I don't know. I've been that guy, except I didn't whine about it in a blog post. I didn't know anyone who knew these things and didn't know how to find answers. Naive web searches were surprisingly hard to parse. I didn't even know Youtube had coding instruction. I ended up doing all my coding inside Google Sheets custom function editor. It let me log my output or be invoked in a cell on the sheet. Looking back that seems so strange, but what I realized is that all the setup instruction for it is directed at non-coders so they don't make any assumptions like the install modal on NodeJS that TFA complained about. All the tutorials and quora (eventually found SO) questions on Google sheets are asked and answered by laypeople.
I can only imagine how much faster I'd have gotten my start if I could have used the browser itself. And the inspector console is useless until you can type your code perfectly on the first try (or second if you happen upon the up-arrow/edit functionality).
So after I began my dev career I began volunteering at a free local library coding session. It was part-babysitting, but there were a handful of kids who usually had part-time access to a parent's budget Windows laptop.
A basic coding environment inside Chrome or Edge (vscode lite?) would have made those sessions so much more productive. And I'd have been confident that no matter what computer they ended up on later, they'd wouldn't have to do any magic incantations to get back to coding.
Even giving them a bookmark to one of the all-in-one dev env websites isn't enough. It needs to be able to run locally without internet. And those coding websites over the past few years have been changing so rapidly in interface and setup that it would easily throw someone for a loop who was just beginning.
I can only imagine how much faster I'd have gotten my start if I could have used the browser itself. And the inspector console is useless until you can type your code perfectly on the first try (or second if you happen upon the up-arrow/edit functionality).
So after I began my dev career I began volunteering at a free local library coding session. It was part-babysitting, but there were a handful of kids who usually had part-time access to a parent's budget Windows laptop.
A basic coding environment inside Chrome or Edge (vscode lite?) would have made those sessions so much more productive. And I'd have been confident that no matter what computer they ended up on later, they'd wouldn't have to do any magic incantations to get back to coding.
Even giving them a bookmark to one of the all-in-one dev env websites isn't enough. It needs to be able to run locally without internet. And those coding websites over the past few years have been changing so rapidly in interface and setup that it would easily throw someone for a loop who was just beginning.