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Things I Don’t Know as of 2018

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Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018

#91
It's on tangent but

I owned an agency before and my employees under NDA wrote opensource projects for celebrity developers.

It was effectively a GhostCoders for hire service.

Out of them a few developers got very popular. It was a matter of luck more than anything. Anything can catch wind anytime, we just needed to keep up with the trend.

One way to catch this is coding style. Since, we employed GhostCoders - style varied considerably if a person looked deep - they could detect it, tho we tried to create a guidelines per celebrity programmer still picking up a particular style is quite difficult.

Hammering out dozens of project every month for a celebrity programmer needed that we hire multiple coders as no one would work all living hours.

Every project was a greenfield project, so hiring ghostcoder wasn't difficult at all.

Once you've proved your Opensource worth, companies would employee you as a celebrity coder and you just need to blog, tweet and give talks. Illusion of work is sometimes more important than the real work.

But even the ones who didn't get that popular accured a portfolio of contributions which helped them get a well paid cushy job.

Once you've breached a significant popularity threshold, you don't have to go through any interview and people assume you possess superior knowledge about everything.

This is why we still offer ghostcoding service to turn you into a popular Opensource developer, you might also recoup costs through Patereon.

So reading this i am not very surprised.

Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Never heard of Dan before today. Now he is "a guy on the Internet who writes about programming but doesn't know much about it".

He invented Redux, and is a core contributor to React.

Honestly, hearing that a core contributor to React doesn’t know much of anything about basic engineering topics is disheartening, not encouraging.

Not memorizing the algorithm book is one thing, but being considered a “rockstar” when you don’t know basic sorting algorithms...

Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018

#93
A really curious aspect of this list is the “scale”/depth of the various topics. Some are very specific: “Node backends”, “GraphQl”; some are very general: “algorithms”, “functional languages”.

It is well established that “knowing more” is not really a thing; we just learn to further understand relations and distinctions, feeding our ability to know of more things we have yet to learn.

Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018

#94
post #53
post #45

This is an awesome article! I like the idea of being more forthcoming with what we don't know. > Containers. I have no idea about how to use Docker or Kubernetes. (Are those related?) I have a vague idea that they let me spin up a separate VM in a predictable way. Sounds cool but I haven’t tried it. > Deployment and devops. I can manage to send some files over FTP or kill some processes but that’s the limit of my dev…

>My "thing I dont know as of 2018", just for good measure: How to build complex front-end applications without making a complete mess of things! If you find anyone that truly knows the answer, please let us know :) I'm sure plenty of people claim to, and many more will just claim that the mere concept is flawed so there's no point, and there are even more non-answers. But the actual problem is very difficult. I remem…

Brilliant.

Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018

#95

It's on tangent but I owned an agency before and my employees under NDA wrote opensource projects for celebrity developers. It was effectively a GhostCoders for hire service. Out of them a few developers got very popular. It was a matter of luck more than anything. Anything can catch wind anytime, we just needed to keep up with the trend. One way to catch this is coding style. Since, we employed GhostCoders - style v…

How effective is an NDA in this case? A lot of NDA's are effective because BIGCO you signed the NDA with has piles of money & resources to sue you. If a developer is ghostcoding for ROCKSTAR and it gets out ROCKSTAR hires ghostcoders. ROCKSTAR is screwed and maybe he was making pretty comfortable money at BIGCO but his pockets are exponentially smaller than BIGCO's. And he doesn't have a legal department to handle the lawsuit either. He'll have to handle it himself, while he's being dragged & disgraced in tech news and on Twitter.

And even if the NDA is with you the agency, do you have a legal team? If you do is your agency big enough or is it worth business enough for you to get into a big fight with one of your former contractors to defend ROCKSTAR? Especially when ROCKSTAR is the one who looks bad to the public and not necessarily your agency?

I'm not saying you're not telling the truth, it sounds plausible but I wonder about the model.

Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018

#96
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He invented Redux, and is a core contributor to React.

Honestly, hearing that a core contributor to React doesn’t know much of anything about basic engineering topics is disheartening, not encouraging. Not memorizing the algorithm book is one thing, but being considered a “rockstar” when you don’t know basic sorting algorithms...

He knows (is aware of) what he doesn’t know: you can be sure that he will learn by himself or seek someone with more knowledge when he faces a challenge involving a new (to him) topic / concept / technology.

Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018

#97
post #38

Is that guy really an experienced developer? He's obviously talented but experience and talent are different things. It sounds like he has less than 10 years under his belt.

I’ve been learning programming since 12, got first software job at 18. I’m 26 now. So depends on how you count.

Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018

#98
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My "thing I dont know as of 2018", just for good measure: How to build complex front-end applications without making a complete mess of things! If you find anyone that truly knows the answer, please let us know :) I'm sure plenty of people claim to, and many more will just claim that the mere concept is flawed so there's no point, and there are even more non-answers. But the actual problem is very difficult. I remem…

There is a core issue with UI development that makes things harder and less elegant than the backend. It's the io loop. Components must change state and react to state. This where the complexity arises. If you remove the loop by having components only react to state, you will find your programs to be simple, modular and more beautiful. The feedback loop of IO destroys the functional and modular nature of UI. Function…

> Global event emitters might be the best way. I'm not sure if redux does this.

I think Redux actions are essentially emitted global events.

Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018

#99
post #45

This is an awesome article! I like the idea of being more forthcoming with what we don't know. > Containers. I have no idea about how to use Docker or Kubernetes. (Are those related?) I have a vague idea that they let me spin up a separate VM in a predictable way. Sounds cool but I haven’t tried it. > Deployment and devops. I can manage to send some files over FTP or kill some processes but that’s the limit of my dev…

Just so you know, on mobile version of your site, on ios, pricing page description overfloats left and you cant see description for the numbers - I guess it's cpu, ram and storage but what is infinite, traffic?

Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018

#100
post #72

What I miss from this article is what he does know. Not to boats, but to contrast. I know some of the things he does not know, and I'm sure he knows things I don't know. But without knowing what his expertise is, it's easy to think you know more than him.

I think the assumed background for the reader is knowing who Dan Abramov is - he's the guy who started Redux, and is currently on the React team. The rest of his blog so far is basically about things he does know.

In the spirit of this page: I don't have a clue what Redux or React are.
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