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Comment by mistermann | Hacker News Reader

Considering there are probably many thousands of developer hours invested in this, I hope Fog Creek invests ten or thirty hours into making some quick and dirty youtube videos showing starting from scratch and building out a a few full apps with persistence, some integrations, etc so we can see what that involves. I still don't completely understand what GoMix is exactly from the video shown here.

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No, please, not a video — this is the most inefficient way of conveying information about a product aimed at developers. Just write a well-structured text tutorial.

I have noticed that a lot of young people have never learned to read fast or skim large documents.

My guess is that is the reason we're tortured with hours long videos with very little content.

Young person here! (at least I hope I still count!)

My anecdotal data point: the homepage only seemed to have a video explanation, I dropped off right then because I didn't want to watch a 2 minute video about how this works.

And it's not searchable!

When I search a page I'm looking for a description and a bit of context. You might be able to search a video thanks to autotranscripts. Then you have to scrub to be sure the keyword is in the correct context.

is that why there's so many videos these days, sounds plausible - I agree they make skimming very difficult. I think videos are cheaper to make to, just record a session and talk over it.

While I agree the numbers seem to be on the side of videos as far as I can tell.

Honestly I would like if they did both. Sometimes I like to just listen to videos while I'm doing other things and sometimes I like to be able to just skim through an article.

For "getting a feel", I find video is fine. For actual learning, I agree not so efficient, but video can be excellent for deciding whether a person is interested in digging deeper.

"efficient" is an overloaded term, and depending on your meaning it's not something everyone's pursuing.

Many of the example apps have a step-by-step guide embedded in the project (see the Setup.md file) e.g. Alexa: https://gomix.com/#!/project/alexa-skill Parse: https://gomix.com/#!/project/parse-server Slack: https://gomix.com/#!/project/slack-bot

But we'll be sure to work on some video examples - I appreciate people learn in different ways. For a quick overview of Gomix, see https://gomix.com/about/

Ditto. This is my second or third exposure to this project and I'm still not sure what the heck it is, and what the value add is. I understand things like setting up DBs, wiring up a front and back end, etc... But this? I don't get it. It seems like it's supposed to be an easy to use, but powerful and extensible, way to build apps, but it doesn't necessarily look any easier. And it looks complex in its own way.

So yeah, I'd like a really robust tutorial (text, preferably, I don't like to sit and watch videos) which shows the creation of a full featured web app with persistent data storage, and a dynamic front end. Something with robust functionality so we can see how something like that is built.

Yep, this is a good idea. We've been holding off so that we can use the community's actual creations as the examples, and that's what we'll feature when we make clearer introductions to Gomix. Some will be videos, some will be written out, and maybe we'll do other formats as well.

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