I hadn’t bothered to look in ziggit’s “All categories” and notice the “Docs” category, which doesn’t get a lot of activity. Many have done such a great job documenting their experiences and useful patterns, and two threads in that category, Zig Learning Resources and Code Patterns look like useful resources that require(d) TLC. (Indeed, the helpful zig “community” is often touted as one of its strengths.) Of course, its long journey to 1.0 stability is often touted as a weakness (though I’m one who embraces the long journey as “healthy”). These are the backdrops to my brainfart here…
I’m fairly new. I recently collected some intel to try to codify a pattern or two. I encountered lots of dated material (much of which still works, but…). I’m not one who has my own bloggish “place” to exhibit my wonderful findings to the world. I’m mostly content with explorations that result in a fairly “clear” post or two, in the “Help” or “Explain” categories here on ziggit. And most of the helpful finds along my journey were in posts of this sort.
But, I do feel like cryo-freezing my findings, in public, in a slightly different way. I’d like to try a slightly longer, more thorough explanation, e.g., of a given pattern/pseudo-documentation, but I don’t want to “bother” everybody in the “Explain” or “Help” categories. My idea would be: this “post” would likely be quickly discarded by normal consumers on ziggit, but would be potentially “found” by searchers. When found, the find would be more “hardened” than an exploration in “Explain” or “Help”, and might have very few replies (replies might be criticisms to help harden the top-post). The top-post would be potentially edited, to remain somewhat up-to-date, but, even more importantly, it would be CLEARLY STATED what version of zig it referenced. My recent 0.16 thoughts should be immediately discardable by perusing eyes that really need their 0.15 code to work. Likewise, an 0.29 user might suspect my post on an 0.16-related use-case to be out-of-date. Maybe. Unless it was updated. But those perusing eyes should be able to make that judgment call right away.
My vision might be for another category, or for a particular use of the “Docs” category, in which posts tended to be the result of exploration elsewhere in a ziggit thread (or possibly elsewhere altogether), vetted and curated, so to speak. A post would be carefully constructed, in any event, and would not have to shy away from being on the longer side, as it would be dismissed quickly by most who were not in the market. Importantly, a post would be topped with some specified preliminaries, like a clear title/subtitle and zig version reference. Indeed, a poster should submit to criticisms of the title and top material, to make those best, and other criticisms might influence the editing of the top post, to make it great.
I also think such posts would work best targeting specific use-cases, and not bleeding over too much, or becoming too broad. And they wouldn’t be collections of links to lots of great resources (the couple of posts I referred to, above, in Docs, are great - there’s a place for that, but my vision for this would be otherwise). Instead, posts would hopefully be clear, constrained, and educational. They might go deep, but would not attempt to be too broad. By “deep”, I’m envisioning something like: I. a slim debug variant, II. added better error handling, … VII. all things considered. I like detail, but don’t think tons of detail is right for the main zig documentation, that tries to fit on one page, and often the best documentation is in people’s blog posts or in ziggit, deep within a thread somewhere, after details have been worked out and some consensus has been found. But then, too, when you find those, you have to rely on the date to know how “dated” it is. This (new idea) would be kind-of a “landing place” for “live” documentation - disparate, grass-roots, decentralized, …. yet peer-reviewed, curated, more thoughtful than whatever landed in the last post of a “how-to”ish thread.
But… I’m new. This idea might be pretty stupid… or it might already be implemented somewhere. I’m just one who is not sure where to land my “final thoughts” after an exploration. I’m sure they’re not even “final”, since they regard 0.16, anyway, which is still very un-final. But as-of today, and they’ve had some time to marinate and get criticism and feel like they want to live in a slightly more appropriate home. So this idea came to mind.
Thanks for your reflections.