Guide Post Improvement

Contributors
1

Continuing the discussion from:
https://forum.freecodecamp.org/t/freecodecamp-challenge-guide-find-the-longest-word-in-a-string/16015/49

Y’all probably know that I’m not a huge fan of having the Guide Post articles on the forum.

Having static code examples hosted in a separate location from the challenges is a recipe for out of date example code.

Also, there just aren’t a lot of good tools to make a PR type workflow for approving modifications or updates to the solutions.

Honestly, if I was creating this Guide Post stuff from scratch, I’d host it in a website deployed from a Git repo where users and mods could make PRs to improve or update solutions and could create issues to flag out of date or confusing solutions.

With more modern tools, it is possible to test these solutions regularly and automatically against the curriculum and flag issues with out of date code. I’ve done a lot of work professionally with that sort of thing for Julia, Rust, and Python and would be interested in a project to do something similar here. It’s a fair bit of work, but it provides better quality documentation and user manual/guides with a more robust review process that ultimately results in less work down the road.

We get a better product out the other end with easier maintenance and transparency, and its an example to our campers of modern best practices for code examples in documentation.

2

Didn’t it used to be a wiki type site incorporated into our primary repo?

3

I think so. I don’t know how easy it is to do automatic code example testing in that sort of environment though.

4

Ah, so apparently there will only be one acceptable solution on each step of the new curriculum, making the guide post obsolete in the future and this possibly not worth the effort.

Then again, I imagine we will still have the coding prep challenges in the future. It might be worth having good solutions and a good process for those challenges.

But that still will take a while to arrive, so the question still stands of how we ensure that the guide post articles have good quality, up to date solutions. As it stands, we have a lot of iffy quality solutions that can be more confusing than helpful.

5

I do think that having the guide posts here on the forum helps drive traffic.

6

Yeah, I agree that is a big benefit of having the solutions link over to here. We just don’t have a good quality maintenance process right now, so some of our solutions are teaching bad code.

7

Can you elaborate, does this mean that people have to solve the challenge in one particular way (“use a for loop, solving it with .forEach will cause the tests to fail”)?

8

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