This is me, Rob, writing this right now. I’ve always preferred first-person style when writing content because it gets me closer to how I would communicate if I were in a one-on-one private mentoring session with you (yeah, you). This might strike you as odd compared to the writing styles of the academic resources you’ve read in the past.
😃 Honestly, I think they are the ones doing it wrong, not me. Learning and mentoring are personal and should focus on the individual, not the people forcing those individuals to buy something.
That last paragraph (technically a blockquote from HTML and Markdown) starts with an emoji. I like emojis. They are like a modern form of cuneiform. I use them to give meaning to turning a paragraph or section into callouts and sidebars from popularized by traditional publishing. You have seen them as those boxes and things on the side that are related to the current content but not directly. If you see an emoji at the beginning of one of these blocks here’s what it means:
😃 something happy or funny
💡 an idea or tip
💬 some chat, or story, or commentary
🤬 a rant, usually that would include curse words
⚠️ a warning, or caution, achtung!
You might have noticed that the word ‘callouts’ was bold and italic. Bold-italic is reserved specifically for terms, meaning that they are likely to be found referenced in the ‘Related:’ section or otherwise have their own zettel and glossary entry. Pay attention and memorize these when they occur. They are key to mastery and will be used a lot by myself and potentially others interviewing you one day.
This content is also full of fenced and raw (unformatted) blocks. Fenced blocks are always code or output that you would see on your terminal:
#!/bin/bash
echo 'Hello world!'
$ ./hello
Hello world!
Raw blocks are simply text that needs to appear as is without any formatting:
_ ____ ____ __
| '__\ \ /\ / /\ \/ /
| | \ V V / > <
|_| \_/\_/ /_/\_\
⚠️ Fenced blocks are never rendered in places where special characters are not allowed, such as in a YouTube video descriptions, which is why every learning node with a video has a full zettel of written text to go along with it. Raw (unformatted) blocks, however, are rendered.
And one last convention that is a hold over from traditional publishing, any time you see a name in parentheses after an inline quoted phrase it is a reference to the person who said it. That person’s name will always appear in the ‘Related:’ section at the bottom of that same zettel.
Here’s an example, when I say “don’t get mad, get busy” (Rob) you know what I mean.
Related: