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I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115

blog.jenniferdewalt.com

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Re: I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115

#351

Post by ShirtlessRod »

ceol wrote: post #267
petea wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I created a new account to avoid precisely people like you psychologizing libelously about who I am. I feel reassured that it was a good idea to create a new account.

Translation: "I know what I'm saying is coming from a place of extreme bitterness, but I don't want search results for my name showing these comments to my potential employers." If you're going out of your way to create a new account to voice your opinion, chances are your opinion is shit.

> "If you're going out of your way to create a new account to voice your opinion, chances are your opinion is shit."

That's a bit of a stretch, isn't it? Some opinions are more unpopular than others, and sometimes recipients of said opinion aren't as restrained as one would hope when they encounter an opinion they don't like.

Re: I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115

#352

Post by ShirtlessRod »

yaddayadda wrote: post #131
thenomad wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shrug . Maybe it depends on whom you hang out with. Personally I spend a lot of time with successful entrepreneur and creative types. This sort of focus and commitment, whilst it's definitely laudable, isn't abnormal amongst that crowd.

"Maybe it depends on whom you hang out with." ...and your existing bills and how you are able to pay for them. I've got a 1 hour commute each direction, and an 8 hour a day, soul-sucking, brain-energy-sucking job. (HN is sanity retention medicine for me.) By the time I get home in the evening, fix dinner for the kids and me, eat, catch up with the family, etc. I don't have a lot of time or energy for anything else.

Well, obviously you don't hang around with the cool kids, then. :)

Re: I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115

#354

Post by gridspy »

samstave wrote: post #138
sivers wrote: post #54

There’s this great story from the book “Art and Fear”, that's very appropriate here: === The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bath…

One of my first jobs out of highschool was as a cad drafter for an architecture firm. As the low kid on the totem-pole, I was given the tasks that were not liked by the architects: drawing detail sheets and reproducing blueprints. -- both tasks were highly repetative. I took both as opportunities to find a meditative cadence to the work. I actually really enjoyed the rhythm of taking plots of large 30x42 inch drawing…

I really liked your take on viewing a repetitive task as a way to improve and relax.

Another nice thing about a repetitive task is that it is perfectly predictable. You know exactly how long you should take because you've done it before and can expect very few surprises.

Much unlike any sort of difficult debugging or implementation which can be unpredictable, although enjoyable.

Re: I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115

#355

Post by rwallace »

grecy wrote: post #208
sivers wrote: post #54

There’s this great story from the book “Art and Fear”, that's very appropriate here: === The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bath…

While I love the message from the story, I feel the need to "hack it". If I were in the "quantity" group, I would have just made one god-awful lump of clay object weighing 100lbs, then found other more interesting things to do for the rest of the class.

If you'd rather be doing something more interesting, why sign up for the class in the first place?

Re: I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115

#356

Post by jimzvz »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #342
ceol wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we need to question it every time it appears We really don't. You playing armchair internet detective will not stop people from getting more attention than you. What do all of those things hurt? Nothing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a story on the internet for a few days. It's not being shoved in your face, you're not being made to read about it. You chose to join this thread, like you chose to look…

I completely agree. I've always wondered what the obsession about "outing" liars on the internet is about. If the person can craft an interesting enough story to keep people engaged for a short period of time, who cares if its "true"? This is the internet, the value is derived from what is communicated, not what actually happened on the other side of the terminal. Now when someone is asking for donations or whatnot,…

Maybe you two enjoy consuming bullshit but don't be surprised that other people don't.

Re: I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115

#357

Post by James_Duval »

ryan-allen wrote: post #291
whbk wrote: post #289

From her Facebook, September 2009: "If you don't know already, I've created an iPhone app! I've been working really hard on this and have had lots of fun taking pictures of myself and my friends. Oh, what it does is gives everyone in the picture a HOT or COLD rating. The app is called ruHOT and is available for download for the iPhone and Android phones. Check it out!" So yeah, highly doubt this is truly her first ro…

Interesting sleuthing. Maybe it's just exceptionally well targeted self-advertising. I know I'll get creamed by playing the gender card, but if this were a guy, would we be so coy to call them out on the fact that 'this ain't your first time'. I think if anything this kind of misinformation regarding 'the possible output for a beginner' is actually discouraging to beginning developers. I do think this experiment it s…

I created a game in Actionscript 2.0 back in 2009.

