I've never seen anything at all as interactive & playful as this. Nothing that comes close. All in one, designed to create the experience of DNS. It's in the name: Mess with DNS. That makes it far far far & away different
And I think that makes all the difference. I tend to believe very strongly in hands on experience, think that seeing things happen yourself & getting to play is by far the best way to learn, just incredibly surpassing.
There's a theory of education called Constructivism[1] that is broadly similar. Adherents include folks like Seymore Papert[2], creator of Logo, employee at One Laptop Per Child (which I think is the most interesting & innovative software environment we've ever created, vastly under-appreciated). Projects like Logo are supposed to create that hands on feedback, to make programming not just writing scripts & having programs run, but ways to see the code really execute, to create more interactive modes.
With software eating the world, it is so so so important to me not just to create knowledge, to tell tales of what software is, but to let people have the experience themselves. To create playgrounds to meddle, to mess around. I wish so much that applications could actually show & explain what they are doing, what's inside of them, could reveal their workings, but we're so far away from that Enlightened world, we've fallen into such deep shadows imo.
(Side note, I see things very differently, but I also am disappointed folks would downvote your perspective like this. As for the lack of knowledge/experience, I'd say that most engineers don't have familiarity because there's not a lot of opportunities to set up & learn systems work; most coders spend their time coding, not setting up bits of infrastructure to run code on. You yourself also say "writing the code is the easiest part", which underscores just how complex/inter-related/particular all the systems/infrastructure stuff is, how probable it is engineers might not feel fully competent or brave enough to engage.)
> I've never seen anything at all as interactive & playful as this. Nothing that comes close. All in one, designed to create the experience of DNS. It's in the name: Mess with DNS. That makes it far far far & away different
Oh absolutely! I don't mean to diminish this. The ability to interact and play also works very well for my own learning.
> There's a theory of education called Constructivism[1] that is broadly similar. Adherents include folks like Seymore Papert[2], creator of Logo, employee at One Laptop Per Child (which I think is the most interesting & innovative software environment we've ever created, vastly under-appreciated). Projects like Logo are supposed to create that hands on feedback, to make programming not just writing scripts & having programs run, but ways to see the code really execute, to create more interactive modes.
+100
> With software eating the world, it is so so so important to me not just to create knowledge, to tell tales of what software is, but to let people have the experience themselves. To create playgrounds to meddle, to mess around. I wish so much that applications could actually show & explain what they are doing, what's inside of them, could reveal their workings, but we're so far away from that Enlightened world, we've fallen into such deep shadows imo.
You bring up a good point overall about the lack of interactive materials for engineers/students/interested folks. I also suggest opening up any cloud provider (cheap for playing around is probably better!) and trying these things with services like Traefik (which are easy to configure/play with). Try to do some multi-region failover stuff, observe what happens with different load balancing strategies, that sort of thing. It reminds me a lot of watching videos about setting up IP networks, stuff like Cisco certification material.
You've given me some food for thought on educational materials for sure.
> As for the lack of knowledge/experience, I'd say that most engineers don't have familiarity because there's not a lot of opportunities to set up & learn systems work; most coders spend their time coding, not setting up bits of infrastructure to run code on. You yourself also say "writing the code is the easiest part", which underscores just how complex/inter-related/particular all the systems/infrastructure stuff is, how probable it is engineers might not feel fully competent or brave enough to engage.
Yeah this stuff isn't easy and operational work is often a different skillset than writing code.
And I think that makes all the difference. I tend to believe very strongly in hands on experience, think that seeing things happen yourself & getting to play is by far the best way to learn, just incredibly surpassing.
There's a theory of education called Constructivism[1] that is broadly similar. Adherents include folks like Seymore Papert[2], creator of Logo, employee at One Laptop Per Child (which I think is the most interesting & innovative software environment we've ever created, vastly under-appreciated). Projects like Logo are supposed to create that hands on feedback, to make programming not just writing scripts & having programs run, but ways to see the code really execute, to create more interactive modes.
With software eating the world, it is so so so important to me not just to create knowledge, to tell tales of what software is, but to let people have the experience themselves. To create playgrounds to meddle, to mess around. I wish so much that applications could actually show & explain what they are doing, what's inside of them, could reveal their workings, but we're so far away from that Enlightened world, we've fallen into such deep shadows imo.
(Side note, I see things very differently, but I also am disappointed folks would downvote your perspective like this. As for the lack of knowledge/experience, I'd say that most engineers don't have familiarity because there's not a lot of opportunities to set up & learn systems work; most coders spend their time coding, not setting up bits of infrastructure to run code on. You yourself also say "writing the code is the easiest part", which underscores just how complex/inter-related/particular all the systems/infrastructure stuff is, how probable it is engineers might not feel fully competent or brave enough to engage.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Papert