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I find it super annoying, this trend where no one wants to write learning documentation anymore, but instead put up a bunch of demo videos and video "training courses."

I don't want to spend 5 minutes watching you do something that would take me 10 seconds to read. I can't search for terms in your video, and I can't use them as a general reference manual. I can't go at my own pace, easily keep my place between devices, enter code as you go, the list of cons goes on and on.

I would rather pay you money for a good eBook (and no, PDFs don't count), than to have the only realistic way to learn about your software be a playlist on your YouTube channel.

This, however, this...

Went to check out Ansible again, because I've heard good things lately and it's been a couple years since I've looked at it.

Took me a while to find their docs because there's almost no mention of anything on the home page except trying Tower for free.

Found the docs. The first item there is the Quick Start Video and I think, "Cool. That's a good use of video, showing off the product."

I dig out some headphones, click play:

"Ansible is a powerful" BOOM!

Enter my email to watch the video?!

Ah, forget it. Maybe I'll see you next time, Ansible.

Comments
  • 3
    I agree with you a thousand times, but Ansible is (really) cool :) I use it to deploy my shell config (zshrc, vimrc, muttrc, openbox config...) on every machine I ssh to :)
  • 2
    @willol Yeah, I really am going to give it an honest go. It's just, the email thing and the overselling of Tower really turned me off. I'm like, "Whoa! You gotta buy me dinner first."

    I probably should've done this as two separate rants, too. A short one on the pay-per-view video and one on video learning.
  • 0
    @LeFlawk

    Or maybe:
    Demosthenes%Tecumseh@freeamerica.org ?
  • 2
    Or maybe
    mail@mail.com' OR WHILE 1=1;
    Just to see what happens haha
  • 1
    Completely agree. If I can't RTFM then it's just super annoying. Scrubbing through videos to find out simply how the damn thing works. Complete pain in the ass.
  • 2
    You can use https://mailinator.com for spam emails lol
  • 1
    I agree with you that video tutorial is no substitute for documentation but Ansible is really well documented so don't get your beef here.
  • 0
    @hjk101 Yeah, I really, really should've made this two separate rants. I didn't mean to imply anything about Ansible's documentation.
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