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Keep your experiments separate #96

@nelsonic

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@nelsonic

Fellow dwyler Jessica Kerr @jessitron recently published this excellent post jessitron.com/2022/06/07/keep-your-experiments-separate/ [5 min read] that superbly summarises the reason we have "so many" example, tutorial and demo apps @dwyl ...

The gist is: "keep it simple, to focus on each new concept or experiment."

"Keep your experiments separate." ~ Eric Evans

"Eric forks the repository each time, and adds the new feature to the base game.
That way, the learning is not complicated by feature interaction.
"

In other words each time Eric adds a feature to his game he isolates it as its' own experiment.
That way the interaction of features can be tested one "variable" at a time instead of trying to observe

Obviously there are always people on HackerNews who haven't quite understood the benefits of simplicity and the scientific method:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31702975 🙄 these are the same people who claim that [automated] "Testing is too hard".

The world is full of people who skipped learning about science and the scientific method.
Why? because it's more difficult in the short-term to adopt the more rigorous approach.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction
.”
~ E.F. Schumacher

By isolating the individual element of a technology, tool, technique or feature we are trying to understand/experiment with we better understand what is going on and can explain it to others.

We have individual "learn-xyz" repositories for each element of our technology stack.
These are beginner-focussed ("your first hour with X tech") notes
When we build a module ourselves e.g: elixir-auth-google, we create the corresponding demo App: dwyl/elixir-auth-google-demo
Finally we assemble the component elements into an example apps, e.g: dwyl/phoenix-chat-example

I increasingly feel like I should just short-cut everything and do exactly/whatever Jessica ❤️ says and will save myself a heap of effort! 😜

Todo

  • Write this up better and publish it.

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