By sticking to jokes and a simple style, I never felt confused or lost in lingo.
I guess if you're a serious company like Apple, you can't really have that kind of tutorial for iOS dev. But that would really help.
they are written in a humorous tone, and intersperse joke drawings between the chapters.
In college, I was a mechanical engineer living with a CompSci major, CompE major, and a CompSci / CompE double-major. I'd occasionally stop them when they were explaining things to me with "Explain like I'm a MechE". Slightly less self-deprecating than "mathematically inclined idiot", but same gist.
Because of this, I was also quite useful as a rubber duck for debugging.
The fact that this is true is, to me, a slightly sad reflection on our culture. I understand that too much silliness can get in the way of conveying information, but as you point out, so can too much seriousness.
It's obviously a fine balance, and unfortunately it seems safer to err on the side of seriousness when in doubt. It's one of those things that if you sit down and ask any average individual, they will probably prefer a bit of silliness and an informal style in any situation where it's appropriate, yet somehow collectively we seem to have agreed to default to the opposite, and stick with things being quite dry and serious as a norm.
Interesting, but ultimately a little sad. Why is this the case? Why is our culture this way? Why can't things just be a little more fun by default?
(aaaaand this could go on for hours)
On the other hand, there are brands out there with the exact opposite approach. Cards Against Humanity comes to mind first. Their image is explicitly one of mild carelessness and apparent candidness such that anything written too formally would seem out of place.
But indeed, there do seem to be more of the former brand type than of the latter. Having a neighbor who speaks constantly with a similar tone as the writer of this article, I can say that trying to hold my own in a conversation with him is really tiring. You eventually just run out of witty remarks. Is it possible it's more an issue of skill and time? As in, are there fewer people out there with the skills necessary to make good silly writing than there are people who can write seriously? And does it take them longer (and thus cost even more) to make writing in this style?
I rambled a little, but I think the issue is a combination of people equating seriousness with importance, as well as a general lack of creativity.
"too much medium,
not enough message"
When we refine our writing (or speaking) to - supposedly to make it less jumbled and easier to read - we usually end up removing a lot of the little details that made up the original thought. The writing may have much better grammar and organization, but real thought isn't perfectly organized and we end up losing some of the "character" in the original idea. (this may be good or bad, depending on the situation)
Vi Hart has an amazing overview[1] of this concept, in which she discusses the very wise words of the Edmund Snow Carpenter in his[2] book "They Became What They Beheld".
The trouble with knowing what to say and saying it clearly & fully, is that
clear speaking is generally obsolete thinking. Clear statement is like an
art object: it is the afterlife of the process which called it into being.
The process itself is the significant step and, especially at the beginning,
is often incomplete & uncertain.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm-Jjvqu3U4
[2] probably co-written - or at least "heavily influenced" - by Marshal McLuhan
[3] http://ogun.stanford.edu/~bnayfeh/plan.html (very mild NSFW language of the form "____ happens")
So very true...
Open a vein...share yourself...reveal yourself...share what you've learned and let the excitement you felt while discovering it flow...
For most writers, the majority of the time, your true audience will "get" both you and the ideas you're trying to share...
Sometimes you'll expand the size of your potential audience with raw enthusiasm, even when they have no idea what you're talking about...
It is a pity because the content is quite interesting but we are here discussing about his writing style??
The source code[1] for said project is pretty great.
Kind regards,
[24x7BLAZEIT]XxXhUCkYau$XxX
[0] http://swagify.net/ [1] http://swagify.net/static/js/swagify.js
But hey, I was 17 and also it was me so... I'm biased.
No affiliation, I just use it for work:
I've used it for school projects and work before, and was amazed by the documentation and API capabilities. Everything is configurable and easy to figure out.
Edit: it's Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0. I wonder if that stops me running ads on a site that uses it.
"The empirical findings suggest that creators and users approach the question of noncommercial use similarly and that overall, online U.S. creators and users are more alike than different in their understanding of noncommercial use. Both creators and users generally consider uses that earn users money or involve online advertising to be commercial"
Lots of casual self-deprecation. I'd recommend well known comedians, but I'm no good at remembering names.
But then I use some wysiwyg and I make something much nicer in no time... Should I really give up on these tools :(?
It depends on the use case.