Show HN: Follow-up to Python/Django/HTTP/... notes/docs | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Follow-up to Python/Django/HTTP/... notes/docs

5 pointsTomaszZielinski2 comments

http://my-notes.readthedocs.org/

Some time ago I posted this question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4024938 where 100% of the top-level replies were positive ;). So here is the follow-up.

It doesn't focus on anything specific, it's more like a collection of "loose" notes related to the Python/Django/JS development. The value here is that I try hard to filter out the noise to make those docs useful for myself. For instance, when I need to learn something on a specific topic, I check e.g. 10 or 20 threads on Stack Overflow, and pick just a handful of answers. And only those few high quality answers make their way to the docs.

Let the bashing begin!

Love it! We need a site dedicated to this kind of thing - assortments of various bits of hard to find knowledge that come up when you're learning about a new platform/language/framework/(anything?). IMO, the learning curve for say, a new framework is often dominated by this kind of knowledge - not particularly complicated, but hard to find when you don't know what you should be looking for.

The problem of course, is that when you really dive in, there are FAR too many of these kinds of tips to be useful on a single page. Maybe a sophisticated search or categorization that would let you loosely specify the symptoms of a problem, or what you want to accomplish in simple words would work. Also, some way of specifying your level of knowledge in each area that the problem involves would be nice. So for example, if you selected proficient with UNIX then it might say "install these libs from source with x flags", and lower levels might have more info about how to deal with problems that crop up during that process.

I have an old idea of mine about a web service (aka "startup") that would roughly do what you described plus some additional features to boost learning/memorizing the most useful bits of knowledge.

But for now we have to live with ReadTheDocs, these days I barely have time to browse Hacker News!

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