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Comment by ciguy | Hacker News Reader

People are often intimidated by the official docs and hesitant to go there. And the docs you linked do not cover Docker Compose which is actually the point of this tutorial. Getting an application running is easy for most people, connecting it to a Database is not as easy as it requires some hand holding or an understanding of networking, configuration etc....

In a way the Docker part of this is just a prerequisite to get to Docker Compose. I've found that once people understand the compose part they start to see the bigger picture and get some curiosity about networks, databases and configuration which is not as easy to intuit from a single Dockerfile.

Also this whole tutorial is just one lesson in a much larger email based mini-series on DevOps: https://miniseries.opscentric.io/devops-career-success The progression in the series makes more sense than the standalone lesson.

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>> People are often intimidated by the official docs and hesitant to go there.

Someone interested in "leveling up" their DevOps career is intimidated by official documentation... and more comfortable with github?

Seems like a stretch to me.

GitHub has become weirdly mainstream in the last few years. Almost all college students have some exposure even from non-CS courses. And yeah I know it's strange, but official docs just don't do it for some people.

I suspect you are like me and prefer to just read the docs and learn on your own. But there's a huge percentage of people that don't learn that way and need more hand holding at first. There's a reason that Youtube videos are so popular for learning technical subjects. I would never watch a video to learn anything technical myself yet millions of people prefer it over reading.

What I'm doing is based on experience of what works to get more people started and interested. Not everyone is an OG hacker who's been programming since they were twelve. If you are that type like I am, this is not for you as you can learn it faster on your own than you can read the tutorial. This is for those who are less experienced and might be intimidated getting going.

There is a whole industry geared to those who "might be intimidated getting going". This often leads to being stuck in 'tutorial hell', where one never has to feel intimidated and never lets go of their instructors hand. Slippery slope in my opinion.

They might be in the wrong career if they don't want to read official documentation.

I used to think the same, but in many cases nobody taught them how to read the docs. Once they get more familiar with the concepts they are able to dig in and be more independent.

>https://miniseries.opscentric.io/devops-career-success

I generally agree with:

>"Successful DevOps practitioners don't get paid to write code or configure servers. They get paid to solve problems."

However, I'm curious how your miniseries ties this in. You're starting with what is, ostensibly, rote technical knowledge. How do you convey/teach things like:

  - navigating abstract problem spaces

  - owing deliverables to cross-team non-technical stakeholders

  - responding to severe outages in highly complex, large-scale distributed systems

  - designing operational processes to make said outages easier to deal with

Skills I've generally found incredibly important to have, but hard to teach absent the experience of dealing with them in the first person.

Totally agree on all counts. I run a more comprehensive course which covers the tech but then gets into hands on clinics with simulated outages where we break people into teams and have them troubleshoot under supervision and mock interviews, sample real world style projects they have to design a deploy pipeline for an app etc....

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