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Hetzner Online chitchat
Hetzner_OL
Member, Provider, Top Provider
in Providers
Hey everyone, I've started this discussion as a place where I can post little bits of Hetzner-related news.
So here's the first one. We just added a new interview to our website featuring the CTO of Talkwalker, the social media monitoring service.
And, in case anyone hasn't heard, we now have a Hetzner Community set up for posting tutorials. The best thing is that you can earn up to €50 in credit on your Hetzner account for each tutorial. So if you've recently done a project that you think other users might find useful, write it up and send it over to our Community manager.
Comments
@Hetzner_OL is prem
Seems like DigitalOcean's community tutorials?
Please keep it clean, @Hetzner_OL is prem.
Things said in this thread should have not been said.
All prem providers have digitalocean tutorials. Personally for me linode have better tuts.
What makes a good tutorial, would you say? What specific qualities do you look for? --Katie
@Hetzner_OL
a bit offbeat to mention but I guess you need some good English speaking staff at the support level so that the replies can be more sensible and useful. I love Hetzner, your service is topnotch but lately I experienced rather blunt and "thrown over" replies by your staff, it seemed as if they had hard time understanding the question in the first place.
Good Luck!!!
Someone changed their avatar and i almost had a heart attack thinking they banned Katie. -_- *goes for a sight check'up*
Mainly a tutorial that is to the point, but explains what every line does in the process. This allows for end-user tinkering with the tutorial, while not only telling the end user HOW to achieve a certain thing, but also WHY a certain thing is achieved through these steps.
Good tutorial is tested tutorial. If hetz writes tutorial, it must be tested on their machines and OS. That's a prem tuts.
Decent writing skills and technical accuracy for instructions are key. I like them to not be broad, but to be narrow like "How to install _____ on Ubuntu 18.04." Don't try to make one tutorial fit a bunch of variables that change the process, make multiple tutorials.
The second key is commitment. Be committed to updating them when something changes so that one is inaccurate later, or add relevant data to them as needed, no matter how old they are.
This. A hundred times this. Make it teach-by-example, not just be an IKEA assembly manual for servers.
That's your oppinion, as a provider. Most people that actually use these tutorials prefer it to be an assembly manual.
I'm not a (hosting) provider, I'm a tutor. And I am well aware what people "prefer", but that doesn't mean that they actually learn anything useful from it - they generally come away from assembly manuals with 0 long-term knowledge gained, which is a waste of time.
People prefer assembly manuals because they're easy to follow without thinking, while promising to teach people things and making them feel accomplished. They just don't actually do the "teaching things" part.
"Hi, I'm hungry, I'd like a hamburger please."
Nah man, you don't want a hamburger. Here let me teach you how to raise a cow, and in a few years you can have all the meat you want!
No, they accept it to get a task done, if they needed a tutorial in the first place then it suggests they would benefit far more from the explanation of why they need to do something rather than just doing it.
Except unlike eating a burger, server maintenance is an ongoing task, and so you do actually need to learn how your own setup works.
Why is it that people who try to use analogies as arguments, always come up with analogies that aren't even remotely similar to the point of discussion? It's tiring.
No you don't, wtf? You just get hacked and start sending spam and hosting phishing sites, get suspended, then you make angry raging all-caps fake reviews on WHT about it
"WTF, I followed the tutorial exactly, now my server is down, fuck you x tutorial provider, why didn't you tell me what may happen. Now I have to figure out what this error message means, WTF, stupid tutorial does not even work".
Exactly.
Yes it would be cool if people actually care about how stuff works. Most don't.
That's the real truth for most.
More like: Sure, I'll tell you how to make one. Start with a bun. You might want to lightly toast it to prevent it becoming soggy from the sauce. Add some lettuce for a change in texture during the meal. Pickles bring up the acidity level of the entire thing. Add sauce to taste, too much and your entire burger will taste like sauce, too little and you will just taste a slightly boring piece of meat.
Cooking the meat is delicate: To get it medium-rare (the temperature preferred by most people), you would need to cook it until the inside is x degrees C. Use a meat thermometer to measure this. For well-done you should cook it until y degrees C. The main difference here being that medium-rare preserves some of the tasty juices from the meat, while well-done makes your burger slightly more girlfriend-friendly (no redness).
The above is a tutorial I would consider good. Now compare it to a step-by-step assembly manual:
Toast the buns. Add some lettuce, some pickles and sauce to taste. Cook the burger for 3 minutes on each side. Assemble burger. Eat.
The first tutorial gives you way more insight into what is actually happening, and allows you to adjust it to your needs. You can still read through it like it were an assembly instruction, but the more skilled readers will be able to use it for customization and understanding.
Edit2: Damn, now I'm hungry.
So what's more apropos then? Install apache with
apt install apacheor is that too easy and the "real l33t" use Arch and compile the binaries themselves?Educating the masses is an admirable goal but most people just want the job done and really don't care for walls of text to get there. Your instructions would just get a TLDR and instead of educating people you end up with no one even starting to read it.
Look over some of the DO tutorials and then read the comments and questions. Almost every answer is in the text of the tutorial but people read the title and jump to the comments with "Do it for me!!" things.
I get where you're coming from, I'm from the world of O'Reilly animal books on the wall. Have a question, read the book. It's not like that anymore.
Provide both approaches - recipe howto and detailed howto - and LET people choose the kind of tutorial they want.
The important word here is CHOICE.
What are you even talking about? Noone here is suggesting hand-compiling binaries. What we're suggesting is that a tutorial should actually explain the reason for the instructions it gives.
I feel like you're just arguing for the sake of arguing here.
That is bullshit. This stuff is literally my job. It works absolutely fine, and the vast majority of people are interested in learning the reason behind things, if it is explained well.
Books aren't a good model for learning most things either. They're linear, and most topics aren't.
Heh, you do know what the PH in my name stands for, right?
Is it that you have a sour personality, or is it that you're very base-ic?
Pretty Hopeless?
Oh, are you one of those "Do you know who I am?" types. Some fun to come.
Nah, I actually support users that have never touched linux in their lives and introduce them to cli, daemons, networking, embedded systems, iot... On the scale of 100,000 users or so. @jar knows who I am.
Some of the responses though are quite humorous. Not on the level of WSS shitposting though, he had style and grace. Was quite cerebral about it. The stuff around here now is the same old, same old.
a bit offbeat to mention but I guess you need some good English speaking staff at the support level so that the replies can be more sensible and useful. I love Hetzner, your service is topnotch but lately I experienced rather blunt and "thrown over" replies by your staff, it seemed as if they had hard time understanding the question in the first place.
I'm not 100% sure what you mean with "thrown over". Maybe you meant that one of our support staff mis-used a standard text in some way. (?) Or maybe something similar to "thrown together" (?), meaning, done in a quick or sloppy way. (?)
I'm sorry that there's been some issues with the English in your tickets. We definitely don't want our tickets to come off as blunt. If you still have your hands on any of these ticket numbers, would you mind passing them on to me via a direct message? As the company's in-house English teacher, I try to prevent these kinds of situations from happening. Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.