This is by far the biggest challenge you'll encounter writing a tutorial, video game walkthrough, recipe, etc:

> “The reader knows everything I know except this one thing”

Because as the article says, it's hard to know what your audience already knows, and far too easy to take 'shortcuts' when helping them by forgetting how many things you've assigned to muscle memory.

Teaching people is difficult, and it's really easy to leave a lot of crucial information out if you're not careful.

That said, I do have one more antipattern (and one more recommended design pattern) worth considering here too.

For the antipattern, it's when the tutorial doesn't work anymore because of updates to the subject in question. I remember this being a big issue when I was trying to learn Angular a few years back, since the official tutorial was clearly written for a long obsolete version of the framework that functioned very differently from the current one.

The number of times I've had issues like that is far too high online, and it's usually because the person that wrote the tutorial didn't check back in on it whenever the language, framework or relevant dependencies got a major update.

So, if you write about a topic and things change significantly, go back and check your work from before. If you can, update the article, and if you can't, at least put a notice at the top saying the article is now obsolete and should be skipped.

On a different note, a good pattern to keep in mind is that you don't need to be chained to a specific format. Way too many people assume that because they're providing a written tutorial, there's no place for images or video content there.

But the truth is that in many cases, an image is literally worth a thousand words. In other cases, showing people how a step should go in video or GIF format can be more helpful than just providing a list of bullet points.

So, take that into account. Provide all the information in your chosen format for sure, but provide relevant images and videos when the info is clearer in that format, or for when people need a visual cue. That way, you can check them if you're struggling with the written instructions, and figure out whether your setup is wrong (or the tutorial has left out some crucial information) based on how similar the author's screen is to your own at that point.

Just because you're using text doesn't mean you have to treat your guide like it's going on GameFAQs in a .txt file in the mid 90s.