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Comment by fein | Hacker News Reader

I've been a pretty hardcore PHP guy for 3 years now, and know exactly how long it would have taken me to do all of this: probably 200 days on my own.

My biggest issue is stuff like this. Take a look at the JS from day 1-8, then look at day 9.

Day 8: http://jenniferdewalt.com/more_drop_shadow.html

Day 9: http://jenniferdewalt.com/bouncing_ball.html

That's a pretty massive jump in coding proficiency in a delta of one day.

This has nothing to do with marginalizing skill, it just seems like there was some outside help here, and that should probably be credited.

edit: I see a lot of different indent patterns on the JS as well. That kind of points me towards n different coders with at least two different text editor configs, or a good deal of copy->paste from SO.

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> a good deal of copy->paste from SO

This is pretty much a given. The delta from days 8 and 9 is "learned how to use named functions, learned that jQuery has plugins". That's not that much of a leap, but of course any student is going to be using external resources. You might notice that her goal was "make websites", not "hand-code everything".

This is how everyone learns. Copy-paste some code in without understanding it, watch it break, figure out how to fix it, repeat.

Pretty much everyone is guilty of using outside resources. She explains in her blog post that she used a lot of Google, SO, etc. Maybe she doesn't give exact citations for every piece of code she uses/takes inspiration from, but no one really does.

I don't think it's helpful to speculate as to whether she had someone in particular helping her throughout the lifetime of her project.

I suspect that if a similar project were done by a male, no one would question if it was a solo venture or not. I think the fact that Jennifer is a woman makes people suspicious enough to inspect the code and say things like, "it just seems like there was some outside help".

Maybe there was, maybe there wasn't. It's as disprovable as it would be if Jennifer was a man instead of a woman, yet only a woman would get called out on it.

I know I shouldn't even get involved here, but I looked at day 8 vs day 9 very carefully and day 9 clearly builds on day 8 (e.g. the disableSelection code is carried over). The indentation that bothers you is feature testing code cut-and-paste from http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.cssHooks/. The additional JS code for the ball animation is totally reasonable for someone to learn and implement in a short time.

TL;DR: there's no red flag here.

TL;DR; people make whatever justifications they want from the code to support their stance.

I wrote simple learning programs along these lines in C and Java in the 1990s. I didn't have a web page to publish my progress on then, but once I got to the point of being able to create ANY graphics in Java, I can readily imagine myself moving from that to the bouncing ball sort of thing in a day of concentrated effort.

So that alone doesn't suggest to me anything deceptive afoot.

I doubt my indentation patterns were very consistent at first either. :-) Especially if I was learning from one book on one day and another book on another day.

You think it's a massive jump? I'm pretty sure a novice programmer could go from one to the other spending a full day on it, especially with the help of SO or tutorials. 8 hours is a lot of time if you are focused.

lol, well, maybe she is a 10x in the making and you are not! just because something will take you 200 days doesn't mean it will take other's the same amount of time.

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