Meteor Tutorials (The Plan) - We need you

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Hello everyone,

Context
We want more and more people to learn Meteor. The solution is to create a mechanism where people can learn themselves without guidance or live coaching. The reason for this is that it can be very time-consuming and it can be a waste of resources.

The problem
Meteor guide + other tutorials out there, are very intimidating, especially for newcommers. We gave juniors tutorials to learn, but they got demotivated, things weren’t making sense for them, even for basic stuff such as Meteor.methods().

It took us over a year to get used to Meteor and understand the foundation, and how everything is linked together. Heck, after Meteor 1.3 things changed dramatically, and we had new things to learn. But I believe Meteor is now mature enough to create a tutorial that will last through the years. Reasons: Modular approach and React.

Solution
Create a series of online video tutorials which takes people through a proper learning curve. Video tutorials will be 100% free (no such thing as premium videos), and maybe have implemented a beer donation service :beers:

Who wins from this ?

  • People who want to learn Meteor
  • Any web development agency focused on Meteor. They can just give the tutorials.
  • Meteor as a community
  • Meteor as a platform

Why are we doing this ?
We think at the core of Meteor are geniuses who crafted the ultimate tool for building apps. We worked with many other frameworks before, but when we got into Meteor we were hit by such an elegant and simple API we couldn’t help but fall in love with it! And when you love something, you want to see it grow.

And plus, we’ll have a lot of fun doing it!

We need you.

We created a plan for our tutorials to structure the learning curve:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B42TpXMHbpv-VjNTa2ZtdVp2czg

Check-out the README from that folder.

Comments are enabled at each course document. Feel free to leave comments.

Feel free to leave a message here what were the greatest challenges when learning Meteor, and how you managed to overcome them.

If you want to contribute, you can mail me or leave a message here. You can find my email in the README doc in the folder.

The plan structure is not LOCKED. We aim at locking it this week so we can begin with a solid plan.

Let’s do this!

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Hey this sounds really cool - I wrote the original tutorials on meteor.com and about 1/3 of the Meteor Guide so I’m very excited to see where this goes.

One thing - this sounds a lot more like a whole book (more like Discover Meteor) than a tutorial. The goal of the “official” tutorials is to give a tour of most of the features in a very short amount of time. Often when people are looking for a “tutorial” it’s something that will take 1-3 hours, and is something they can follow along with.

Perhaps there’s a way of splitting this into more contained chunks? Right now, the “courses” seem split up by topic, like everything about collections, everything about subscriptions, etc.

On the other hand if this worked for you internally for training then perhaps it’s the right model.

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Hi Sahsko, it’s very hard for people like you that know Meteor in such depth to write tutorials for beginners, because you have so much context, and things that for you seem trivial, for others are very complex. This is why we began asking for feedback from juniors and beginners right from the start.

After our research we concluded that we need:

  • 15min max videos
  • We need an article for each video (sort-of summary), so people can refresh their memory fast
  • After each chapter we need to create something that ties everything together.
  • Leave clifhangers at the end of each tutorial.
  • Friendly and encouraging attitude, to help motivate newcommers
  • Engage people in asking questions and enable socialization on each topic (YouTube comments or Medium.com Comments)

We are targetting people absolutely new to Meteor in order to convert them .

Any other tips are more than welcome :slight_smile:

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Levelup Tuts has already been doing this, and they are really good. I would suggest supporting him on Patreon and continuing his series.

However I think Meteor/Levelup Tuts lacks in tutorials for mobile app development. One great topic would be accounts-facebook on iOS. Seems to be a huge issue in the community since 1.3+ . I myself have not figured it out, but once I do, I will be very inclined to lay down some concrete documentation.

I would like to make the case in general that having more tutorials on mobile app dev with Meteor would be great. I would also be willing to bet a lot of new comers with various degrees of low level to mid level Javascript experience choose Meteor because of its ability to step in to the mobile development world using the tools they already know. It is in fact what attracted me to Meteor.

The challenges as web dev to adopting platforms like swift/obj-c or java can be very daunting and far to time consuming for most scenarios.

React Native addresses this, but you still need to have some sort of grasp on those platforms to get far, React Native seems to be really resource intensive to boot as well.

Meteor has (for me at least) has a pretty good middle man for learning curve, production time and simplicity. And I’d like to think a lot of this possible because of the hard work done by MDG and various package developers really cut down on the process of having to do some of the things that require the extra mile until your completely able or ready to.

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As someone who spent a lot of time in the past writing tutorials and teaching people, I would agree with that statement. My issue at this point is that I am seeing a drastic downturn in Google search traffic for Meteor and the MDG team has basically mostly moved off working on Meteor, leaving just @benjamn at this point.

I personally find it hard to commit my businesses time & energy into creating new Meteor training materials at this point.

Best of luck and I hope you find some people to help out.

