Week 23: Changes | Hacker News Reader

Week 23: Changes

blog.jenniferdewalt.com

104 pointsjaf12duke41 comments

As someone with a design background and now work mostly in development, something I learned about myself is that I am now convinced that every single 'web designer' in the known universe should be forced to make a full HTML site (tools of their choice!) that is compatible back to IE8 (bonus points for IE6) and 'mobile friendly'.

Plus accept that web pages are not the same as printed pages.

Wait, that's not all about me learning about myself though. Maybe my background and my current job has given me a less accepting attitude towards 'web designers' that don't learn the canvas they are attempting to paint on?

Sometimes I do feel bad about it though.

Oh! I also should have done more coding in college.

> every single 'web designer' in the known universe should be forced to make a full HTML site (tools of their choice!) that is compatible back to IE8 (bonus points for IE6)

But they only pass if it's backwards-compatible to Lynx as well.

I downvoted your post on accident. I'm sorry. This meager apology is my only recourse. I hope you are able to regain the karma I recklessly took from you.

Upvoted him for you.

As long as it isn't hidden in the dead pool, I don't care much where one of my comments' karma is. BTW, it's at 30 now, so no damage done.

She says: "The thing I was missing is that math is just a bunch of symbols that you manipulate to get new symbols out. Coding is basically the same thing. The meaning isn’t in the math or the code itself. The meaning comes from the interpretation of the mathematics or similarly, what your code is doing for someone."

This is, I think, the most important thing to understand about mathematics, and failure to understand this leads to the travesty that is K-12 mathematics education in the US. I find it impressive that she came to this conclusion on her own, having started as someone for whom "Math was never [her] favorite subject".

I taught myself to program when I was 11, using GameMaker, which had this neat scripting language called GML that hooked into the editor to control things above and beyond the simple actions built in.

Learning about functions and variables made algebra ezpz when we learnt it later on. Matrices were multidimensional arrays (I know, not quite the same in terms of maths, but hey I was young).

More importantly, programming taught me how to approach logical problems the correct way. I'm super thankful for it :)

> Matrices were multidimensional arrays (I know, not quite the same in terms of maths, but hey I was young).

In math, if something has all the properties a kind of object is defined to have, it is that kind of object. Mathematics is based on definitions, so things are what they are defined to be, no more, no less.

In fact, you can implement mathematical structures in terms of other mathematical structures, as Peano did when he defined numbers and basic arithmetic in terms of set theory:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms

Hey, set theory is neat although I never got to study it.

> "The thing I was missing is that math is just a bunch of symbols that you manipulate to get new symbols out."

This is the Formalist philosophy of mathematics, which isn't the only one (as you might imagine given that it has a name):

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/formalism-mathematics/

Formalism is at odds with Platonism, to pick an obvious antithesis, as Platonism holds that mathematical entities do indeed have a reality beyond us finite, mortal creatures and our symbols:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/

There are, as you might imagine, a lot more philosophies of mathematics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics

That said, at the K-12 level, formalism is what students need most; make mathematics a game and show them how well the game applies to reality. That unreasonable effectiveness is quite astounding the first million times, and it never really quits being astounding:

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_...

Formalism in math states that mathematical truth is what can be proved. Manipulating uninterpreted symbols is part of math no matter what philosophy you subscribe to. The author of the quote is clearly making a practical, not a philosophical, claim here.

I check in from time to time and am continually impressed with her cycle of innovation and release...amusingly, if you check her repo, the way she's structured the app is basically batshit crazy (creating a controller for every new app, even though each app is mostly static HTML and JS)...but hey, it works, and it works well, and just goes to show how imperfect implementation isn't the end of the world.

(her controllers directory in the repo: https://github.com/jendewalt/jennifer_dewalt/tree/master/app...)

And yet, not knowing exactly how to structure things is enough to hold back novices and experts alike. The OP just plowed through -- devoting a half year of her life to this -- and will have made more web-sites (or thingies) than I'll make in a lifetime, and doing it for self-enrichment. If only more people had that same attitude.*

* Yes, she's lucky that she has some situation where she can devote a huge chunk of her life to exploring web dev...but it's not as if everyone has to do the half year route...Doing a simple web-page/widget/app a week, or every two weeks, is a manageable commitment for people who are already in the online/web industry.

I can totally relate to her thing about typing. I've been coding professionally for nearly 20 years and can't type for shit. My theory is that typing code is not like typing words in sentences in paragraphs in [whatever]. Code is not structured the same (not always "word [space] word [space] word [punctuation]"). Code is not as linear as an email or story (well.. not the same kind of linear anyway). Code uses a totally different ratio of symbols/numbers/letters/etc (I type more dollar signs and under_scores in a day at work than in a whole month not at work). Well... that is my theory anyway.

I've noticed this myself as well, with a similar timeframe. In college, right when I started coding, I would regularly type up a 8-10 page paper (for non-CS assignments), find 2 typos in spell check, and then just ... turn it in. No grammar snafus, no syntactic boo-boos, no problems at all.

