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Those of who have written some coding tutorials - can you please share your workflow?

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfu8nZwIoLmgxUaKwHK7XmuSbVPudCIPr_Efb3nZInvzeR2KQ/viewform

Hi, fellow Indiehackers!
my friend and I have been working on a new tool that aims to make reading & writing coding articles a much more pleasant experience.

We got annoyed by the state of current programming tutorials. Particularly, we're not much of fans of coding tutorials on Medium-like websites since the UI and features don't have code in mind besides some basic formatting. But those are places where you find coding articles the most though.

We think there should be a better way of sharing your programming knowledge. We're making something like Medium but with code interactivity and the features that come with your IDE.

I know there is a lot of aspiring technical founders around here. I'd like to ask you a few questions.

Could you please share some insights into your workflow when writing a piece that involves source code?

E.g.:

  • What annoys you most?
  • Do you write right inside your IDE? Or what app do you use?
  • Do you create new projects containing article text + source code that can be run?
  • Do you always run that code or are you confident enough it'll run?
  • Do you copy the code into markdown or use pictures?

If you don't feel like writing **you can also share your response through this Google Form. It shouldn't take more than 2 minutes.

Feel free to ask & discuss anything in the comments sections.
Thank you!

#tech-questions #ask-ih

submitted this linkon July 17, 2019
  1. 2

    This is very interesting to me. I'm currently planning on launching a course and am writing tutorials for it and am thinking about a good place how to share these.
    Medium does not work great for it.

    Can you tell me more about your idea? And have you built something yet?

    And will you share the results of the survey?

    1. 1

      Thank you for the interest Mila!
      Not yet, we will have something to share very soon. I'll let you know :).

  2. 2

    I haven't written lots of them, but I always remembered that getting a good syntax highlighter on your blog sucked.
    I would love a products like https://carbon.now.sh that would not work with images but with easely embed-able snippets where a user can still copy lines of code.
    Yes you can use codepen and stuff, but I prefer the minimalistic look of Carbon.

  3. 1

    I ran into the same problem and wrote a tutorial system for my personal site. The plan is to flesh it out a bit more in the near future:
    https://citw.dev/tutorial/create-your-own-cli-tool

  4. 1

    Since you're making something similar to Medium, what will separate you from Dev.to?

    To answer your question, here is my writing workflow:

    • I create a project with the code samples to make sure any pieces of code included works. If it's small enough, I can put it in CodeSandbox and embed it inside my article.
    • I write the post in a markdown file inside my editor and either embed the CodeSandbox or put the code in a code block (some code).
    • Lastly, if there is a code project, I'll put it on GitHub and include a link to it in the end.
    1. 1

      Thank you Alex. That's a very useful answer!

      As for the difference between us and dev.to.
      We're more like runnable sandboxed projects that are "merged" with the text you'd normally write when writing a coding tutorial.

      1. 2

        Is it similar-ish to Jupyter Notebook?

        1. 1

          Yes. It's focused on a better way of sharing knowledge behind a project/codebase.

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    This comment was deleted 7 years ago

    1. 1

      Thanks for your answer!
      We are fans of both glitch & repl.it and enjoy using it :).

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        This comment was deleted 7 years ago