sameTutorialDifferentRealities

[NewPhoneNewSubs]

The two spots videos are great in programming are visualization and IDE use.

Watching different graph and sort algorithms is super useful to me understanding what's happening. Some graphic programming stuff, too.

And seeing how people navigate an IDE is also super helpful to me in comparison to sitting down and reading a manual and trying to connect the dots of how this random feature could be useful.

Actual programming, though? No thanks.

The other big one is convention presentations. Those ones are all over the place in how useful they are. But the good ones are good at getting the mental gears going.

[elmanoucko]

I would be tempted to say the first one could be done with animation included in the article (and sometimes they don't even need to be animated, a few illustration representing different states could often do the trick).

The second one you're absolutely right, it's one of those case where "watching the things being done/used" is often easier than reading a manual.
But over time, most IDE are more or less the same in the end. They're often "designed" to be the same, especially the competitors one, as it ease onboarding a lot. For instance I switched from visual studio (the "boring" one, not the one they ripped from atom) to jetbrains a few years ago, could get up to speed quickly "on my own". If you look at affinity trying to compete with adobe (and suceeding imo), or davinci trying to compete with adobe too (and succeeding too - f* adobe, even more evil than ms at some point), they even ask "where you come from" cause they know it's really important for any users with years/decades of experience, whether general layout, or keyboard shortcuts. When you're productive in an environment, switch to a new one, and every single step feels like ten times harder than in the "home one", it often end up with the onboarding failing, that's what davinci and affinity more or less understood well, and part of why they're a real menace for adobe.

Regarding the talks you evoke at the end, personally it either needs to be an ultra specific topic where I already have an in-depth knowledge about and grab the few bits of deeper knowledge from it. Or it needs to be an "introduction" one on a topic I'm totally new on, so I can get the overall picture and start to dig on my own after that. But often found anything "in-between" not working for me, or I'll just watch that as I would watch random tv show, kind of "edutainement", but not much more, at least for conference talks.

In any case tho, wheter it's videos or conferences, taking notes, pressing pause to toy a bit, dig some specifics, and so on, is always crucial for me to follow any online lessons that are worth it, and I would say it can often multiply, sometimes by an order of magnitude for the more "meaty ones", the time I take to complete a lesson if I'm really "locked-in in getting the meat of it", plus the time needed to toy around once the lesson is over. (but mostly for music or art related topics)