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Introducing Community Articles

· 4 min read
Marco Pegoraro
Marco Pegoraro
founder

Now PGMate displays articles from our Community. 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

Although this is not a strictly functional improvement, it's something I deeply care about.

👉 It's the second step towards integrating a sleek Postgres Client with a Learning Center.

Introducing articles

The goal with Community Articles is to create a mix of features inspired by:

  • Classic database client
  • RSS feed reader

😇 Can't hide that the inspiration came from GhostJS admin panel that offers exactly this.

Best of Breed​

I know, I know; they say: "do one thing, do it right", but this is still a personal side-project so I feel really free to experiment with features I believe could be beneficial to us Engineers.

Way too often, we focus on solving the next task on the backlog and neglet our own growth. This is true for both technical and personal growth.

By embedding Community-driven Articles into a development tool (that I hope you use daily) chances are that some articles will catch your attention and you will read through. 🤞

The Journey Ahead​

My brain is exploding with ideas how to take the educational side of PGMate to the next level:

Bookmarks​

Same as for the quick-facts, it will be possible to 👍👎 an article, influencing its display status and building a short-list of content that is particularly relevant for you.

Comments​

PGMate aims to be a social platform focused on databases and Postgres.

One possibile development is to introduce an account system and link it to your running client (yeah, just another token) and enable classic community features such as comments and similar.

Another direction would be to enable multi-account within an installation and run this comments feature among the users that can access one PGMate instace. Highly inspired by the concept of a Discord server.

Annotations​

I plan to steal this feature from Kindle. I just love to highlight and annotate contents there, and collect my ideas and reflections in an automatic scrapebook.

Wouldn't it be nice?

Your local PGMate instance will then become a mix of client, editor, and notebook.

Personal Articles​

The community articles are basically just a bookmark file on GitHub that is automatically imported when your client boots.

Well, why not add a "+" icon and let the user add custom bookmarks as well?

Of course, we would prefer if you decide share your bookmarks with the community and open a new PR towards our Contents Repository.

Community-driven Courses​

The Internet is full of good training material. For free.

Articles, videos, podcasts. The content is out there but needs research and organization.

The idea is to build catalogs of structured contents that fulfill a learning purpose.

This will be similar to how the Articles work, but the "bookmark file" would be organized by goals and milestones.

Here are some examples of a possible structure:

  • Goal: Postgres Intro
    • Milestone 1: Run Postgres using Docker
    • Milestone 2: Basic CRUD
    • ...
  • Goal: Indexing
    • Milestone 1: Theory on Indexes
    • Milestone 2: Explain / Analyze
    • ...

Each milestone will be a list of bookmarks to free online materials (I guess mostly YouTube videos) that are sorted out from easy to difficult and are meant to be consumed in order.

Of course, all of this will be JSON files in out Contents Repository that you and everyone else can edit and PR to. The idea is to build this organized content togegher, right?

PGMate will import the sources into the local state at boot time and provide a nice UI where you can look around the courses catalog, track progress and maybe enjoy the same features that we are imagining for the Articles (bookmarks, annotations, comments)