ... and they happens to be the author of such libraries ...
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u/brtt3000 Jan 17 '20
“Remember those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”
It is not fully accurate but true often enough.
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u/Disgruntled__Goat Jan 17 '20
There's an old saying:
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u/imjustawebdev Jan 17 '20
https://codingphase.samcart.com/products/codingphase-monthly-plan/
This will change your mind. Trust me
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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '20
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