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I agree with @nicholasbydesign LevelUpTutorials are great for newcomers and beginners.
Best way would be to sponsor LevelUpTutorials

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Back in the Meteor classic golden years, your materials and podcasts helped when I needed it, thank you for your service. :slight_smile:

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tl;tr
i’m the perfect newbie, and i would:

  1. complete and up to date documentation
  2. a lts release supported until the end of the world
  3. a toolbox packed with app templates and a code generator
  4. change the name ‘meteor’ to ‘metero’
    … now, if possible…

hi,
it’s one of your ‘targets’ here… :slight_smile:

i don’t know if i’m a professional programmer or a hobbyist: i just remember everything started ages ago with a few bash scripts assembled copying and pasting code found on google, and it came up with an ecommerce business built on top of a bash ‘kind of erp’ and a php ecommerce written from scratch.

in the last few years i’ve been trying to make a standard application out of my “bash ‘kind of erp’” and i’ve always looked at meteor as a great candidate for the framework spot.

here are my 2 cents about why i’ve never studied it seriously nor written a single application so far:

1) meteor is DIFFICULT.

i wrote wonderful bash scripts and a decent php/mysql ecommerce website with a few javascripts enhancements.
everything was done in my spare time, without literally studying anything. i learnt everything gradually, day by day or hour by hour, looking for simple solutions to the simple problems i was facing.

my google searches were something like:
‘how to look for a string a text file?’
‘php how to pass a variable to another web page?’
‘amazon mws php sdk’
'javascript change color on hover’
and so on…

i tried and do the same with meteor, but i was not able to.
it seems like there is no way to create an interesting application with meteor without literally studying it. you can, of course, follow a tutorial and create a todo or a whatsapp-like app, but as soon as they come routing, css templates, auth, react, apollo and so on, it is clear that you can’t do it just in spare time. the difficulty delta between demo apps and real world cases is just too high…

if you were someone who doesn’t know meteor, how would you rate a [tutorial intro page] (https://www.meteor.com/tutorials) where 3 different versions of the todo app are available and not a single word is written about what to choose and why?
how many people who know the difference between balze and react need a todo app tutorial…?
and how many people who need a todo app tutorial already know the difference between balze and react …?

2) meteor changes yet too FAST.

i perfectly know that meteor changes fast because the whole js ecosystem is changing even faster. i won’t add anything that someone hasn’t already written on these forums.
i’m just pointing the fact that the faster a technology evolves, the harder is for hobbyists or hobbyist-like people to keep the pace.

woodworking is a good hobby as wood is pretty always the same and so are tools. what if screws format changes every year? by now shell scripting and php look to me more similar to woodworking than meteor.

you’ll say that nobody forces anyone to move as fast as meteor does. i could, for example, still use blaze instead of react. and i agree with you.

but the hype around react and apollo comes mainly from mdg. you can’t say ‘hey, react is the best view layer in the world!’, then expect people to remain with blaze. if old screws format (blaze) is good, don’t sell a new one. or sell it, swear you won’t change it for a a long time and hope hobbyists will trust you…

and what about application structure? i’ve never seen a framework with 2 recommended application structures: an officialone (guide.meteor.com/structure.html#example-app-structure) for small apps and an unofficial one (github.com/kadirahq/mantra) for large projects.
sometimes it happens the opposite: the ‘official’ structure is too deep and a simplified version is suggested for learning purposes. but the official documentation is usually supposed to be the most comprehensive…

i don’t know if meteor is a mess right now. but i can assure that it really seems to be a mess from a newbie perspective.

3) lack of tools.
2 things i love when i start playing with new stuff:

  • template apps
  • code generators

it is hard to find good template apps because, like written before, meteor is evolving fast and even good souls who want to share their experience find hard to keep the pace. i guess discovermeteor.com is still at meteor 1.3, reactioncommerce has no react integration yet, and so on…
i should be able to pick something from each of them, but i’m a newbie!

code generators are great for the very first approach. they’re useful to better understand application structure and to see what code you should have written to obtain a particular result.
the only meteor code generator i’m aware of is meteorkitchen, but it’s still a bit too complicated for a newbie like me. it seems more a tool for people who already know meteor and want to speed up developement…

4) i can’t type 'meteor’
seriously, i can’t… it usually comes ‘metero’, sometimes ‘meter’… backspace is by far the most frequently pressed key of this post… :slight_smile:

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Hi Josh thanks for the response.

I personally find it hard to commit my businesses time & energy into creating new Meteor training materials at this point.

It is the same here! It’s very hard, not hard. However, someone needs to do it. And we decided to take charge.

My issue at this point is that I am seeing a drastic downturn in Google search traffic for Meteor and the MDG team has basically mostly moved off working on Meteor

Yes I am aware of that, however I see hope for Meteor because of it’s simplicity. This is what made PHP win over Java/Perl, not necessarily bc it was better, definitely it was much worse, but it was much simpler to use.

Apollo is a good decision for MDG, but not for Meteor. We tried doing what apollo does in: http://grapher.cultofcoders.com so we can solve the issue of data fetching and relations in MongoDB + Meteor. And now it’s easy for us to scale an app.

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They may be good, but it uses Blaze. We did not choose React because MDG said so. We chose React because it’s the next generation of templating. Those guys solved the problem and they did it well.

Good point, we will need to focus a large part of the tutorial on Mobile. This is a good selling point!

