anthonygore

Hi HN,

I’ve published over a hundred coding tutorials in the last few years and read hundreds more.

There are a number of things that frustrate me as both an author and reader:

- It’s difficult to create focused code examples.

- It’s difficult to keep code examples accurate and properly formatted.

My aim in creating WalkThru is to make it easier to read and write code tutorials. By utilizing the interactive and dynamic aspects of the web WalkThru provides:

- Code examples that can dynamically focus on specific lines.

- Code examples are compiled from linted and formatted source code.

I’d be grateful for any feedback or contributions.

https://github.com/walkthru/walkthru

Yes, it will. The component removes the content from the source.

Founding a successful startup requires a tonne of soft skills that most people need time to build.

I made a video on Deno which gives a quick summary of its key features:

https://devtrends.io/videos/deno

I find that weird, his style is so distinct any fan would immediately recognize it

How I approach it is to roughly map out the features it will need e.g. database, backend logic, UI etc. Then I'd think about whether or not I can achieve that with a stack I know e.g. Laravel/Vue.js. If not, I'd isolate the tricky parts and research what tools I'll probably need. Rinse and repeat until the right stack is settled on. Then start building a rough draft.

There are two important aspects here: getting ideas recorded, and organising them.

Note pads and text files are great for getting ideas down, but bad for organising them

If you can’t organise the ideas later, the whole system breaks down and you stop using it

I looked into different SaaS apps etc but they all had some features I didn’t like or were extraneous for me.

I realized the only way to do this was to create my own note taking app with a UI that was optimised for my way of doing things and would contain as few bottlenecks as possible for recording and organising

The result is an app where I can type something out in markdown format, apply tags, and then filter all my notes by tags

I uses local storage because I hate the idea of a login getting in the way of recording the idea

Sharing data between components without parent/child relationship is the main reason

If you're interested in learning Vue I can offer both my own course and book as recommendations.

The course demos three substantial Vue.js projects:

https://www.udemy.com/vuejs-2-essentials/

The book is about full-stack Vue & Laravel and includes one large project, an Airbnb clone:

https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/full-stack-...

Oh god how did I manage that...thanks, I've updated the original post.

Identifying what's worth writing about is not a skill you have naturally, it's something you develop from practice. I know it sounds trite, but just start writing, and do it consistently, and you'll build the skill.

I've been blogging almost weekly for over a year. My first 5-10 articles garnered almost no interest; even now they have only a handful of reads on Medium. I was writing about jQuery tips for god's sake. But I eventually learned from my mistakes and now I have maybe 10 articles with more than 100 recommends on Medium, and I've had two articles make the front page of HN.

Fantastic, well done.

Very cool. How are you driving traffic? I imagine search engine traffic would be fairly low for this kind of niche.

The problem with articles and discussions like this is that the "markers of success" pointed out may all be true, but incidental.

Take Slack as an example. Yes, it was a simple idea with low product surface area and easily protypeable etc etc. But other people had built Slack-like products before that met the all those same criteria and were not successful. The critical factors for Slack were the connections the founders had (or made), the VC money, and perhaps a whole bunch of other things.

As much as we'd like for there to be a nice, neat guides for successful businesses e.g. "build a little snowball", the truth is that the reasons for success are often totally unique, contradictory and unrepeatable.