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 javascript code is covered extensively in brief online tutorials. Maybe, given 10 hours, you couldn't ingest a tutorial and put your own spin on the concept, but thinking that nobody else could do that is a bit arrogant.
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 to mention that she knew Rails from like day 1.
Additionally, she knew better to hide sensitive information about secret tokens for maybe AWS in the config folder and other Rails environment info.
Really? Is Hacker News this gullible? If you really want to see what actual beginner struggle with for 10 hours a day, go take a look at StackOverflow. Beginners are struggling for hours to create hoverover effects and persistent footer.
In case anyone misses my other reply to this troll, her initial commit[0] was the default Rails app, which most any newbie can get up on GitHub in a single day. She didn't even touch the app/ directory, where all the Rails-specific code lives, until two months later.[1]
I'll admit it, I'm skeptical. I'm also a bit jealous that I can't seem to find 10 spare minutes a day for learning.
Some quick internet sleuthing led me to https://angel.co/grapefeed which appears to show that she's the co-founder of a social-sharing website that just happens to be written in Rails.
If that's the case, then she likely has access to the other co-founder/Rails developer. Not to take anything away from her work, but it doesn't seem quite the same to me as the "One day I woke up and decided to learn web development on my own" tone that I took away from the blog post.
With stories like this, I have found it to be the opposite. People that would usually question this, won't because they are terrified of being called sexist which is (exactly what you have done and) one of those things that hangs around you and can ruin your career very quickly.
This style of marketing is becoming very popular. The young, disadvantaged, novice, whatever does something extraordinary through sheer brilliance and dedication [1][2][3] and when their claims don't really match reality [4], nobody cares. The marketing has already succeeded. It is exactly the kind of marketing that is taylor made for social media and if we don't want to be inundated with it in the future, we need to question it every time it appears so that only the truly deserving reap its benefits. Extraordinary claims (should) require extraordinary evidence.
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 up those four examples of the thing you hate so much.
I would much rather question the people who spend their time trying to denounce others.
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, skepticism is warranted. But this? Just take it for what it is; enjoy it or move along.
The benefit I get out of these stories is gaining a new perspective, motivation, insight etc. 99% of the time its inconsequential whether the story is bullshit or not. Spending mental energy trying to determine veracity is utterly useless for everyone involved. You win no points for determining its fake and yet you miss an opportunity for self-reflection and growth.
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.
Not gullible, just giving her the benefit of the doubt. It could turn out that she had some guidance, or has worked with people (though not as a programmer) and is smart + good enough memory to osmos some good practices, or took some class a long time ago that stuck better than she thought. Perhaps she had a power up period of non committed grazing and chose day 1 as the for real now point. Or some combination of above. To be honest I don't care. She's done something few can: keeping to a goal when she could easily have slacked on sites like hacker news, completing something not at all trivial, doing it well and sharing it. How long she's been programming wouldn't move my opinion in any direction.
And even if there is more to the story, I still accept her day 1 as valid. My least generous interpretation is she came with at most a scattered modicum of knowledge, gleaned from informal trifling and lacked confidence enough so, that saying she is new is a rounding error compared to how good she will get.
Indeed. Not mentioning anyone doesn't mean she's working alone.
It's possible that she uses some help. It's also possible that she works on her own. It's also possible that she's a fictional character (admittedly there isn't enough data proving otherwise).
The idea itself is interesting regardless of the above. First thing that occurred to me is why don't I go for it myself. I'm still pondering that.
> It's also possible that she's a fictional character (admittedly there isn't enough data proving otherwise).
She does have a Twitter that's been active for a few years, and doesn't give an indication that she has prior programming experience. This would be quite the long con.
I've had a Twitter account for over a year and posted absolutely nothing to it.
I wouldn't say "con", but I do find it implausible someone went from nothing to everything and was making full websites on day 1. I mean I've cranked out some personal web-apps over a weekend, but I usually spend the next week or so "fixing" them, which for me is how I learn - I have the framework of what I want to do, and then I figure out how to add more and more features until it's the streamlined experience I want it to be.
But a ton of that time is just spending hours working out why things are the way they are.
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.
