The Origin Story

There's plenty of educational content for open source data tools. Some of it is free, some of it is paid. That's all fine, but not all content is equally meaningful. In particular, the maintainers of calmcode experience the following fustrations:

  1. There's a lot of hype. The new tools get a lot of attention while the old tricks still work just fine.
  2. The people who write the documentation typically don't understand what it is like not to understand it.
  3. Profit seeking sometimes causes incentives that don't align with a good learning. It can often feel like more effort is spent on marketing than the actual lesson plan.

All of this feels like a real shame. Learning tech should be a encouraged, but right now it can cause a lot of learning anxiety. There's an overload of content but a lack of direction. No sense of calm. This website tries to give a small remedy to this situation by sticking to a few principles.

Principles

1. Calm Content

Tech needs to have less skill anxiety. We don't want to overpromise or even suggest that you "must have these skills". That would be non-sense. Instead we just hope to show you tools and thoughts that might make your professional life more enjoyable.

No experience points, paid-for certificates or pressure, just short videos and code snippets that respect your time.

2. Patience and Iteration

Great blogposts are the result of an inspiring idea, not a deadline. Educational content is the same.

We want the contributors of this project to delight in the idea of finding the best analogies, metaphors and examples for code and algorithms. You cannot force this by having a team work on this project full time. Instead you let it happen by having a small group of trusted folks do their day to day work while keeping track of lessons they learn along the way that can be shared.

3. Show, don't tell.

A lot of educational content out there is lengthy because the content 'tells' rather than 'shows'. One could explain how an oven works, but this won't teach you how to cook. Similarily, we could teach you just the syntax of a tool, but this won't be enough to use it meaningfully in practice.

Instead you should start from scratch show how it's done. This is a more reproducible attitude, especially to somebody who is learning in a hurry.

Experiment

This project is an experiment and we like it that way. It will calmly evolve over time and we'll see where it goes. There is no rush.

Because of this attitude we don't have to consider investors with unhealthy growth ambitions. Instead, we can keep it simple and make sure that the incentives can align towards calm content. We think this is great for the people interested in learning as well as the maintainers.

We hope you enjoy the experiment. If you have any feedback, please let us know.