Nowadays even a short email can't measure up.

I think it's because I edit code much more "interactively" than I used to write prose: editing a previous line as I think through the current one, deciding to change a variable name or edit a loop construct or what-have-you. That habit has transferred to writing prose, and I think it's for the worse.

Rather than having a complete sentence planned out before I start it, I find myself getting partway through and then thinking "huh, I'd rather rephrase the beginning like so". And so I change the beginning and go back to the end, but often a conjunction or phrase-transition gets messed up in the middle and I don't notice it.

EDIT: typo!

I do this all the time on anything longer than a couple sentences.

You can both benefit from adopting the Halmo's Spiral technique http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/36521/963.

My theory is that when typing code, I'm thinking entirely about the code and have no attention left to spend on how I'm typing it. I end up with countless typos that I have to backspace and type over again, often adding more typos in the process, yet doing it that way somehow preserves my focus much better than being careful with the keys does.

I am really glad I am not the only one who has experienced this! It really has been a strange and annoying phenomenon.

For this very reason, I used to map my right Alt key (alt-gr) so that, for example, alt-gr + e was left parenthesis

Maths is like programming with terrible variable names.

And a very-not-context-free grammar!

Except for APL / K / J programmers!

Math isn't the symbols, it's the ideas. The symbols are just a crude way of communicating the ideas.

We cannot even think about ideas, leave aside communicating, without involving symbols. Language is a necessity for thinking. So what you said above, doesn't really say anything.

I'm amazed by the creative ideas she comes up with day after day. You're almost there!

Definitely impressed by her tenacity and creativity. But if I were to do the same for self-enrichment reasons, I might go a different route. I'd rather build one or two full-blown apps in 180 days so I can dive in a deeper depth. After all, quality is better than quantity, isn't it?

Though she definitely has inspired me to do something similar.

I would argue quantity is better than quality for learning. This is why in art classes teachers have you constantly making new things instead of spending the entire semester on one painting, sculpture, whatever...

When I was learning Ruby on Rails I built iterations of the same stupid app dozens of times—I found that more helpful that the more in-depth app that took more than a month.

EDIT: wording

When you build iterations of the same app, you are essentially working on just one app, refining it, probably making it perform faster, look nicer or just architect it better. That, to me, indicates quality over quantity. That's pretty much what I meant in my original comment. The lady who posted this is building 180 different small apps in 180 days, many of them aren't refined or related to each other, that's quantity over quality.

I still think that quantity over quality is the way to go, though I would opt for a little more depth than these are.

There's a lot of "one-time" stuff that's important in web-dev--primarily server & app config--that can be a big obstacle, for instance. Getting it down pat is a huge step in the right direction.

Anyway, for beginners, I think this is a great way to do things.

I was a bit overwhelmed by the many samples that I clicked on.

Someone else posted a link to her GitHub repo and I was glad to check it out some. I chuckled at her using of Ruby/Rails. I was amazed at her using of jQuery.

It pains me to note that what the industry might consider sound software engineering is so detached from the creative tools that she has employed to get this going.

On one hand the industry demands greater quality from their tools. On the other hand the industry seems eager to provide the creative tools used by amateurs-alike to help to get people trained in the tools that the industry might need.

JavaScript really is a puzzle that the industry has been trying to solve. Because JavaScript is far away from what the industry might consider sound engineering principles. But users of JavaScript could make for great employees, so the industry has been trying to figure out a way to create a bridge between the two.

Keep up the great work! I liked playing the Hangman.

Cheers.

I have not unfortunately experienced the typing thing (my typing speed is getting faster), but I can definitely say my appreciation for compact functions and mathematics has increased a great deal.

I would also add to the list: 1) In my day-to-day life, precision has become more important. It's tougher for me to accept imprecise statements as they often reflect incomplete knowledge which, as we all know, will lead to "bugs" or lots of head-banging 2) Logical problem solving skills have increased right in line with my debugging effectiveness. 3) As walls of abstraction get torn down through application of technology and programming, I find it harder and harder to identify and describe technology to non-technology users without cringing (see number 1)

I learned to code 3 years ago-- I've worked professional in it for 2.5 years. A couple of changes I've had (that occured fairly early on) were:

1. A nitpicky eye for detail. Even in my non-coding life I seem to be just a bit more detail focused than I usually am.

2. Tenacity and willingness to 'jump in'. I think this was always a strength for me but now, as long as I'm not totally stumped, when I find something (a bug, or a new thing I'm curious about) I will just dive in and explore.

Scrolling on `Day 162` is shaky and often misses final position when moving the mouse rapidly.

She is like an unrelenting ant!

Women are crazy.

What could this comment possibly add to the discussion? Why did you post this?

Oh I think you know.

It is like you want to be downvoted. Exploring yourself to find out why could be useful.

You can't control me with your threats.

What on earth was that about.

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