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He is also making a React version as we speak if it has not already been completed.

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We saw them, we didn’t like them at all.

  1. Blaze
  2. Doesn’t really give you much information for large-scale applications.

Our goal is to teach people how to scale-up their app code-wise. Not just create a simple ToDo. This is why we have dedicated chapters on coding patterns and how to use them in Meteor. Event Dispatcher.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNxg7jg5e2s teaching you to do this.resolutions() to get the data from Meteor. + extends TrackerReact. Wtf ?

Without providing a container for this data. This is really a bad tutorial, made by someone who hasn’t worked on large-scale apps in Meteor. I really appreciate him, but you can’t just teach bad stuff.

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Who is “we” though, if there is going to be tuts. They should appeal to everyone (or try, I know not everyone can be addressed), I know from the reading forums very often a lot of people would rather use Blaze, myself included. I like React outside of Meteor, but for me it is too much JS fatigue inside it.

There is also a large trend of people wanting to use Vue and Aurelia inside Meteor. And we cant forget Angular 2 will probably become more popular.

You guys can do what you want, but if I had to weigh in. I think mobile app development needs some love as it lacks pretty bad in documentation and how to’s right now.

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Hey there,

We have similar background, started with bash from when I was a script-kiddie 15 years ago, then moved to PHP large scale and now I’m in the JS world.

Regarding knowing something without studying… huh ? I really don’t understand your concern. Maybe you refer to the fact that things need to be more intuitive ?

Meteor changed way too fast. We now think it’s solid. Embraced NPM world + Modular Code + React. These decisions completely changed it and we think it’s going to be LTS.

I come from bash world also. From the long-gone times I was a script-kiddie.

and what about application structure? i’ve never seen a framework with 2 recommended application structures: an officialone (guide.meteor.com/structure.html#example-app-structure) for small apps and an unofficial one (github.com/kadirahq/mantra) for large projects.

Well this is another issue we want to address. We want to teach people how to build their own structure and scale it, not give them a bunch of folders which are going to stay empty until they actually use it. Teach a man how to fish not give him a fish sort of approach.

  1. i can’t type 'meteor’
    seriously, i can’t… it usually comes ‘metero’, sometimes ‘meter’… backspace is by far the most frequently pressed key of this post… :slight_smile:

Be serious, just do a bash alias and name it however you want!

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Nicholas, I also love Blaze, don’t get me wrong. But Blaze, Vue, Aurelia, others are on different planets comparing to React. React is JSX (JS+HTML blended), that’s it’s strongest asset. There is absolutely no js fatigue using it in Meteor. Zero. It’s way more fatigue using Blaze.

Regarding mobile development, another guy mentioned this above. I agree, it deserves a lot of attention and we will have to invest a lot of focus in it. VERY GOOD FEEDBACK. We have 3 meteor apps running on Mobile, 1 blaze, 2 react. I must say Blaze… oh man it dissapointed us, works like shit on mobile, we have no idea why, we’ll have to refactor the app fully :frowning: to React.

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Your Meteor mobile apps, you don’t happen to be running accounts-facebook on Meteor 1.3+ do you?

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@nicholasbydesign
Hi I can confirm that it works. The app I’m talking about is that Blaze app (which runs very bad) running on 1.4.1.2. Nothing additional was done. It just worked out of the box. You can find the app: Mindclash on google play.

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Regarding knowing something without studying… huh ? I really don’t understand your concern. Maybe you refer to the fact that things need to be more intuitive ?

i probably was not clear in this point. studying means to me what we all did sometimes during the college: forget about the rest of the world and focus on something for a few weeks or months.

a hobbyist with a family and/or a job can’t do it. and from my own point of you view meteor seems too ‘monolithic’ to be split into arguments you can learn in the sparetime over the months or over the years.

meteor, of course, was made to do complicated stuff. if you need a simple script you use bash, python or something like that. you won’t probably create an app to grep a file or calculate md5 hashes, right?
if you want to create an app with meteor you have something ‘complicated’ in your mind, and you will not be able to do it until you study javascript and meteor.

this is just my opinion, of course, and i’ll be glad to find i’m wrong: i’m in the bad condition of having both a family and a job and i can’t find weeks or months to dedicate to js and meteor study.

Meteor changed way too fast. We now think it’s solid. Embraced NPM world + Modular Code + React. These decisions completely changed it and we think it’s going to be LTS.

let’s hope so!

Well this is another issue we want to address. We want to teach people how to build their own structure and scale it, not give them a bunch of folders which are going to stay empty until they actually use it. Teach a man how to fish not give him a fish sort of approach.

ok, but application structure is a part of the fishing rod, not the fish! please give me a complete fishing rod… and if i find it’s not good for me, i’ll modify it once i’ve been able to fish!
please provide a full application structure, if some folders will be empty after the app is finished, i promise i will delete them!

Be serious, just do a bash alias and name it however you want!

oh, i wish it was that simple!! can you guess how many times a newbie like me types ‘metero’ on google search and github?!? my backspace key is consumed!!

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This and the fact that we don’t see more blog updates from MDG bother me… it really fells like MDG is saying goodbye to Meteor.

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