Hetzner Online chitchat

Hetzner_OL

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.

Jord

@Hetzner_OL is prem

Developer_HZH

Seems like DigitalOcean's community tutorials?

Jord

Please keep it clean, @Hetzner_OL is prem.

Things said in this thread should have not been said.

LTniger

@Developer_HZH said:
Seems like DigitalOcean's community tutorials?

All prem providers have digitalocean tutorials. Personally for me linode have better tuts.

Hetzner_OL

What makes a good tutorial, would you say? What specific qualities do you look for? --Katie

mehargags

@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!!!

xaoc

Someone changed their avatar and i almost had a heart attack thinking they banned Katie. -_- *goes for a sight check'up*

teamacc

@Hetzner_OL said:
What makes a good tutorial, would you say? What specific qualities do you look for? --Katie

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.

LTniger

@Hetzner_OL said:
What makes a good tutorial, would you say? What specific qualities do you look for? --Katie

Good tutorial is tested tutorial. If hetz writes tutorial, it must be tested on their machines and OS. That's a prem tuts.

jar

@Hetzner_OL said:
What makes a good tutorial, would you say? What specific qualities do you look for? --Katie

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.

joepie91

@teamacc said:

@Hetzner_OL said:
What makes a good tutorial, would you say? What specific qualities do you look for? --Katie

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.

This. A hundred times this. Make it teach-by-example, not just be an IKEA assembly manual for servers.

pike

@joepie91 said:
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.

joepie91

@pike said:

@joepie91 said:
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.

PHDan

"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!

Lee

pike said: Most people that actually use these tutorials prefer it to be an assembly manual.

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.

joepie91

@PHDan said:
"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!

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.

hzr

joepie91 said: Except unlike eating a burger, server maintenance is an ongoing task, and so you do actually need to learn how your own setup works.

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

Lee

"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".

pike

@hzr said:
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

Exactly.

Yes it would be cool if people actually care about how stuff works. Most don't.

Lee

pike said: if people actually care about how stuff works. Most don't.

That's the real truth for most.

teamacc

@PHDan said:
"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!

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.

PHDan

So what's more apropos then? Install apache with apt install apache or 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.

DrCornFlakes

Provide both approaches - recipe howto and detailed howto - and LET people choose the kind of tutorial they want.

The important word here is CHOICE.

joepie91

PHDan said: So what's more apropos then? Install apache with apt install apache or is that too easy and the "real l33t" use Arch and compile the binaries themselves?

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.

PHDan said: 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.

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.

PHDan said: 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.

Books aren't a good model for learning most things either. They're linear, and most topics aren't.

PHDan

joepie91 said: 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.

Heh, you do know what the PH in my name stands for, right?

teamacc

@PHDan said:

joepie91 said: 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.

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?

joepie91

@PHDan said:

joepie91 said: 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.

Heh, you do know what the PH in my name stands for, right?

Pretty Hopeless?

Lee

PHDan said: Heh, you do know what the PH in my name stands for, right?

Oh, are you one of those "Do you know who I am?" types. Some fun to come.

PHDan

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.

Hetzner_OL

mehargags said: @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.

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.

Hetzner_OL

I hadn't expected the topic about tutorials to be quite so controversial. Thanks for everyone's feedback. I'll pass it on to our community manager. --Katie

Lee

Hetzner_OL said: I hadn't expected the topic about tutorials to be quite so controversial.

It's LET, we can and will turn everything into a controversy. If we fail to turn a subject into a controversy, then that failure will cause controversy.

TimboJones

@joepie91 said:

@PHDan said:
"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!

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.

Probably because you're venturing off yourself... his analogy was right. It's ironic you're saying this.

I see tutorials "How to install blah", not how to maintain blah. It's like you don't know why Google is popular and only meet people who always click on the second page of Google results.

JoeF

The other day I managed to migrate entirely away from hetzner!

Service was ok. Although customer service was poor Dedi server was hard shutdown without warning to have a ssd installed, could be hard to find the correct ticket system for billing, Dedi ddr3 ram upgrades were crazy expensive and US peering wasn't great.

Cloud VPS were ok though although I could never workout what the extra 1-3€ charges were for on them.

Hetzner_OL

@JoeF Thanks for the feedback. We appreciate it

Hetzner_OL

Hey guys, I just wanted to give you a quick update about our team. We've got a new social media coordinator here at Hetzner in Gunzenhausen, so you'll be seeing her comment more and more frequently here. I'll still pop by every now and then to say "boo" and to keep up-to-date with any drama that's unfolding in the web hosting world. Please give Helena a warm welcome.

LTniger

Hetzner_OL said: so you'll be seeing her comment more and more frequently here

Nice! Does this mean that you (Katie) are stepping down?

Hetzner_OL

Gradually, over time, yeah, I'll be doing less and less social media in the coming months. I wear a couple of hats here at Hetzner. I also do translations from German to English, and teach English classes. Even after Helena is more familiar with everything at Hetzner and LET, I'll still come by.