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Comment by petea | Hacker News Reader

So let's see her repository (https://github.com/jendewalt/jennifer_dewalt).

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.

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In case anyone misses my other reply to this troll, her initial commit[0] was the default Rails app, which most any newbie can get up on GitHub in a single day. She didn't even touch the app/ directory, where all the Rails-specific code lives, until two months later.[1]

Please, no one believe this jerk.

[0]: https://github.com/jendewalt/jennifer_dewalt/tree/258e91c40f...

[1]: https://github.com/jendewalt/jennifer_dewalt/commit/c0d02c8c...

I'll admit it, I'm skeptical. I'm also a bit jealous that I can't seem to find 10 spare minutes a day for learning.

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.

As far as I can tell this is an account that was created entirely to post negative responses in this thread. How sad.

(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.

These guys tend to come out of the woodwork when the focus of the article is of a certain gender, if you catch my drift.

With stories like this, I have found it to be the opposite. People that would usually question this, won't because they are terrified of being called sexist which is (exactly what you have done and) one of those things that hangs around you and can ruin your career very quickly.

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 need to question it every time it appears

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.

I completely agree. I've always wondered what the obsession about "outing" liars on the internet is about. If the person can craft an interesting enough story to keep people engaged for a short period of time, who cares if its "true"? This is the internet, the value is derived from what is communicated, not what actually happened on the other side of the terminal. Now when someone is asking for donations or whatnot, skepticism is warranted. But this? Just take it for what it is; enjoy it or move along.

Maybe you two enjoy consuming bullshit but don't be surprised that other people don't.

The benefit I get out of these stories is gaining a new perspective, motivation, insight etc. 99% of the time its inconsequential whether the story is bullshit or not. Spending mental energy trying to determine veracity is utterly useless for everyone involved. You win no points for determining its fake and yet you miss an opportunity for self-reflection and growth.

Is she selling something that I'm not aware of?

Herself, as most of us are. This kind of thing will make it a lot easier to get media attention for her projects like Grapefeed [1][2].

[1] - http://grapefeed.com

[2] - https://angel.co/grapefeed

I created a new account to avoid precisely people like you psychologizing libelously about who I am. I feel reassured that it was a good idea to create a new account.

It's interesting that you reach so quickly for the adjective "libellous" given the tenor of your comments and the insinuations therein.

And, unlike the subject of the post, you don't even have the courage to stick your identity to your work.

>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.

Translation: "I know what I'm saying is coming from a place of extreme bitterness, but I don't want search results for my name showing these comments to my potential employers."

If you're going out of your way to create a new account to voice your opinion, chances are your opinion is shit.

> "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.

Attacking the person instead of his opinion is worse.

Not gullible, just giving her the benefit of the doubt. It could turn out that she had some guidance, or has worked with people (though not as a programmer) and is smart + good enough memory to osmos some good practices, or took some class a long time ago that stuck better than she thought. Perhaps she had a power up period of non committed grazing and chose day 1 as the for real now point. Or some combination of above. To be honest I don't care. She's done something few can: keeping to a goal when she could easily have slacked on sites like hacker news, completing something not at all trivial, doing it well and sharing it. How long she's been programming wouldn't move my opinion in any direction.

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.

> It could turn out that she had some guidance

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.

> It's also possible that she's a fictional character (admittedly there isn't enough data proving otherwise).

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've had a Twitter account for over a year and posted absolutely nothing to it.

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've had a twitter account since May of 2008 and have less than twenty tweets. It just sits there, aging.

Cry every time

After 1000 hours with Google, all of those things are completely plausible. Moreso if you have a mentor to turn to. In fact, I would think that if you haven't reached that level of basic competence after 1000 hours, you're probably a pretty slow learner, or just not getting programming.

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.

So she did some hand waving. So what? It's not a lie to say that she's teaching herself how to code. And at least she's doing something with her time.

that being said her little pages are great to inspire a budding web programmer.

You betcha. She's gonna get book deals and invitations to talk at conferences in no time with this internet theatrical.

She says she works in a shared developer space. She's also co-founding a site with an experienced developer. It's quite possible that one of these developers helped set up the back end.

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?

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