🟢 "Ski Slope Ratings" for Technical Content: 🟢 🟦 🎓 🎓🎓

Technical content rating: 🟢 accessible to anyone

When reading a blog post, you've run into at least one of these two problems:

• Hold up — I wanted to deep-dive into technical details, but this post is written for a nontechnical audience

• Hold up — I wanted the high-level overview, but this post goes way off into the weeds

We want to meliorate this problem in our blog. To do so, we're adopting "technical content ratings" that borrow from the North American ratings for difficulty of ski slopes. Namely:

🟢 Green circle

Nontechnical, accessible to anyone with a basic education. If you can't understand the post, then it's our fault — not yours.

🟦 Blue square

Mostly nontechnical, but may use jargon-y technical terms and discuss certain markets and ecosystems at a high level. For example, a post could use the initialism "LLM" and assume you kind-of know what LLMs can do, without defining "LLM" or assuming any knowledge of their inner workings.

🎓 Black diamond

Technical to the degree that we expect a basic understanding of coding in a high-level language. For example, we might list the code slackBot.on("mention", console.log) and assume you're able to read it, even if you don't know the language well (TypeScript in this case) or deeply understand what the code is actually doing.

🎓🎓 Double black diamond

Deeply technical, no holds barred. The post should still be written accessibly in plain language, but if you're missing some required background knowledge — for example, how neural networks work in a post that deep-dives into LLM internals — you may not take away any new knowledge.

We hope you find these ratings useful. And we encourage you to use them on your blog posts as well!

Appendix: what's with the graduation caps?

Funny you should ask. There is no "black diamond" or "double black diamond" emoji. A black diamond emoji was proposed to the Uncode Emoji Subcommittee and declined. So the mortar board is about the closest substitute. 🤷