This is just a short “thank you” post for anyone who tries to teach random people on the internet something about programming or anything else.
(Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash)
Recently I found myself thinking back to a talk I saw at Laracon 2019. I rewatched the entire thing on YouTube and even managed to find myself in the audience. It’s called ‘Demystifying Dependency Injection Containers’ and its from Kai Sassnowski. You can watch the full video here on YouTube.
In short: if you have ever wondered why dependencies (classes) can be ‘magically’ resolved (instantiated), please watch this.
Did you watch it? Great.
Back in 2019, when I sat in the audience and heard Kai explain it, it kind of blew my mind. No, but really. I was amazed at how simple the base concept is. I could not believe that the thing I formerly described as ‘Laravel magic’ was actually explainable to me. But that might be because of some lingering imposter syndrome, I guess ;-).
A couple of weeks later, when I had built a couple of my own containers, I reflected on my initial amazement. I tried to put it into perspective and kind of shrugged the whole experience off by thinking: it must’ve been exactly the right information, at exactly the right time. Nothing more, nothing less. I was just ‘ready’ to understand how containers conceptually work. This line of reasoning was reinforced by the fact that a colleague, who also watched the talk, did not fully understand containers yet.
While this might be kind of true, I don’t think it is the full story. When I rewatched the video, I realized how expertly Kai explains the topic in small steps, making it very much understandable for a wide range of people. By taking you through the process step-by-step, you gradually realize how it actually works. The slides actually help visualizing it and is not just a dump of code on screen.All of this just to say: great job Kai! I hope you give many more of these kinds of talks 🙂
This was just one of these talks or videos that sparked a small (or big) “a-ha!” moment. Over the years there have been many talks, videos and blogs that have taught me something, completely free of charge. And that’s something that keeps amazing me. The amount of free content, trying to teach you a programming concept, language or just something completely different and unrelated to programming, is just astounding.
So: thank you! To anyone who produces such content. I’ll try and contribute my bit as well :).