Web developer tool secrets that shouldn’t be secrets
> Many things heralded as the best thing since sliced bread in presentations and video tutorials are hardly every opened, let alone used.<p>This reminds me of something I heard once... that the first half of Portal (the video game) is basically a giant playable tutorial, and that a lot of video games start off with a tutorial disguised as gameplay, and that this is actually pretty pleasant.<p>The world's gotten pretty good at crafting tutorials disguised as gameplay. Could we do this with dev tools? Has anyone tried to make "VSCode: the game"?<p>Maybe "tip of the day" popups could be restructured as minigames?<p>Possible hurdles I can think of off the top of my head:<p>- a fancy tutorial probably runs into exactly what the author mentions on the next few lines: that adding more documentation doesn't fix things, because most people don't go to the documentation.<p>- In a game it's very easy to tune the tutorial to what you'll later encounter. A dev tool tutorial... every dev's needs are different. I imagine you'd have to structure it as a tutorial for "core functionality", plus separate tutorials for each extension.<p>- In the game context, I'm <i>expecting</i> to do certain actions repetitively. This has the side-effect of refining those skills. In a dev context, repetition is often considered a smell (though, I'd argue even in dev work we pick up a lot of little katas without thinking about it).<p>- Harping on repetition some more... what about the debugging tools that I only need to use once in a blue moon?