Comment by kaycebasques | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kaycebasques | Hacker News Reader

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I'm the content lead for web.dev. Just wanted to give a quick shout out to the people who made this happen because it's not clear on the site. I think this is also useful information because you'll see that a lot of CSS experts we're involved in this project.

Adam Argyle [1] and Una Kravets [2] created the podcast series. Una mainly drove the overall project to convert the podcasts into this written series. Adam provided technical reviews on the written content and I also believe he created most or all of the self-assessments (i.e. the 'check your understanding' quizzes). Andy Bell [3] wrote all of the content (and demos, I think). Rachel Andrew [4] edited all the content. Rob Dodson drove the engineering work behind creating this new "courses" infrastructure on web.dev. I was hands-off on this project so I may not have gotten everyone's roles exactly correct, but I do know these were the main people involved.

[1] https://twitter.com/argyleink

[2] https://twitter.com/Una

[3] https://twitter.com/piccalilli_

[4] https://twitter.com/rachelandrew

[5] https://twitter.com/rob_dodson

It is interesting that this uses a podcast + text rather than what would have been a more conventional video based tutorial. The use of a podcast for describing something so fundamentally visual as CSS looks really unusual. I just started going through and came back here to note that it somehow seems to work well!

I wonder if videos are a little overused as tutorials. Videos aren't very searchable (yet), and they are unreliable to scan through (in most scrubbing implementations I've seen), so while they are nice to get started, they are hard to return to later to brush up on something.

I love this podcast + text approach in theory. A podcast to talk through the material, and a really well written page to reference. The CSS Grid page is a great example of this.

Aside: As someone who has been in web dev for a while, sometimes I feel like what I need is an "unlearn CSS" tutorial, to erase some old habits.

Yes, I found that odd as well, no plan to listen to 15 min podcast on a web-page when Im just trying to quickly learn something I need to know to fix my code. Though overall the aesthetics of the site are nice, very clean look and nicely organized.

Content designed to answer individual questions (eg StackOverflow) is often different in form than content designed to provide comprehensive education like college classes.

That's poor strategy when creating developer docs, no one wants to listen to a 15 min podcast when they come to a page to learn something or find an answer to their question. Most people on website are scanning for relevant information and they don't want to spend more time than needed, that is how good content should be presented.

Are you not aware that just because a certain piece of content doesn't suit you at this moment, doesn't mean that the content is bad?

In addition to yourself, there are other people in other situations who are looking for different kinds of content.

These are not developer docs first. There are plenty of wonderful other resources that serve as CSS dev docs as a primary resource.

I've listened to some of the podcast and it is really good, even in the car where you're highly unlikely to have devtools open.

At first blush, I like it a lot, and am eager to give it a try. I'm busy, and, no matter how much more efficient videos would be in an ideal world, I just don't have a lot of time to sit down and watch them. I also like to get away from the screen and go see what the outside world looks like every so often, y'know?

With a podcast, though, I can listen while I do dishes or whatever, and hopefully that will at least give me enough background information that I can understand the written parts more quickly.

Just as an FYI, I'm seeing a certificate error when loading web.dev. I'm on latest Chrome Version 90.0.4430.212 (Official Build) (x86_64) on Mac OS Big Sur

Screenshot: https://d.pr/i/gvj3fA

I've been trying to visit web.dev for days for various reasons, but I just get this and neither Chrome nor Safari will let me visit. But apparently a bunch of you can see the page, so I'm confused as to why I seem to be the only one seeing this... but maybe you or someone there can help? Thanks.

Very odd, I'm on the same release (Catalina) and no difficulties. The certificate is from Google Trust Services, which presumably Chrome should honor.

Perhaps you have a proxy causing interference?

As the sibling comment notes, looking at the certificate using Advanced may help clarify things.

Update: here's the full chain that I see:

web.dev, signed by GTS CA 1D2, with a root certificate of GlobalSign Root CA - R2.

This is what I see: https://d.pr/i/8VY9As

As far as I know, I have no proxies to interfere...

Apparently there's still more to see if you dig deeper, but I'm unfamiliar with Chrome's UI for invalid certificates.

If you can open your terminal, this may be easier:

% openssl s_client -connect web.dev:443

It will hang (I guess awaiting more commands) but you can use Control-C to kill the connection.

The gist below has the first several lines showing what you should see.

https://gist.github.com/macintux/68ab1317d4b7677951069baf95c...

OK, I think I see what's happening. There's some other software that overrode the *.dev cert. I'll remove that and see if it works. Thanks for your help!

Huh, that's...unexpected. My best guess was that somehow the root certificate was missing from your computer's trusted certificate store.

Glad you got it sorted, happy to help.

It was a fairly common issue when .dev first launched. https://andycroll.com/ruby/clean-up-broken-dev-domains-after...

Aha, interesting. Thanks.

Yup, that's exactly what happened. Thanks to both of you for your help! I really appreciate it. This was driving me nuts!

Open that Advanced button to proceed, inspect the certificate (click the lock icon in URL bar)

could be DNS of your ISP?

You have a bug on the focus slides where the first few buttons are actaully links to //web.dev and when you click them in order to give them focus the whole codepen iframe navigates back to your site.

Una and her content are great.

Checked out the first two chapters on this resource and immediately recommended it to my colleagues as well.

Hey Kayce! How come you no longer do the chrome dev tools update videos on YouTube?

I stopped doing DevTools docs/advocacy when I became documentation lead (content strategy + people management) for Chrome DevRel (the team behind web.dev, developer.chrome.com, Chrome Dev Summit, Workbox, and lots of other stuff) about 1.5 years ago.

This is amazing. Did y'all use any kind of static site generator or documentation tool (e.g. Antora) or was it hand rolled?

All of web.dev is open source. Here's the directory [1] for the Learn CSS content. The site is all based on Eleventy [2]. I don't know if Rob (engineering lead [3]) and team did any funny stuff for the Learn CSS infrastructure in particular but you can ping him on Twitter for questions.

[1] https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web.dev/tree/main/src/site/c...

[2] https://www.11ty.dev/

[3] https://twitter.com/rob_dodson

Thank you very much!

Thanks for sharing this!

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