[Docs Rewrite] Meta-Issue: Overview

This is the parent tracking issue for all the work we’d like to do, and primarily serves to link to the other issues.

I’m initially basing this off my suggested outline for the new docs structure and content. This is absolutely not final, and I expect us to iterate on this a lot as we work through everything.

For now, I’m organizing the top-level task list by category / docs structure section.

Tasks

• Guided Learning Paths (#3591)
• General Content Improvements (#3593)
• “Introduction” section (#3594)
• “Tutorials” section (#3595)
• “Recipes” section (#3596)
• “FAQ” section (#3597)
• “Real World Usage” section (#3598)
• “Using Redux with a UI” section (#3599)
• “Understanding Redux” section (#3600)
• “Style Guide” section (#3601)
• “Other” section and content (#3602)
• Redux Starter Kit section (#3614 )
• Examples (#3917)

Planning / Discussion Topics

• Docs writing guidelines and issue templates (#3609 )
• Ideas from other docs sites and user feedback (#3615 )

Notes

Any pages that are moved around must update our Netlify redirects file so that visitors see the new page.

Questions for Discussion

• Should we keep everything on a single docs-rewrite integration branch, or should we just go ahead and update master piecemeal as we go so that we get the initial benefits? I’m inclined to put changes into master as soon as we’re happy with them.

[markerikson]

Some feedback from a random HN user ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21927109 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21927800 ):

Biggest problem and reason why people (me included at the beginning) don’t like Redux, you should know when you need it and you should use some abstraction layer (eg RTK). One cause could be the docs: while the maintainer try their best to educate a lot (also in this thread paired with interesting link building strategies), there is not quick and easy way to get into Redux. If you start with RTK’s docs, you don’t understand everything. Then, you need to read the Redux docs, then again back and forth. And this just takes too long to grok an actual simple API.

I meant the docs. It’s like decades ago like when you wanted to learn Rails. Then somebody said stop! First learn Ruby… This is not how people learn. There’s too much time between learning and trying, so there’s no proper and face-paced feedback loop. Let’s try to get into somebody’s head who’s ok in react and slowly wants to get into state management but having no clue of nothing:

His mind:

• Ok, where should I start?

• Which is the best? Mobx, redux, just ContextProvider or local state??

The poor guys falls into the rabbit hole and reads Reddit, HN, Github issues for hours, still not sure what to do; 2 hours later

• Ok, let’s try redux, for whatever reason, the maintainers seem to be quite active

The poor guy tries to decide if he should go just with redux/react-redux or rtk; former because it is good to understand the foundation, latter good because just to avoid boilerplate and that’s what this acemark is promoting everywhere. The guy is still overwhelmed and don’t forget doing decision is hard; it’s one of the biggest struggles for humans

• Ok, I guess I need to start with redux because it’s the foundation.

He sees all the theory, new terms, the boilerplate and there’s no fast-paced feedback loop; he just think heck and checks out mobx, 4 hours later

• Man mobx is even more weird, totally unstructured and while mobx’s maintainer seems to be a nice guy, my gut feeling is: stay away

• Let’s check out npmtrends, oh great, npmtrends shows that people also don’t like mobx, cool, it has much less traction, decision made, nice

• So, let’s try redux again, maybe this time I start with RTK

We know what happens, RTK has better feedback loops but w/o the basic knowledge of redux he will struggle, 6 hours later after jumping back and forth the both docs

• Lets stop here, tomorrow is another day.

He is out of flow, motivation is down, the next day he doesn’t continue because the whole experience didn’t feel good, he writes a post on HN that redux sucks steel and maybe looks the next week again on it

The situation is a bit like with kubernetes; until you have proper feedback loops with k8s you need days, with new k8s distros this got better but the biggest bummer are the k8s docs, too much, too verbose, so many new terms, no feedback loops at all and every k8s examples has minimum 100kb yamls.

What would be great and I know that writing good docs is much harder than actual code:

One and only piece which the reader should read first, which teaches him redux foundation, react-redux boilerplate and rtk within max 2 hours. After that he should have a working example AND should have understood it. No links to other resources, no nothing.

This main piece should be linked everywhere in the Github readmes of all redux relates projects in bold and h1 READ OUR MAIN PIECE FIRST, on all the doc pages and in all forum posts. I mean look at your post’s footer in this thread: so many links, why? You need one entry point. RTK could be the entry point, it just needs a bit more flesh on redux and should be declared as the entry point of redux. There’s one disadvantage though: with RTK as entry you’d kill the ecosystem around redux but IDK if you did this anyway by declaring RTK the standard way. And you would have a lot of redundant docs with redux/react-redux. Or maybe we need to merge all because maintaining redundant docs is just too much for an OSS project.

Whatever, all not easy but there must be a way because redux is the most underrated thing in the frontend world, it’s def the best state management and RTK is a nice and long deserved abstraction.

Key point:

One and only piece which the reader should read first, which teaches him redux foundation, react-redux boilerplate and rtk within max 2 hours. After that he should have a working example AND should have understood it. No links to other resources, no nothing. This main piece should be linked everywhere in the Github readmes of all redux relates projects in bold and h1 READ OUR MAIN PIECE FIRST, on all the doc pages and in all forum posts.

I think this matches up with my desire for a “quick start” page that teaches RTK and React-Redux right away.

[markerikson]

Suggestion to have the Redux docs mention that “spreading out state mutation is a bad idea”:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22333526