It's pretty clearly hosted by freecodecamp.com; of course it's something intended to promote them. It's like saying that a post on the Google blog about "getting girls into coding" is an ad for Google.

But it can't be astroturfing, which has a specific meaning about misrepresenting the source of the support.

The stock image is shady, but that's more of a Medium-style-blogpost thing (edit: see below) -- people routinely add stock images in obviously-not-fair-use ways, without permission; the negotiation article used a ton of stills from Mad Men (presumably before they got a nasty letter and took them down).

[1] This one: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/how-not-to-bomb-your-offer-n...

Edit: Didn't check that url -- n/m, you're right, it's something FCC seems to do a lot, not a Medium-thing.

Looks a bit like Jeff Daniels in dumb & dumber aged 10 years.

Good find though. This is really fishy.

I think you all are misunderstanding the article. It's extremely common on medium articles to use stock photo at the top of your article. This probably also serves as an article thumbnail in article summaries/indexes.

The author clearly uses a photo of what is ostensibly themselves as their profile pic. Nothing in the article indicates "this is me."

More important: there is little if anything to be gained by this deception. The article includes self promotion, including "Connect with me on twitter" in the author byline. But this is IMO a par for the course quid-pro-quo in nearly every blog article ever written.

I know it is extremely common, but one thing is when you write something about (say) biking let's say titled "Biking is good for your soul" and have a nice stock photo of a "generic biker" on a mountain trail, another IMHO is if the title is:

"I’m learning to code at 56. Here’s an epic beat-down of my critical inner self."

and just after the title you put an image of a good looking fiftyish guy looking at the reader straight in the eyes, and right after it you repeat:

"I’m 56 years old and learning to code.".

Maybe it is not "intended" or done in any way in "bad faith", still it does seem like saying, "here I am, at 56, look at me".

I took it to be a personification of his Critical Inner Self.

jaclaz - nice detective work. Photo seemed a little too perfect.

Just very basic looking for it with Google Image Search, nothing to be much proud of, it is IMHO more interesting that you will find it also here:

http://bobdoesdev.com/

as the image referencing a testimonial "Jordan Blum, EIC, The Bookends Review" whose looks are also slightly different:

http://thebookendsreview.com/about-us/

As a rule of thumb, when it looks too good to be true, it isn't. ;)

This REALLY irks me.

So how should we punish him for lying, polluting the net, wasting bandwidth,etc?

>So how should we punish him for lying, polluting the net, wasting bandwidth,etc?

Maybe ;):

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079470/quotes?item=qt0471984