311–320 of 383 posts
I think I'm more mentally wired to learn things incrementally, than to act as a a prism as Jennifer has done, so gloriously in 180 days.
Thank you for sharing this, I think HN has needed something like this.
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Gal is fine, if a little forced. Person would probably be best here though.
Hey Jennifer, Well done on your journey, very impressive! It's an inspiration for many of us. You replied about the use of "girl" (and I agree, "person" would be best here), but why not reply to petea's original comment where he criticizes you? Every time your blog makes it to front page on HN, I notice you're active in the comment thread but you don't reply to the criticism. Why not? It would quickly put an end to t…
Well, that's a novel theory on Internet commenting.
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We don't call male coders "boy", let's not call female ones "girl" unless they're a fourteen year old or something.
Let's not have another semantic argument (hacking vs cracking), the term "girl" (and the term "boy" for that matter) has both the meanings of an child of the given gender but also the informal friendly meaning for an adult of that gender. For example "lets check with the (boys|girls)" is a pretty common usage casual usage of the term for adults, especially in the 18-35 age bracket. The term boy is actually very commo…
How about the tech industry? When's the last time you got called a boy? I'd be baffled to be called a boy by someone I didn't know.
> Depending on the context using "women" implies a level of formality and abstraction that some could find more offensive.
I suspect you'd have a hard time finding someone who'd have been offended by replacing "girl" with "woman" in the original post.
This is fantastic. Especially inspiring to me, more than the fact that she learned how to code, is the fact that she dove into something that she had no background in, and after 180 days she came out with a solid understanding of the basics of programming; enough to do stuff on her own (and, combined with her graphic design/illustration skills, probably enough to do freelance webdev or get a junior level position in…
I have a friend who talks about the flywheel model of learning. If, every day, you spend even 15 minutes towards your goal of what have you (aka, add even a little momentum to your flywheel), at the end of a year, you will have a lot of knowledge.
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Translation: There are two kinds of people in this world: 1) Those who hit some ceiling and actually achieve contentment. 2) All-consuming psychopaths who love looking down on everyone else for their lack of ambition. I was born the second, but I sure as hell don't have to stay that way. Also, side comment: some of us don't want to be employer-capitalists. We like doing things for their own sakes, not so that we can…
You took what you wanted out of the OP's comment. Their comment is putting everyone in two buckets, 1 that sits around and watches TV when they get home from work, and 1 that works on personal development in their free time. What they want to use that personal development is up to them. They could use it to start a non-profit, or learn a new hobby or learn a new skill. But... sitting around watching TV until bed cert…
But here's the thing: the "watch TV/self-development" dichotomy exists and keeps existing at every level of actual achievement. There are people who think that lawyers, doctors, and software engineers are underachievers for not becoming CEOs, after all. Lawyers, doctors, and software engineers tend to think people working old-fashioned 9-5 jobs instead of high-level professions are underachievers. People in old-fashioned 9-5 jobs think part-timers are underachievers.
And in the other direction, there are people who think that anyone who merely runs a business and doesn't build an international business conglomerate is an underachiever. There are people who think that running an international business conglomerate instead of a world empire makes you an underachiever.
There's at least a few people who think that running a worldwide empire makes you an underachiever, because you should be trying to become a god!
Sometimes all you have is an impulse to go in a direction, but not a destination. Those are the impulses to go out for, when no actual destination will sate the impulse.
I would encourage her to try things other than web development. Make a desktop application, or a program in C, or do some performance coding on an embedded system, or write a webserver from scratch, or wrestle with writing a program with multiple threads. You might say this is too much to expect from a beginner, but no one would have said that 20 years ago. It only seems hard because of how easy web development is to…
It's getting difficult to justify coding anything else, though.
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There are 11 types of people in the world, those who understand unary and those who don't.
There are 12 types of people in the world, those who don't understand "-ary" at all, but who can increment.
The project was an awesome undertaking, and completing it successfully is brilliant. Jennifer clearly has an aptitude for taking an idea for a small website from conception to completion quickly. That's a heck of a skill. But it's not a skill that makes a good web developer. Web development is, in the most part, the easiest kind of development. In 15 years of doing this stuff I can state with some authority that 99%…
Quite baseless, actually. While you just think web development as general CRUD but there are many aspects of web development that are challenging. It might not challenge you for smart algorithms, low level optimizations, or a clever recursion but what about a elegant UI, thinking about user experience, optimizing server performance, reducing page load time and many more.
Saying that "X programming is easy, real programming is Y" is a bit immature to be honest.
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There are two type of people in life. The first type graduates from college and their learning stops for the most part. They say to themselves, "well, I studied for four years and got a job, now it's finally time to sit back and relax." So they put in their regular 9-5 and then come home and waste their lives away by watching TV shows and playing video games and going out and getting drunk on weekends. Essentially, t…
There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.
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(judge == evaluate) != (judge == condemn) I wish there were a better way to disambiguate "judge".
How can you have evaluation without the possibility of condemnation? If your evaluation is always positive, it's not very useful.