[ANN] A Julia Discourse Site for Non-technical Users

I don’t think Benny was referring to technocrat’s code when he wrote this, but it does remind me of a similar feeling.

I’m still quite a novice programmer myself, especially around setup and tooling. I wrote a Julia package to simplify and automate some of the tedious actions my co-workers still do in Excel. I wrote a .bat file they can double click to call the Julia package manager and set up the proper environment. I wrote detailed (formatted and screenshot) instructions on how to download all the needed tools, start Julia, and call my package functions. I tested everything myself and then sent it out with much fanfare.

Upon first use, a Git permission security issue I never saw coming stopped the whole project in its tracks. I’ve still not taken the time to figure out implementing a solution.

I tried very hard to argue and prove coding to be easier than their current Excel methods, but now because of this error, it’s my fault that they are turned off to Julia and coding in general as being too complicated to be worth trying.

I find it unfortunate that there is a requirement for them or me to learn to troubleshoot all this auxiliary tooling before they get to try running Julia code themselves. (Here I’m using “tooling” very generally to mean everything else we’re forced to interact with to get Julia code to run.)

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