I was lucky with my previous job. It was my decision to make. I just prototyped something that got traction and I did not have to convince anybody.
Because I liked it that much. And how it made me feel about development.
I know there are a lot of developers who feel the same. I meet them everyday in gitter chat room.
Now here comes the frustration, when I try to talk about using Aurelia for the project I’m on now - there are a lot of hesitation. it sounds like this:
- Oh… before you mentioned it, I never even heard about it.
- Why is it good?
- Ah well… where do we find developers?..
You all know the drill
I was not a part of community before. I never knew it existed. I was following Aurelia blog and reading the docs since early betas. And learned my way around. I even would go that far and say that before Aurelia I could not say that I was a javascript developer. Surely I was using durandal and knockout and jQuery. But it never felt like pure js.
But that was a learning curve. And if you followed like a true early adopter - if was easy to keep up.
But I was highly motivated.
Recent discussions here about state of the documentation concluded that it is lacking something as it is now. I admire @adriatic’s mission to create compelling guides and AUCS idea as a whole… It resonated with me…
But I come to it from another angle.
There are a lot of ‘newbie’ questions in gitter.
There are a lot of unanswered questions on stackoverflow.
In my opinion they are a consequence of a pour onboarding experience at the moment.
If you look at the …otherFrameworks some of them offer a possibility of getting started online. on code pen or other interactive tools.
Less friction - more attraction.
Current “getting started” guide for aurelia is skeleton based at best. And overloaded with choices.
Remember knockout?
http://learn.knockoutjs.com/
I don’t think there have been code pen, when Steven Sanderson created that awesome experience.
I still think it is the best learning framework experience I had.
We can do that with a series of gist.runs. And a simple document to follow along.
With a bunch of links to docs where relevant.
Very same guide could be executed with CLI.
I believe that for newcomers - the less choice is better.
When you give developers choice they will start figuring out what’s better instead of getting started.
Now imagine trying to compare webpack vs jspm when you know neither?
How do I bundle my svgs with webpack so they end up as a single file in a dist folder?
Some of those newcomers even make it to github and ask their newbie questions there.
So how do you convince your boss? Well by helping out Aurelia, obviously (-:
Help with easing the path for newcomers.
Help them get addicted. The more of us there - the better. (-:
…to be continued…
And go help with those issues on github (-:
Next post will be about how to, if you don’t know or feel scared.
Anyone can help out.
P.P.S
a link from the most recent issue on github at the moment
getting pop corn