
Google I/O 2018 codelabs - marcacohen
https://codelabs.developers.google.com/io2018
======
mathnode
It feels so inhuman. Like everything google, there are no names, no faces, no
citations. Just walls of information and puzzles. Khanacademy has gone a
similar direction; they have removed the human element from learning and are
not hiding that fact. Even scam emails at least try to pretend they are
genuinely sent from humans.

My favourites are still coursera and MIT OCW. They may not be the most perfect
web technologies, but the landing pages right now contain people, faces,
names, places and history.

I think this is the dystopian model of learning. We are faceless droids to
them completing emotionless tasks. And to what end? So that one day a future
generation might be able to qualify for a job that the AI is not capable of
doing? If my grandchildren solve enough puzzles in the VR-web-o-sphere they
will qualify to be blessed by, The Google. THE Google!

~~~
some_account
I prefer this to marketing faces.

Marketing faces are random actors and models, not having anything to do with
the product, so it's a dishonest relationship from the start. It's designed to
manipulate you into thinking the product is more genuine and is used by people
you can look up to, and thats why you miss it now. You miss being manipulated.

A colleague of mine is bashing open source a lot because it sometimes has
humor, like 'ooops a funny thing happened' or 'taking the poison pill' instead
of 'We apologize for this error, please contact customer support bla bla'.

The windows attitude is also 'sit back, we are taking care of you' while the
Linux experience is more genuine, less polished.

~~~
marcacohen
The lack of a human touch on this site is simply a function of our priorities.
This site was developed by volunteers, in the proverbial Google 20% style, and
we've put very little effort into marketing. Admittedly, it could stand a bit
more warmth, but, for better or worse, we've always put our focus on the
content -- giving developers a fast track to building something fun.

~~~
prepend
Take a look at the open source projects parent mentions. Do you think they are
putting their focus on marketing over content? OSS sites are made by real
volunteers. While this project is neat and is a side project, all the
contributors are paid by Google, right? So it’s perhaps possible to get 21%
time. Or convince someone with some empathy to volunteer as well. The problem
has been solved by many community driven projects.

Apache has amazing content as well as a “human” touch.

This site demonstrates that someone put some effort into the design, so
perhaps the easy solution is to spend even more time on marketing and skip the
design-o-tron.

~~~
marcacohen
> Do you think they are putting their focus on marketing over content?

I never said, nor meant to imply, judgements about any other projects. I was
simply sharing the choices we've made based on our priorities and resources.

Personally I'm comfortable with those choices because they've resulted in
literally hundreds (>650 at my last count) of nice looking and fun to use
coding tutorials. I'm also quite proud of the authoring flow we built: these
codelabs are generated directly from Google Docs (you don't have to write a
line of code to produce them) and we've open sourced the tools for others to
use
([https://github.com/googlecodelabs/tools](https://github.com/googlecodelabs/tools)).

------
TheAceOfHearts
The mobile version of this site is seriously crippled; it doesn't allow
filtering and runs pretty janky. Whenever you scroll it activates the ripple
animation for one of the cards, which is very annoying.

On desktop... It's also very bad. Has it seriously gotten this bad at Google?
Maybe I should call for an interview. If you're going to hijack navigation, at
least get it right. Most modern web browsers have tabs, allowing you to keep
multiple links open at the same time. A common usage pattern is to browse a
large collection and open the links of interest in tabs, in order to work your
way through them later. If you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, you'll
usually use the middle button to open links in a new tab. However, if you have
a trackpad you'll use cmd+click on macOS or ctrl+click on Windows and
GNU/Linux to open links in a new tab. This is the default behavior and it
works perfectly out of the box.

The navigation issue is easily resolved by opening the console and replacing
the navigate function. Setting it to an empty function does the trick:

    
    
        app.navigate = () => {}.
    
    

The annoying ripple animation can be removed with CSS:

    
    
        var style = document.createElement('style');
        style.type='text/css';
        style.appendChild(document.createTextNode('paper-ripple { display: none; }'));
        document.body.appendChild(style);
    

Another bug: in the tutorials, navigating to a different step preserves your
scroll position instead of resetting to the top as expected.

Their WebAssembly Physics and DOM objects tutorial [0] is worth checking out
if you wanna see a quick example of WASM in action.

[0] [https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/hour-
chipmun...](https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/hour-
chipmunk/index.html)

~~~
4x3l
Thanks for the feedback! I dislike the ripple animations, too. This is coming
from Material design implementation in Polymer components 1.0.

Hijacking navigation wasn't very nice either, absolutely agree. Too bad we
didn't have time to drop it.

All of this is going to be replaced soon. Codelabs site is moving away from
Polymer. Working on the new implementation in
[https://github.com/googlecodelabs/codelab-
elements](https://github.com/googlecodelabs/codelab-elements). Contributions
are most welcome, of course.

------
hdlothia
Interesting that I couldn't find any golang content

