Comment by huehehue | Hacker News Reader

Comment by huehehue | Hacker News Reader

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I don't do much recreational coding now, but there are a couple of recent examples:

- I needed to submit something on a website that had a completely broken frontend (like, scripts were busted). Found an old version on the wayback machine that worked and, fortunately, there were no compatibility issues. This is pretty basic, but I could have set up overrides in dev tools to restore a working version of the "original" site.

- Needed to make a hotel reservation, but the online form was broken (NaN for all number inputs, probably broken validator). Was able to guess the expected format and manually issue these requests, which worked.

I often think about technical literacy. Programmers are in this bubble where we think "oh, I'll just use grep and regex" and we can solve all sorts of problems. But 99% of people don't even know what those things are, much less have the foundation necessary to use these tools effectively. This sucks, because technical literacy does not seem to be growing at a rate that matches our societal dependence on these systems.

>I often think about technical literacy. Programmers are in this bubble where we think "oh, I'll just use grep and regex" and we can solve all sorts of problems. But 99% of people don't even know what those things are, much less have the foundation necessary to use these tools effectively. This sucks, because technical literacy does not seem to be growing at a rate that matches our societal dependence on these systems.

Even working in IT this is an issue. For something I used to do we needed to take a bunch of input and turn it into a basic csv before it could be used. For example, feeding a bunch of servers names into some kind of script. People kept coming to me to help them put this together, because I was decent with a text editor. Eventually I decided to make a little website that let people dump in all their garbage data; it would clean it up and format it in various formats, depending on what they needed it for. I figured one or two people on the team would get some use out of it. How wrong I was. It was being used hundreds of times per month. I was attending a demo for some other team a couple years later and someone on the demo used it to get his input in order before using whatever he was trying to demo. Some of these seemingly basic things can be huge for enabling people to do their job effectively.

I always thought I shouldn't have gone into IT, but something else... anything else... and simply used computer skills as a super power. The productivity someone with some basic computer skills can have, compared to the others who don't, is crazy.

> Needed to make a hotel reservation, but the online form was broken (NaN for all number inputs, probably broken validator). Was able to guess the expected format and manually issue these requests, which worked.

Bravo for the neat hack, but did you actually get a confirmation email? I'd not be particularly comfortable arriving at a hotel that I'd booked through the direct, unsanctioned and entirely unexpected use of an HTTP endpoint! Perhaps ringing the hotel's telephone would have been more practical ;)

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