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.
Please, no one believe this jerk.
[0]: https://github.com/jendewalt/jennifer_dewalt/tree/258e91c40f...
[1]: https://github.com/jendewalt/jennifer_dewalt/commit/c0d02c8c...
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.
(it was created 1 hour ago and the only comments from the account are negative posts about the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=petea)
To me it just confirms what the GP said: plenty of bruised egos in this thread.
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.
[1] - http://gigaom.com/2011/12/13/meet-the-internets-newest-boy-g...
[2] - http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/05/22/18-year-old-invents-unde...
[3] - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2335195/Meet-Madis...
[4] - http://www.businessinsider.com/the-17-year-old-yahoo-paid-30...
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.
[1] - http://grapefeed.com
And, unlike the subject of the post, you don't even have the courage to stick your identity to your work.
Neither do you -- as far as I can tell by viewing your profile and googling on your user name.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.