My read on it is the author is saying that seemingly small changes can have big impacts. I agree it could have been worded better, though I doubt he's trying to promote himself as a genius (as other people are saying) because he clearly highlights the effort his team put into the project in the footnote.

I was really off-put by it too.

"I did it by myself in one day, well actually it was one week but had I known the stack I would likely have done it in one day. Oh, and by the way, after that week, there was yet another month of work involving at least two other persons from my team and then even more work from other teams. But let's not dwell on boring details".

It's nearly as infuriating as the "Appendix: stuff I screwed up" which doesn't contain actual screw up. It's a shame because the rest of the writing is interesting and doesn't need to be propped up.

It's kind of a personal marketing thing these days to have this maverick/hero aura of genius instead of the "unproductive" but real and hard grinding work to get something done and delivered. It worked for a few so thousands try the same and we are here now, I guess?

Given:

- the context that the author already has a very successful career as a well-known developer

- the humility he evidences in most posts on his blog

- the fact that he explicitly highlights the work of others in this post alongside his own

I really don't think Dan is doing this as any form of personal marketing. He has no need of personal marketing, his blog already has several million views per month and frequently shows up on HN as it is, and it isn't really his style.

I did not say he did that, I said that I believe it's common these days given the points I mentioned. You just need to hang around and see a bunch of posts on HN to notice that. QED, he's probably one of the "few" I talked about.

In fairness, based on the limited time I've spent in his company, Dan Luu is pretty bright.

That strikes me as a short tolerance for feeling something is ruined. He appropriately highlighted the real time estimate of the more involved work in a footnote. He didn't literally mean all of the work was one day, he's trying to convey a larger point about outsized engineering returns from comparatively small person-hours of work.

Were you able to move past this to read the rest of the article? Because it's a very good article.

I did go back and read the rest of it, and I do agree that it's pretty good overall. For someone going into detail about the mistaken capitalization of a variable name (which I appreciated), the "one day" bit still stands out as oddly hand-wavy and boastful (and, as the opening remark, I would argue it's pretty important for setting the tone).

If that point needed to be made (and I don't think it really did in this article, that's not the focus), it could have been done more carefully.

The writing style is dense. I suspect a voice fresh out of academia.

The post about salary reads much better so might just be an experience thing.

https://youtu.be/vtIzMaLkCaM

Dan Luu is not "fresh out of academia."

So youre saying he's just dense?