mway’s blog

Being a web developer is a lot like being a guitar player – everyone does it.  With guitar, though, you don’t see 80 bajillion people giving tutorials on how to do extremely simple chord progressions or riffs (which is nice).  I would ask the same thing of web developers: stop insulting our intelligence.

It goes without saying that if you need a tutorial to do something simple, you should not be doing it in the first place.  Learning how to do something for the first time should be an experience that you work through yourself; you should already understand the core concepts and principles behind what you are doing, and have the tools and knowledge at hand to accomplish whatever task you’re trying to do.  Experimenting, testing, and refining are natural parts of the process – they help you grow as a developer and hone your skills.  Don’t let someone else do the dirty work for you.  Jumping into something you don’t fully understand is, amongst other things, a big problem.

For example, there are tutorials for simple tasks like making a button animate up and down using jQuery.  In and of itself, jQuery has a massively simple interface.  Granted, you can do complex things with it too (extending it with plugins, customizing the lib, using subtle effects, and manipulating the DOM more agilely, etc), but doing a demo with something like

$(selector).animate({ top: '-10px' }, 150, function() {
	$(this).animate({ top: '+10px' }, 150);
});

to achieve a simple ‘bounce’ effect is effectively pointless.  When you do simple tutorials, please understand that it is a double-edged sword: on one hand, sharing knowledge is great, and people learn; on the other hand, it paves the way for even more endlessly mediocre developers to be flooding the web.

And honestly, maybe it’s the fact that I am self-taught to the extreme.  There are obviously benefits to helping others expand their skillset – my point, ultimately, is that if you’re going to share knowledge, make it knowledge worth sharing.