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Dead Tutorials

Posted on  by Tommy Ku

This post is more than 2 years old, it may contain outdated information

Last night I was writing abstracts for my blog posts dated back from Decemember 2013 all the way to July 2018. Some of the tutorials I wrote showcased the changes I have gone through — I no longer develop in Laravel and AngularJS (except the few freelance projects I am still maintaining). Platforms/technologies I used such as OpenShift v2, Physical Web and AppCache came and gone too.

As a forward-looking species that we are, it’s easy to forget what framework, platform or techniques we left behind as we are busy chasing the trendy new framework and methodologies (who is still using jQuery/waterfall process?). But there is one thing that the Internet still remember — tutorial.

Take for example those tutorials in my blog: the one about sending email on Gmail via SMTP , or the one about resolving syntax conflict between AngularJS and Twig , are they still relevant today? To my surprise, yes, somehow visitors found their ways to these blog posts. And if my post solves their problem, then perfect! Otherwise, these are just static HTML files sitting around doing nothing harmful.

Although for multiple times I have been thinking if I should delete blog posts I thought are obsolete, I didn’t delete any of them. Some people might still find these posts useful, such as when they maintain a legacy system. More importantly, they serve as a history of my personal development in the field, and what I know of back then. As time goes by, these tutorial may become so obsolete that nobody would care to read them anymore, like tens of thousands of other blog posts, lurking around the tombstone of a dead technology. Before that, tutorials would live on, and even live past the technologies they originally was written for.

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About the author

Profile pic of Tommy Ku

Tommy Ku, a Hong Kong-based Software Engineer experienced developing PHP and Java-based web solutions and passionate in Web technology.

Also a hobbyist digital and film photographer.