One of my team members decided to pick up plugin development on his own accord ❤️ I /think/ he's getting it from doing. But I feel my explanation isn't helping. It's hard to explain. But feels like when it clicks it clicks

I know exactly this feeling. It's some of the weirdest dev I've done. It's so hard to grok sometimes, and then also trivial at others.

I feel it becomes nearly as trivial as lego when you get it. but they're hypercube lego bricks from the outside

Hahaha, I like that analogy. BUT! Even now, I still run into stuff which almost perma-blocks me, even when doing linters and formatters.

but, once you work it out, you understand it right? Just a case of understanding which dimensions to look at things from.

What can we do to make it easier to understand? What are the parts that are challenging at first, or counter-intuitive, etc? The hardest part is for the people who wrote that code to see it through newcomers' eyes, so hearing your perspective can be a huge help in communicating more effectively about it to others (and to you!).

Not too sure. Possibly the documentation needs to be more of a layered tutorial.

I have a list of "pain points" (not the right phrase, but I'm pretty sleepy), and I'm looking to reconcile them into some sort of 3-pronged (i.e. trident) approach

Any and all feedback appreciated. We do want to make this easier to slide into, and need the help identifying how.

what if we rebranded Pants to Jeggings? All the class of blue jeans, but with the stretchiness and ease of wear of spandex.

That's a word I haven't heard in a minute

I think the biggest things are: 1) tutorial oriented docs 2) rule graph error messages 3) higher quality examples.

example-plugin

is now useless

For sure. I think I've identified a handful of other things I think would help plugin beginners and intermediates (at least, they will help me immensely). While

example-plugin

is nice, I think the pants repo itself is a better place to find examples, since we have soooo many plugins. Whenever people ask me how to write one, I immediately show them the docs and the Pants plugins, not because the

example-plugin

is useless, but because once someone jumps into the main pants plugins, it's a wealth of info