Track level articles?

Exercism
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Is it possible to create a tack level article in Exercism?

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There’s track specific docs. Does that help?

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What sort of subjects are you imagining?

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@IsaacG perhaps trac documents could help, although it looks like it is a set list of files.

@iHiD the need came out of me trying to figure out how to write my first article and approach in C# track. There are concerns which would be good to explain a bit more, but which are not specific to an exercise. To give you a better context here is how I got there:

I want to write approaches for the Palindrome Product exercise. Most of the solutions require ability to check if a number if a palindrome. After some discussion we agreed that the best way to do that would be in an article. To show differences between different methods I used benchmarking - it is an interesting aspect and visible only in the ‘dig deeper’. @ErikSchierboom suggested in his comments to expand the benchmarking tests and to include the code so people interested enough can replicate the tests themselves. In both of these articles it would be good to explain a little about performance testing and specific tool we use - BenchmarkDotNet. In fact this explanation would be useful in many exercises - hence the thought of a track level article.

So what subjects would I imagine?

  • Performance testing C# - when it matters when it doesn’t, how to do it if you want to.
  • Extension methods - C# allows to implement many if not all solutions using a “standard” method but also through extension methods. It would be good to discuss somewhere what are the differences and have a link in other articles or approaches that want to show solutions with extension methods
  • Similarly problems can be solve using for and foreach loops, or using LINQ. Some people struggle making the transition, so an article or series of articles to help understand and start using LINQ would be useful and applicable to many exercises
  • Language style considerations?
  • Other little things that come up in mentoring again and again regardless of the exercise, like the fact that if (condition) { return true; } else { return false; } is equivalent to return condition;
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I imagine these would fit nicely in a «Track Articles»/«Track Docs» tab as proposed in Prominently link to track specific installation instructions.

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It’s controlled by a JSON config file and can contain arbitrary documents.

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Yep - the track docs Isaac linked to would be a great fit for the use cases you suggest :slight_smile:

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