There are 5 moments of learning need:

1. When you learn something for the first time
2. When you want to learn more,
3. When you try to apply and / or remember
4. When something goes wrong
5. When things change

This has subtle power when you think about how what you're doing (or not doing) maps to each need.

For example, you could map each moment to a piece of developer education:

1. Getting started tutorial
2. How-tos, conceptual guides, courses
3. API reference and samples, sandboxes, labs
4. Troubleshooting docs, error docs
5. Migration guides, roadmaps, announcement blog posts

Or to developer experience:

  1. Starters, templates, and CLIs
  2. Generated code docs (e.g. JSdoc, Javadoc)
  3. Copilot, discoverable APIs, type annotations
  4. Descriptive error messages, graceful error handling
  5. Codemods, semantic versioning, release notes, regression testing

Or to your community:

  1. Welcome area
  2. Ask questions, hold office hours
  3. Cohort-based learning
  4. Community support / on-call
  5. Announcements, streams, events

Questions to ask:

1. Do you have learning content that serves each need?
2. Are there unmet needs you don't have yet?
3. How easy is it to find when these needs arise?

Have a lovely day,
Kamran

5 moments of developer learning need

Want devs to love your product?

Hi 👋 I'm Kamran. I'm a consulting developer educator who can help your DevRel team increase adoption with better docs, samples, and courseware.
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