Tips / Tip of the day / Today I Learned category

Site Feedback
1

@Laurent.O and @capfredf suggested a category for sharing tips / Today I Learned* type content.

If there are no objections I’ll create a new category on Sunday UK time. (If it becomes too noisy please remember you can mute a category in your preferences.)

(* Learnt? IDK and English is meant to be my first language)

And before I forget: what should it be called?

  • Tips
  • Tip of the day
  • Today I learnt
  • Tips/Today I learnt (I’m not sure if categories support forward slash)
  • TIL
  • ToTD
  • Other(please reply)

0 voters

5 Likes
2

Example content courtesy of @Laurent.O

image
image1242×1331 201 KB

3 Likes
3

See https://ellii.com/blog/learned-vs-learnt

My thoughts about the name:

  • If I hadn't read it in the post, I wouldn't have any idea what "ToTD" meant.
  • Along the same lines, I learned the meaning of "TIL" only relatively recently, so I guess we shouldn't rely on people generally knowing the acronym.
  • What if I learned something I find interesting, but am not sure if it's interesting for others? If the category is called "Today I learned", I would be more motivated to share my experience than if the category had "tip"/"tips" in it. I wouldn't know if my experience is "worth" to be a "tip" for others.
  • Additionally, "tip of the day" could suggest that you shouldn't post in the category if someone else has posted on the same day. (Yes, this may sound silly, but I tend to think about all the ways something can be misunderstood. :slight_smile: )

So if the goal is to encourage posts even if their content is well-known to experienced Racketeers, I'd rather call the category "Today I learned ..." than anything with "tip" in it, and especially not "pro tip", which was mentioned on Slack.

But these are just my thoughts and I'm interested in others. :slight_smile:

3 Likes
4

There would have been even more to learn if the TIL was rephrased as a question, and we already have a "Questions" category.

For example:

I noticed that s-exp->fasl can be much faster when writing the data through a port instead of obtaining the FASL value and writing it to disk separately. Why is this the case?

So, does anyone here know why this is faster? :slight_smile:

Alex.

3 Likes
5

I'm firmly in favour of this. A lot of my journey with Racket has ended up being me looking for the blog post that helps me understand how to use form x in the language. In a bunch of cases, I documented my own learning so I can recall what happened later.

It probably also hints at why Learning racket/scheme - how do you get to the practicing stage? is such a monster thread. That those tips ease the journey from "this looks like what I wanted but am I doing it right?" to "I remember seeing that neat snippet... Yes that's good to know".

3 Likes
6

Yes, using existing categories may be a better choice: we have categories for both Questions & Answers and Show & Tell, and Discourse supports tags so users can tag posts in any category as today-i-learnt.

So I'll delay creating a distinct category for a today-i-learnt category for now, with the suggestion users posting a 'today I learnt' tip to any category use the tag today-i-learnt rather than #TIL.

The comments that acronyms like TIL, ToTD, being opaque to new users is a valuable point. Let's try avoid uncommon acronyms to keep this site welcoming to new users.

Best regards,
Stephen

PS like categories, users can mute tags in preferences so they don't get notifications for tags that are not relevant to them.

PPS There were a number of great tips on the Racket Slack but sadly I can no longer find them :frowning:

PPPS

I'd like to know this too! :slight_smile:

1 Like
7

When you obtain a FASL value and write it to disk, internally, s-exp->fasl has to create a bytes output port and write to it, than return the contents to the user. Than the user writes the result to disk. Effectively, the data is written twice and memory is allocated to hold the value.

That's my guess anyway.
Alex.

1 Like