launch ftw, part 5

Brian Hicks, June 26, 2023

Lesson 4! This one asks things like "What's one thing that people need to know, but don't?" and—I'll be honest here—I don't know them for my chosen audience. I don't really interact with the Ruby/Sorbet crowd outside my coworkers. In fact, that might be a part of why I think it sounds nicer: I don't see any silly drama or encounter many jerks when I'm working in Ruby-land.

In this lesson, they said that Sales Safari would come later, but I think I need to get into it now. I don't have anything better than guessing otherwise! From what I remember from 30x500, the first step is to find places ("watering holes") that people gather, and then to read through forum threads etc. Then look for the things mentioned in the guidebook in today's lesson:

• Pain (3 major types)
  • waste — of time, money, energy, and other resources
  • lack — of knowledge, skill, awareness, time, money, connections, resources
  • feeling — of exhaustion, fear, anger, irritation, stress, isolation, inability, uncertainty
• Value (3 major types)
  • saving — spending less money
  • earning — earning more money
  • psychological — pride, acclaim, confidence, respect, satisfaction, relief, etc

I also remember some specific things to look out for, but that's putting the cart before the horse… first I gotta find watering holes!

Ok, so here's things I know off the top of my head:

• StackOverflow
• the Sorbet users Slack group
• the #ruby channel in my local tech watering hole
• I guess Ruby forums probably will have some buzz around this and RBS (another gradual typing system)
• blog posts

I confirmed those first two on sorbet.org. Let's look at the Ruby community page next:

• mailing lists (maybe! Not gonna get a lot of beginners here in 2023, though.)
• a Ruby discord
• Ruby Central
• conferences
• a list of blogs

OK, those don't seem super helpful off the bat, but I'm sure there's something.

I also took a look at the Sorbet tag on StackOverflow and there's, like, a lot of unanswered questions? Not to mention only 151 questions overall. Is that enough to base something nice off of? (doubt doubt doubt!)

One last place I want to look: Ruby Weekly. Kind of a legendary newsletter! I bet they have a good read on where people are posting. (But update after 15 minutes looking through archives: they don't seem to ever post links to discussions, except very rarely to GitHub issues.)

AHHH yeah, Twitter. Of course Twitter. Programmers are all over there. I didn't even consider it because I've been avoiding it since it became the Muskiverse, but I suppose I can still get some value out of it.

Weird that I can't find any Discourse forums, since it's built on Rails… AH! Ok, there's a Rails Discourse with a few Sorbet results.

All in all, I seem to have two or three really good sources (SO, Slack, Twitter) and a few less-good or maybe more-generic ones. Tomorrow I'm going to sit down and try to find 10 "threads" (even though these aren't forums) that are a) about Sorbet and b) have at least two responses (judging from SO, this might not be easy.)