Comment by duxup

Comment by duxup 2 days ago

7 replies

On sorta the same topic:

In the programming world I feel like there's a lot of info "for beginners" and a lot of folks / activities for experts.

But that middle ground world is strange... a lot of it is a combo of filling in "basics" and also touching more advanced topics at the same time and the amount of content and just activities filling that in seems very low. I get it though, the middle ground skilled audience is a great mix of what they do or do not know / can or can not solve.

I don't know if that made any sense.

josephg 2 days ago

This is also true of a lot of other disciplines. I’ve been learning filmmaking lately (and editing, colour science, etc). There’s functionally infinite beginner friendly videos online on anything you can imagine. But very little content that slowly teaches the fundamentals, or presents intermediate skills. It’s all “Here’s 5 pieces of gear you need!” “One trick that will make your lighting better”. But that’s mostly it. There’s almost no intermediate stuff. No 3 hour videos explaining in detail how to set up an interview properly. Stuff like that.

  • gh0stcat 2 days ago

    I've found the best route at that point is just... copying people who are really good. For my interest (3d modeling) if you want voice-over and directions, those are all pretty basic, but if you want to see how someone approaches a large, complex object, I will literally watch a timelapse of someone doing it and scrub the video in increments to see each modifier/action they took. It's slow but that's also how I built some intuition and muscle memory. That's just the way...

Vinnl 2 days ago

Makes sense that that's the case: there's usually a limited amount of beginner's knowledge, and then you get to the medium level by arbitrary combinations of that beginner's knowledge, of which there's an exponential number, making it less likely that someone has produced something about that specific combination. Then at the expert level, people can get real deep into some obscure nitty-gritty detail, and other experts will be able to generalise from that by themselves.

joseda-hg 2 days ago

It's one of the worst parts of being self taught, beginner level stuff has a large interest base because everyone can get into it.

Advanced level stuff usually gets recommended directly by experts or will be interesting to beginners too as a way of seeing the high level.

Mid level stuff doesn't have that wide appeal, the freshness in the mind of the experts, or the ease of getting into, so it's not usually worth it for creators if the main metric is reach/interest

Structured (taught) learning is better in this regard, it at least gives you structure to cling on to at the mid level

ahoka 2 days ago

Yes, and it's hard to point to reference material to newcomers. Hey, yeah that's actually a classic problem, let me show you some book about this... oh there's none. Maybe I should start creating them, but that is of course hard.

But also, the middle ground is often just years of practice.

greener_grass 2 days ago

CodeWars has a nice Kata grading system that features many intermediate level problems.