robertakarobin

I lead-taught General Assembly's web development bootcamp for a year and a half. My students included a retired Air Force colonel, an orthodox Jewish grandma, and a guy who used to write FORTRAN in the 70s, in addition to lots of people in their 20s and 30s.

We came to realize that one of the most important things our students needed to learn is that their previous careers were an asset that gave them a significant edge over their competition in the job marketplace. They weren't jumping ship and starting their careers over; they were expressing their skills in a different way.

Coding is just a part of being a programmer. Unless you're working for yourself, by yourself, a bigger and more important part is being able to communicate with others about what you're coding. As an employer, given the choice between a competent developer who knows how to communicate an idea and work with others, and a "rockstar"/"ninja"/"master hacker" developer who doesn't, I'll take the former choice every time.

Whether you're switching to technology from being a waiter, a salesperson, a graphic designer, or whatever, the experience you gained from your prior jobs is hugely valuable.

Or, perhaps, they just disagree with you?

https://xkcd.com/1357/

There is a tremendous difference between silencing, disagreeing with someone, and only listening to one side of the story.

I don't think either side is being silenced. Both sides equally like to accuse the other of:

- Ignoring "facts and logic"

- Suppressing free speech

- Being hateful

- Blindly following mainstream media

- Being agents of foreign influence

Hmm, do we really want to open this conversation to making broad generalizations about groups based on small groups of extremists within it? Neither side wins in a conversation like that.

I hate this stereotype. "Hurr durr, stupid Millenials don't even know what a book is, amirite?"

Your books were a huge part of my childhood. The Klutz book got me started in origami, which became my primary hobby. I learned so much from all the earth science books. Now my own toddlers are starting to explore those old copies. Thanks for what you created.

Personally, I don't ever really find myself needing to back up a tree, or find myself encountering something unexpected (outside of the code itself). In my experience Git is extremely reliable... but only if you enter its weird commands with no typos whatsoever. Hence: this enormous dotfile I maintain that is half Git shortcuts: https://github.com/RobertAKARobin/dotfiles/blob/master/.bash...

It makes me think of an old car that only the owner can drive, because it'll break down for anyone who hasn't memorized all its quirks (e.g. my own bumper-sticker-covered, manual-transmission 1996 Toyota Corolla, fondly named Sharon).

Again, though, I have the same relationship with virtually all frameworks, tools, and languages (looking at you, Bash).

As another commenter said, Git is so pervasive that learning something else would put you at a big disadvantage.

That doesn't excuse Git having an unintuitive UI that makes it very difficult to learn. It has that in common Vim, Emacs, the command line itself... and programming in general. What they also have in common is that once you get used to them they're wonderful tools.

If you don't practice using branches, resetting, rebasing, etc., you're not going to get good with them. Create a dummy repo and practice. There's no "easy button."

I was terrified of Git when I started using it. All the time, I would call in senior colleagues to resolve Git issues that went over my head.

Nowadays, I use Git for coding as well as writing, vector graphics, datasets, and anything else that isn't stored in binary. The time it took to get here was well worth it.

I have a Pixel 2 and really like it. I've hardly had any problems with the speed or performance of the device, and the camera is better than my DSLR.

Thank you! So each exchange has its own formula for determining the price that gets shown on the ticker?

Let's say someone owns shares in a very low-volume stock — one that gets a couple trades a day, at most. Could they artificially increase the share price by offering their shares at a high price, then using a second account under their control to immediately buy them at the inflated price?

If I buy a stock, does the price at which I agreed to buy it become the new share price on the stock exchange?

Every article on "Where do stock prices come from?" seems to just talk at a high level about supply and demand.

But where does the price come from at a nitty-gritty level? Is it an average of all existing offers or something?

Do different exchanges and stock-ticker websites have different formula for calculating share price?

If a very low-volume stock is listed at $4, and then I offer to buy a share for $100, does the NYSE suddenly start listing its price at $100?

I don't think it's just GitHub. I noticed everything seemed slow but thought it was just my ISP. Turns out from looking at downdetector.com there seems to be a large spike in reported problems across many sites and providers, all occurring at the same time.

You would think that diffing is inefficient, but apparently modifying the DOM is significantly more inefficient. Mithril -- the framework that inspired this example -- has an interesting take: https://mithril.js.org/vnodes.html

Eh, I feel like that's any web framework in any language. Take Django for instance. If you're doing a very boilerplate project, then it's pretty slick. But as soon as you start trying to do any customization you go down a rabbithole of subclasses and mixins, where looking at the source is usually more helpful than the documentation.

I think the reality is web applications stand on the shoulders of lots of giants. We're only able to get anything done thanks to abstraction that someone else did for us. We still have a need to see below the surface occasionally, though, and finding the balance between readability and customizability is an eternal struggle. Plus, everyone has their preferences: I hated Angular at first because of its steep learning curve, and now love it for its strictness.

I suspect this is a typo, but it reads well anyway. :)

You're absolutely right. This article is geared toward people who are brand-new to programming, and in turn is geared toward people learning about programming through web development.