Welcome! This is a community for collaborating on creating great technical guides and tutorials. Our collective aim is working together to educate the world while improving our knowledge at the same time. Think of this as a "Wikipedia" for technical guides and tutorials, or "Medium.com for developers" as another analogy.
- Technical blog content is currently created on WordPress, which isn't great for developers (doesn't easily support code blocks, etc).
- Once a guide is created, it becomes stale and out of date. If the author doesn’t maintain their content, then it becomes less useful.
- There isn’t a strong way for developers to improve their content through peer review. Wordpress isn't great for that.
- Guides currently exist in silos. They live on individual blogs, and are fragmented and varying in quality. Those guides don't typically reach a wide audience since individual blogs have limited reach.
- Programming guides are largely in English and do not translate quickly/easily into other languages since code isn’t easily auto-translated. Other countries don’t have easy access to learning.
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We use MarkDown (rather than WordPress), a simple file format. This is a really simple text-based file format that takes around 60 seconds to understand. It's really easy to make things bold, italics,
code blocks, etc. Markdown is used in many places, such as Github README files. Even this file is a Markdown file. You can help us edit and improve it. -
The guides are stored in GitHub, which many developers use daily and love.
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Use your favorite text editor to create guides and check them in via Git. Or you can also edit guides using Github's UI. Way better than Wordpress.
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If you aren't familiar with git/Github, or don't want to bother with that, that's fine too -- we have a handy-dandy visual editor on our site to edit guides right here.
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The code for this site is open-sourced in Github. Let's improve it together!
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You can get your guides peer-reviewed by others. This improves the quality of our collective knowledge.
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Others can help maintain your guides long-term, making the content have a much deeper longevity when updates are needed, and removes the original author as a single point of failure if you get busy and can't maintain your guide.
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We can help each other reach a wide audience and make a bigger impact. When a guide gets published, we all work together to help promote it on HackerNews, to get lots of viewers. By building momentum on this site together, we'll get a larger audience over time, which means your guide will reach a wide audience.
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(Future) Bring knowledge to other countries. Your content can be translated by a community of bilingual individuals who are passionate about their countries receiving knowledge. Thanks to their translating efforts, the guides and tutorials can be shared with countries who don't have a deep understanding of the English language.
- Help the world. You'll help spread useful knowledge.
- Free subscription to Pluralsight.com. Pluralsight is our corporate sponsor for this project and is subsidizing the costs of some of the open-source development. We've negotiated with Pluralsight to give all contributors a free subscription to their video library on training for programmers, so you can stay up-to-date on all programming topics. This is worth $299/year.
- Network with other important members of the community. We'll give you access to our Slack community, to make awesome connections with others who are involved.
- Free access to the next hack.summit() conference for you and your friends. Get your own special code you can give out!
- Github.com contribution credits. Github tracks your open source contributions and shows a cool green graph on your profile page. Every change you make to a guide counts toward your open source contributions. Now you can easily get every square on your graph into the green! See here for more information.
You do, as the original author. This site is a venue for your content to be maintained in a much better way than Wordpress, and to reach a wider audience. But we don't own your content. In fact, if you really want to, you can host a copy of this website yourself since everything is open-source.
Feel free to write about any technology that you're passionate about. Generally speaking, one of the following:
- Tutorial on programming with X (where X is a technology or library you’re passionate about)
- Top 10 things you probably didn’t know about X
- Guide to what’s new in the latest version of X
- Advanced guide to programming with X
- Top 10 tips when programming with X
- X vs Y [where Y is a competing technology or is no technology]
...or any other ideas you might have. Please reach out to Prateek (prateek-gupta@pluralsight.com)! :)
Tutorials/articles ideally range from 1500-3000 words, including code blocks, to be a 'definitive guide' on a technical subject.
Yes! That's why we've built the editing tools on this site. It's easy to share a link to your article on social media and crowdsource expert-level editors for your topics. You'll be able to see suggestions from the community and accept the changes you want. Our editors can help improve it too.
Absolutely! Join our Slack community, we want as much feedback as possible.
- Fill out this quick form to let us know what you're interested in
- Volunteer to be an editor to help others improve content
- Make some engine contributions to the open-source engine for the site
- Spread the word about the site on twitter, facebook, HackerNews, etc.
- Volunteer to be a translator to help us bring content to other spoken languages
Please reach out to Prateek (prateek-gupta@pluralsight.com) if you want to chat about any of this, or ping us on our Slack!
One easy thing you can do is to check-out what else is out there for this particular subject. Try doing a quick search now for some topics that interest you. Other articles are generally OK so long as there is enough unique/useful content that sets your article apart. Are there ideas you can talk about in your proposed article that hasn't already been written? Enough interesting unique contributions that can be added that move the world's knowledge forward? Those are some things to think about.
- Submit a guide
- Share a link for suggestions to your article with friends, co-workers, etc.
- Continue improving your guide and mark it as 'in-review' from the bottom of the guide page itself. Marking a guide as 'in-review' will make it visible to the community editors and signal that you're ready for help improving the content.
- Our editors will also assist you with improving your guide
- Our community editors will decide when your guide is ready to publish. They will contact you directly and mark your guide as published, which pushes your guide to our homepage!