She says she works in a shared developer space. She's also co-founding a site with an experienced developer. It's quite possible that one of these developers helped set up the back end.
How would this detract from the front end work that she's done and put on display? It's quite clear, at least to me, that her effort has been focused on the content of the 180 pages, rather than the back end work, which to my knowledge, she hasn't taken credit for.
And really? Is your ego that fragile that you're desperately struggling to discredit a random person on the Internet?
The solid-block-of-learning strategy is way less impressive to me than the person who works a 40ish hour a week job then comes home and does many more hours of their own project for moths or years. The want to zone out is strong and after a day of crappy and mind numbing work, beating the laziness is harder I think.
> The solid-block-of-learning strategy is way less impressive to me than the person who works a 40ish hour a week job then comes home and does many more hours of their own project for moths or years.
You might also say the guy who uses a lawnmower is way less impressive than the guy who cuts his grass with a nail clipper. But I don't want to be the guy with the nail clipper.
Believe me, I know the feeling of wanting to zone out after a long day of work, a long commute, etc. I let it sideline my ambition for a decade. She found a way around it. I certainly wouldn't discredit her for that.
I had no intention to discredit! Reading what I wrote it sounds like I did, but that's the last thing I meant. I was just thinking about the things I have learnt and the rare times I have had a chunk to time to learn something (all when I was younger and family-less) which are less impressive to me than the ones I have managed while sleep deprived and working etc.
I know I'm not the GP, but might be able to be some use here. Context: always wanted to do a maths PhD, but ended up stuck running a small business (50-70 hrs/wk) for a number of years. Managed to keep studying through this and have just landed a PhD. Suggestions:
1. You'll be working while you're tired. So your work won't be as good, you won't make optimal decisions 100% of the time, sometimes you will just underperform relative to you at your best. Accept this - your work is still better than all the work you weren't doing before. Slow progress is always better than no progress. Key here is creating space that's just for work. I have a table which is just for studying, and a logon that's only for studying, which actually really helps.
2. Pick a course of study and stick to it. There's a tradeoff here - for a given area of study, you want to choose the best course for you but don't want to waste time trying several different things (likewise languages, frameworks, etc). Pick 2-3 and whittle down quickly (I choose 2-3 MOOCs or textbooks, then whittle down using the first chapter over a week or two). There may be a slightly better course out there you don't know about, but it really won't make a difference.
3. If your intention is to become a professional, pick a specialisation quickly (even almost randomly if you have to). No-one would give me the time of day when I was just generically interested in 'maths' but as soon as I picked a sub-area and started to learn about it, people took me seriously. (Obvious caveats apply about over-specialisation)
4. Start talking to other people. You really need to have done 2 & 3, otherwise you won't have any progress to show, and nothing to talk about, but once you've done enough to talk sensibly to others (which might be less than you think) then you'll be more engaged and less likely to drop out/quit.
5. Accept your limitations. Sometimes work/life will take over - sometimes you can make sacrifices and continue to get work done, sometimes doing this would be too painful and you'll need to take a break to get things in order. The thing here is just to show up.
If I had to choose one sentence from all of this to give as advice, it'd be the last one. Just show up.
> 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?
I did. In secondary/high school. God, I miss those times. I've also seen friends pulling stunts like these off, gaininig significant increase of skills over short periods of time [0]. I wish I had even 10% amount of that willpower now, but unless it's something I'm really excited about, it's not happening (probably related to some personal issues).
I also think what she's doing is a more structured (and arguably better) version of what most self-taught programmers I know (myself included) did around high school - have a project idea that you grow, and keep applying what you learn to it every day. It's fun, it helps to get intimate with what you're learning, and it also facilitates fast progress. That's why I think exercises in programming books are a good idea.
[0] - I had a friend who went from "I wonder what this instruction does" to a quite competent C++ programmer and at the same time from total newbie to kicking my seasoned arse in StarCraft over a single summer. Oh, and he works in Google now. Focus + time works wonders.
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 javascript code is covered extensively in brief online tutorials. Maybe, given 10 hours, you couldn't ingest a tutorial and put your own spin on the concept, but thinking that nobody else could do that is a bit arrogant.