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by gfodor 3217 days ago
Flag 8: He is using Crystal based on his knowledge of ruby, there is no ruby code on his Github

Flag 9: He cranked out a multithreaded reverse proxy in C in four days, despite no other C code in his repo. https://github.com/kbrsh/coat

I learned C when I was just about his (alleged) age. I made some cool shit for an ANSI art group, but my code was a total goddamn mess full of newb mistakes (not DRY, bad naming, etc etc) and there's no way in hell I would be using advanced things like threads and mutexes in general, nevermind correctly.

Where's all the terrible C code? The terrible ruby code? Where's the path and not just the destination? There's a lot of stuff in the github showing he just learned how to do web development. He was at "Hello World" a year and a half ago and definitely deserves props for getting as far as he has since then, regardless of age.

That said, wouldn't he want to put up all of his old work in ruby and C it took for him to get this good at C and Crystal since he already has all the other half-finished projects? Perhaps that work would be too far in the past for his story and would force us to have to believe he knew how to do pointer arithmetic in C at 8 years old?

There's no way coat was written by someone who hasn't been programming for a good while. It's not some phenomenal work of engineering but it's by someone who is fairly seasoned. The profile here looks like someone who was already pretty good and experienced at programming and picked up web programming about a year ago under a new online identity.

2 comments

Alright I'm going to stop replying to these, I'm starting feel attacked.

8. All of my code is not on Github, and there is no reason for me to learn a language simply because I have previous knowledge in Ruby. I chose to learn Crystal because of it's elegance and speed.

9. I wrote that reverse proxy based on a variety of online tutorials[1], but used my knowledge of threads to make it multithreaded.

[1] http://www.gilesthomas.com/2013/08/writing-a-reverse-proxylo...

Fair enough -- I guess you must have learned how to write multithreaded C code with pthreads when you were 10 years old. Props if so. It just defies my comprehension given that I know what it is like to learn to code from a young age (I was writing my first programs at 8 years old on my Apple //c) and your velocity is absolutely insane.

Perhaps you are just 10x more capable at this than all other humans I've encountered in my entire life. If so good luck and godspeed and please try to avoid bringing about AI takeoff for the rest of us :)

You seem like a really nice person with similar interests as me, I'd love to actually get to know you :)

I started out with C, definitely didn't know how to write multithreaded code when I was 10 haha. I learned most of that after reading a great book on operating systems (Modern Operating Systems by Andrew S. Tanenbaum) a couple months ago.

I'm trying to clean up my Github, you'll notice the "DayN" repositories are just edited versions of stuff I found online to learn from. These days I create my own projects, and am slowly deleting those "learning" repositories and making them private.

Flag 10: In his introduction to his 'Moon' library [1], he notes that in 'late 2015' he found he was having problems with Vue. If he's the oldest 13 year old he can be today, that makes him in 2015 toying with Vue enough to start looking under the hood at 11...

Plus looking at his old FreeCodeCamp username [2], I don't believe the programmer who was working through FCC tutorials (with very basic results) in 2016, is the same one who got tired of Vue in late 2015.

[1] https://hackernoon.com/introducing-moon-1d44a99635f0 [2] https://www.freecodecamp.com/KingPixil

Please. The initial commits on Moon were in 2016, and I was playing around with a forked version of Vue locally in late 2015. I think it's extremely important to know what goes on under the hood of popular libraries.

And regarding the FreeCodeCamp profile--I made that account for my little brother (who was learning to program at the time). Along with that, I tried to help people out on the FCC Gitter[1] as much as I could, as teaching people is a good way to master something.

[1] https://gitter.im/FreeCodeCamp/FreeCodeCamp