So I’ve been using Meteor professionally for approximately 2 years now. I sometimes look back at my old code from when I began and think… well, there are a lot of lessons that could be taught early instead of learning the hard way.
Here are some things I wanted to teach to help some “beginner” devs of meteor:
Creating small, manageable, and re-usable front end components
Updating the DOM via reactive design, rather than imperative programming (what is generally taught in college)
Reactive contexts and reactive variables.
Using module loading and ES6
Creating efficient server-side resources and methods
I was going to teach this pragmatically through the development of a Flixster-like webapp, which would use Rotten Tomatoes API and allow users to view trailers, leave comments on movies, and stuff like that.
My question for community is: what do you want to see taught in these kind of tutorials? What’s the most important?
One really important thing that I think gets swept under the rug way to often, only to rear it’s ugly head usually after prod launches, is understanding Meteor performance implications. For example, most intro tutorials/classes do a good job at explaining how subscriptions work, but usually gloss over the specifics with a lot of hand waving and “magic” talk. I wish there was more intro content focusing on performance, like Kadira’s awesome BulletProof Meteor site. Showing newcomers how to see what’s happening under the hood with tools like Kadira Debug, Kadira APM, etc. would really help them out in the long run.
Maybe not for beginners, but I would like a 1.3 migration video.
Otherwise, maybe take one of the sample apps (like marketplace/todos/leaderboard) and go through how a beginner would code that - referring to the Meteor Guide as you go through it.