Meteor Tutorials (The Plan) - We need you

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32

Would be great just to start with the React as a front-end, other choices can be add later.
Best way to have feedback would be to prepare some teaser or pilot demo tutorial.

33

I just can’t look past the fact that react is made and owned by Facebook who can sue you and / or take your app offline of they feel that you’re not using react in the way they prefer. that’s just to much of a risk to take if you’re intending to make your react app your income source. Many companies are dropping react because of this.
Blaze had never failed to run well for me even in large scale apps, so if your app is performing like crap, I don’t think you can blame blaze for this, I’d look at refactoring and cleaning up…
Angular 2 is going to be the duck’s nuts soon too, ignoring that fact can also be fatal when trying to future proof…

34

Really?

It looks to me that FB is forging a sweet set of tools (from GraphQL to Messenger bot SDKs) precisely to allow companies/developer to access the largest private network in the world in innovative ways.

35

Stop spreading this bullshit. Learn about their BSD license and Patent Rider in depth. Also here is the LICENSE: https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/LICENSE

Pls only make such claims backing them up by evidence. Pls let’s not start a “flame war” about this. This is about Meteor, let’s keep it that way.

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36

As much as I do prefer to use Vue I agree with you and think its best to start small and stick with a single framework that is currently the most popular in the Meteor community. Currently that is React.

I’m sure that if the site allows people to contribute then someone will start adding their own videos for the other front-end frameworks.

I personally think that a site like this would greatly benefit the community so whatever the outcome I’ll be happy! :slight_smile:

37

Surely amnesia isn’t THAT prevalent here? https://forums.meteor.com/t/react-facebook-patent-a-problem

Not to look into this before committing all your efforts to an innovative project could prove painful…

38

Where are you getting your evidence from? I thought it was still Blaze.

39

Yep, good call. Blaze and React are probably just as popular as each other at the moment.

However my thoughts came from this video stating a move away from blaze which I assumed was brought about by a majority community consensus:

Your reply also brings to mind this interesting post which put Blaze just ahead of React back in May showing that it is (or at least was) very popular!
https://forums.meteor.com/t/who-uses-what-blaze-angular-react-vue-poll?source_topic_id=30431

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40

I was there and in the thick of it when the decision was announced in around December of 2015. It looks like you might have joined this forum sometime after the decision and fallout.

AFAIK MDG’s switching primary focus to React was not by Meteor-community majority-consensus. Maybe React was catching on outside the Meteor community, but it was still early days for React back then.

There are several posts on this forum speculating and even some where MDG stated why the decision was made.

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41

Updates. The first chapter is almost done. We found a way to teach people the fundamentals: methods, subscriptions, accounts without any view layer! So, no blaze, no react, nothing in the first chapter. Just focusing on the core, or at least, what we see as the core. Can’t wait to share it with you :smiley:

We had to drop the idea of video tutorials. Long story short here were the winning arguments:

  • Ability to easily copy/paste, without having to leave a description with a lot of snippets, our tutorial’s idea was to “force” people to put in practice everything they learn, bc that’s how you remember it.
  • A large majority of people do not watch video tutorials. We interogated a lot of self-taught developers, and they all said they always avoided video tutorials, bc they taught it was a waste of time
  • You can search the tutorial, if something stopped making sense at some point and you want to remember
  • Ability to follow tutorial while listening to music :smiley:

Will keep you posted. Cheers.

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42

This is great. Is there any link to a teaser? :slight_smile:

I agree that written tutorials are way faster to produce and easier to update compared to video tutorials.

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43

Awesome @diaconutheodor, keep up the good work! Shame about the videos, maybe I’m the minority in that respect :wink:

Looking forward to a taster :yum:

44

Hey don’t lose hope, Video Tutorials may still be possible, but they will be based on the text tutorials, it means that I or someone else will make the videos with those tutorials open and go step by step with you.

Another powerful reason for having tutorials like this. Is that it will allow people to submit their changes via GitHub: Community Driven Tutorials. That’s the bomb, if something is unclear, people can come up with better ways to improve what was said there => flexibility and incremental development of tutorials.

Anyways, long story short, we have a demo:
www.meteor-tuts.com Please please please don’t judge it yet, it’s in it’s infancy, it was done in haste and it does not pay too much attention to details just yet.

We are now working with some people that have close to zero experience, and will go together with them to clarify things that may be vague, and we will continue to update.

We are going to have it ready by the end of this week. And ofcourse, it can suffer changes throughout his life-time because we’ll allow people to make changes via GitHub, we’re gonna merge the changes.

We also plan on adding comments via disqus at every page, so people can ask questions and discuss them there.

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45

I love the meteor tutorial thanks for writing it. Reason I jumped into Meteor

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46

I did start with Vue recently and it’s really good. Because in react you have to decide which action manager to use, how to organize CSS in your components, etc. If you new in react and have no clue how to bundle it all together it’s quite complicated, because everyone in react world pushing his solutions and approaches forward. And you have to try everything to understand what’s really good for you. In vue it’s different, everything already there by default. You have to read official docs and you ready to build. I would suggest Vue to everyone who used to like blaze as its replacement.

And one of most greatest feature in vue for me, that I can use jade and stylus again.

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47

I like vue! Honestly, it has ingredients from Blaze, Angular and React + It’s also modular. Very very good. + it has JSX support!

I really like it :slight_smile: And I understand why people like it too!

However, the view layer should no longer be a concern for Meteor. Let Meteor be the reactive data-system, and let there be packages that offer integration with any view-layer. Honestly, in React, I only use “createContainer” from Meteor and that’s it, and something I hacked for methodContainer:

And that’s how simple integrations should be, hook in the Tracker, and some helper methods for method calls :smiley: and some hooks for grapher ofcourse!

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48

Great Job! I’ll be sure to share it on Twitter.

I would also just like to re-emphasize some tutorials for doing mobile development with Meteor. It’s cross platform attraction is a big selling point among beginners.

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Yes very true, we have a fully dedicated chapter on Mobile coming (this was based on the community’s feedback), for now we just want to get this perfect :slight_smile: and understandable by anyone.

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50

Hi @diaconutheodor, to reply to your original question, here are the things i got hung up on when learning meteor:

  • Coding for scale: I had no idea how to do this, and honestly blaze and meteor didn’t help a lot
  • When to care about various issues. For example, coding for scale. Learn shortcuts first and improve it later. Autopublish is a great example of this done right. If you’re in a hackathon, autopublish saves your life.
  • Server schema design: how do you decide when to create separate collections, etc… I still struggle with this sometimes. Mongo sometimes makes this difficult. Like if you ever need to report on a field, make sure it’s not nested in a document or you’re going to have a really hard time.
  • “What the heck is [insert thing here]”. I found myself saying this a lot at the beginning, like “what is a router”? The concept of JS web pages and routers is simple once you get it, but coming from HTML it was really weird. There may be other things like that that would puzzle people coming from non-js worlds, like “what is node”, “what is NPM”, “what is react”, “what is reactive”, etc…
  • How to pick the right package. I still don’t have an answer for this. I often pick the wrong, unsupported package, and end up writing something myself or choosing a different solution. This part sucks. Now I always read issues before committing to a package that doesn’t work right away.
  • It would be cool to have a high-level roadmap of what I should learn and when, with an explanation of what that means and why it’s good. E.g., when and why should I learn about using microservices? This could be done on a single page very easily.

Thanks for spearheading this!

-Julian

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51

It is the story of my life :smile:

1 Like