Improve the experience of newcomers

[lucasloisp]

While the "Overview", "Get Started" and "Challenges" sections are great, there's still a lot of room for improvement when it comes to welcoming newcomers to Slimy — especially when it is used outside the context of guided training. Many ideas have come up (In PR reviews, conversations and trials with learners) about what specifically can be done.

One aspect of improvement it the mechanics of working with Slimy, with a focus on what steps someone needs to take from the moment they decide they want to complete the first challenge to having something set up where they can start giving life to Slimy. Right now this project is more set up as a showcase of solutions, but I would suggest there is room for the repository to also hold a "barebones" Slimy version that trainees can start with and build incrementally.

Another aspect is getting information out there, and a guide on what the challenges are. This could be done via a hosted solution (e.g. gh-pages) with a landing page that tells you all about Slimy and gives you a guide on what to do. It would serve as the "course" itself.

Creating this issue to further discuss.

[lucasloisp]

I really think Slimy would benefit from having landing page, and more of a "tutorial" experience than just the repository. Considering we host on Github it makes sense to use GH pages. But a choice needs to be made on how the site is built, assuming we won't write straight HTML+CSS.

I've been doing some research, and found docusaurus which seems to be the way Reanimated, React Native and React Navigation build their docs, as do 347 other sites, as seen on their showcase. I'll be looking further into it, but it looks promising.

Alternatively, we could use a more general SSG. I've had good experiences with 11ty, but I know Jekyll, seems to be favored by GitHub, and looks somewhat more popular.

[lucasloisp]

Ran some tests with Docusaurus, and it looks good from what I can tell. Plus it's quite intuitive considering how widely it is used.

[carozo]

@lucasloisp Docusaurus looks awesome! 👏🏼
I think it'd make sense to add the tutorial pages to this repo, what do you think? Also, if you could commit what you've already done, I can add the course text that I have and deploy it to gh pages!

[lucasloisp]

Just pushed! Also, Docusaurus has a deploy command that pushes to the gh-pages branch. So I think if we enable GH pages in settings with that option, we should see the site at https://carozo.github.io/slimy/ 🤞

[carozo]

That's awesome! I'll enable GH pages now then 😄

[carozo]

We're live 😎