This week in codefaster was weird. I wanted to write about some very powerful techniques with jq that let you use it on any data format (xml, csv, yaml, etc) and even any data source (dbs, embedded systems, machine config). But it was really hard getting the wording right, and I couldnt make my deadline. So I just submitted the first part which were the basics of jq. Nothing exotic or original. Substack then messed up and delayed my newsletter by 90 minutes. Terrible post right? Well, it made the front page of hacker news, racked up 13k views (I usually get a few hundred), and almost tripled my subscribers. So, I'll try writing more tool tutorials, maybe people really find value there.

link?

Oh that was a great post!

tool tutorials are the most undervalued, undercovered form of content on the net IMO! I would immediately subscribe to a tool-tutorial-focused newsletter

I've been thinking a lot lately about the 4 kinds of documentation: https://documentation.divio.com.

jq is actually a great example of this—I’ve found approximately eight tutorials of relatively high quality on the web and none of them go through an entire pipeline

Thanks @Kartik Agaram, that reference was worth a few hours lost to this Slack 😉

jq has a pretty big surface, so I'm glad you're shedding light there. At my current job we actually use a homegrown language for JS transformation instead of jq. I normally frown upon that kind of thing, but the implementation is so clean I was ok with it (given the decision was already made): https://github.com/schibsted/jslt. It'll never be popular due to the unfortunate naming, hah