You're right, it was for the get-it-done talent that so few people actually have... developers are a dime a dozen. Stop glorifying yourself.
Naively posting about one or two topics says little about one's programming ability, and much more about one's willingness to be open. It would mean a lot more if Pownce wasn't any good. But it was featureful, it seemed to work well, and quite a few people liked it. Dissing Leah for posting a few silly things is just nastiness.
and i don't see any evidence that leah had that much to do with pownce's features. if her blog is indicative of her code, my first guess is the other pownce people were doing all the work.
I've written a lot more code that's both more convoluted and didn't work. I'm not judged for this, because I don't often talk about it. But people should have the right to be occasionally mistaken on their own blog! I don't think the presence of such mistakes takes at all away from accomplishments.
Hers is basically a coded version of what you'd do manually, eyeballing past the decimal. She's more familiar with string conversion than ceil, floor and round. So? That merits public judgment of incompetence? Of being an impostor?
Yes.
I am not trying to be nasty here, but code like that makes me cringe. And yes, if I saw code like that, I would make a strong presumption of programming incompetence.(which is all right. Not everyone has to be a good programmer. As pxlpusher notes above, "get it done" competence is often more valuable).
Since it was publicly posted code, I don't see a problem with "public judgment" either.
"Of being an impostor?"
No. Programming Incompetence != Being an impostor. Anyone can be genuine and incompetent in a particular skill.
So judge that code. There simply isn't enough information to presume programmer incompetence (let alone make a strong presumption).
In my experience, code reviews are humbling to one and all: Bear that in mind before you raise charges of incompetence.
Sure, but as someone said above
"I agree in theory, but ... converting a float to a string to compute an average?"
We'll have to agree to disagree on whether code like this indicates programmer incompetence. To me, it does. YMMV.
I like beautiful, elegant code as much as the next person. But I've done worse than this, often on purpose, in the name of just getting something working.
However, I can't say I haven't said embarrassingly stupid things from time to time...OK, at least not since treating ADD, but still...nobody's perfect. I would also like to point out that there is merit in the approach she took, in that she just got it done instead of hesitating and thinking over what the optimal solution would be. A good example of iterating on a functional original.
The CouchDB post is about someone writing something others might find useful, acknowledging that it might not be the best solution, and graciously accepting corrections from others. In short, everyone's a winner.
The rounding number post simply reflects that the days where a computing bachelors was taken under the Faculty of Science have long since past.
We've all written code that was stupid beyond all comprehension - even PG will cop to that - so never having written bone-headed code isn't a prerequisite for being a good programmer (edit: the opposite is probably true). You need to judge a body of work.