I started to program in around November of 2011.

Being able to cobble together an app or what-have-you is very different from programming, I think. I would not call what I did back then programming.

I even wrote a couple of follow-up games which used a tile-based map system and pathfinding but didn't store nodes on the map as variables - the game calculated the location of the nodes each time they were to be used. That's hideous.

I'd also point out that the vastness of the internet's resources should not be underestimated. I could create something awesome in 10 hours using Codecademy as a reference and generic tutorials I found using Google.

The problem for me would be finding 10 hours to do this in.

I do not think that this is a deliberate attempt to deceive as much as it is a sense the person feels that the person is 'not a proper programmer'. Hell, if I created a similar project now, after completing coursera/proglang and coursera/algorithm-design-and-analysis and working with web design for about a year and a half, I would still call it "teaching myself to code", because there is so much to learn I'm barely dipping my toe in the water.

Re: I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115

#358

Post by 6d0debc071 »

rickhanlonii wrote: post #252
amerika_blog wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe in "just do it" and worry about the details later. However, on the internet, there is a worship of "hard work" that strikes me as emotional more than real. Hard work is 1/2 of the equation. The other part is your wiring: intelligence, skill, etc. Not everyone can do everything. We can dumb down any task to the point where anyone can do it... but at that point, it's a bubble waiting to pop.

Hard work is half of what equation? Is the equation 'success in life as measured against everyone else,' or is the equation 'success in life as measure against yourself'? If the question is the latter--which is the only question a person should care about--then hard work is very close to 100%. This isn't an emotional claim, it's a rational and evidence based claim. The reason that there is a rightful reverence to har…

Better is potentially a difficult term when you're only judging against yourself. Especially with forms of art, where our appreciation of beauty is going to be informed by social standards. When we start talking about better and worse, then we're inviting a general standard into the discussion. After which the question might go something like: To push themselves and at the end of the day just be a bad web designer (or whatever). Is this what people really want to get out of effort?

Doesn't that seem kinda sad to imagine?

Maybe that's another variable people can change: If they can identify the similarities amongst what they enjoy doing, then they can form more abstract goals that can be satisfied by multiple approaches. If they've done that, then the ability to recognise their relative strengths and weaknesses becomes more important again.

Re: I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115

#359

Post by nknighthb »

petea wrote: post #210
freyr wrote: post #143

So many hurt egos in this thread. If you think what she's done is impossible, have you ever devoted 70/hrs a week to a personal endeavor for 6 straight months? Would you have the willpower and perseverance to stay committed and focused? Also, these are cool sites, infused with a lot of creativity and a refined aesthetic sense, but it's not as if she's claimed to have written an OS or compiler in 115 days. Much of the…

So let's see her repository ( https://github.com/jendewalt/jennifer_dewalt ). This girl not only became a competent front end developer in 100 days, but looking at the Gemfile, she knows how to use capistrano, redis, capistrano, paperclip, omniauth and devise? She knows the best practices for Rails perfectly. She not only grasped to use MVC perfectly, but also organized asset codes perfectly in like 50 days. I forgot…

After 1000 hours with Google, all of those things are completely plausible. Moreso if you have a mentor to turn to. In fact, I would think that if you haven't reached that level of basic competence after 1000 hours, you're probably a pretty slow learner, or just not getting programming.

I was maybe 40-80 hours into finally putting serious effort into programming when I started playing with hand-crafted ELF binaries and trying to beat GCC at optimizing simple routines (never had any real trouble with pointers again after that; assembly makes it all make sense). Hoverover effects are not the sort of thing I would have been struggling with.

Incidentally, she's probably spent many more hours coding in the last six months than I have in the past year, and it's nominally my full-time job. It's amazing how little actual code you can end up writing as a professional software engineer.

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