[petea]

I don't know why she has never mentioned someone she worked with at all. I commented about this about her 70 days ago.

---

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.

---

Edit 1.

While rereading this blog post, I found that she made the first simple Rails app on day 69. So who was it that set up all the Rails dev environment for her starting day 1. I don't understand why she still wouldn't disclose how someone else helped her.

[k3n]

> Really? Is Hacker News this gullible?

Not so gullible so as to take to heart what you're saying, considering that you created your account solely to deride her. Here we are, 70 days after your account was created, and yet you've only posted 1 comment that wasn't negatively criticizing her? And your only argument is a copy/paste of your original complaint from 70 days ago, all based off of source-control introspection?

I don't care if what you're saying is true or not, I think your behavior (an apparent personal vendetta) is the only sad thing here.

[AznHisoka]

Criticize the comment.. not the intention.

[farnsworth]

Criticizing her? Sounds like a compliment to me.

[ars_technician]

Your comment is an ad hominem. Address what he said, not his intentions or account history.

[k3n]

Please consider that the comment in question is a verbatim copy/paste from the previous time it was brought it up. If you want to consider spamming the same comment over multiple threads as valid discussion, by all means, have at it.

However, everything they brought up was already addressed 70 days ago. To be honest, petea raises a valid concern, and I certainly don't want to be party to shills or other types of fraudulent or deceptive activities, but considering that petea didn't even put forth the effort to further refine or follow-up on their original argument (especially given 70 additional data points [sites] with which to draw evidence from), then that signals to me that they have motivations beyond what meets the eye.

[fein]

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.

[cheald]

> 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.

[huu]

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.

[kens]

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.

[ars_technician]

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

[tjr]

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.

[kisielk]

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.

[segmondy]

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.

[jakewu1982]

She is dating Aaron O'Connell, one of the technical co-founders of 42Floors. So, she may have been fortunate enough to have someone coach her along the way and unblock her when needed. Irrespective of that, I still think this is an impressive accomplishment in its own right. How many seasoned developers do we know that can execute at this pace for so long?

[yapcguy]

HN does seem to like promoting blog posts by 42Floors on the front page and whenever I've read them I think "meh".

Maybe this is all part of the soft marketing for YCombinator backed companies so they get technology "mind-share".

[RyanZAG]

There's no conspiracy, 42Floors just shares the HN blog post links internally and gets people to upvote them. You only need a few quick upvotes to hit the front page, and having a few 42Floors employees vote up 42Floors content is more than enough.

The 42Floors blogposts are generally good quality too, so nobody has any reason to flag them, and they're generally on topic and somewhat interesting, like this one.

[telephonetemp]

Wouldn't this count as a voting ring?

[RyanZAG]

I guess it would, but I don't know how you'd get around it. If I were to post something on HN that was of interest to friend A, then sending him a link to the HN comments seems like the natural thing to do. Friend A would then probably upvote that article. So I've just created a mini-voting ring.

I'm pretty sure any company featured on HN (eg RethinkDB or any other) would send a link to the comments on HN if their product was being discussed here, and most employees would then upvote it.

It is a voting ring, but it's probably not done maliciously and it's just how HN works, I guess.

[coffeemug]

slava @ rethink here. Our team is really small. Even if everyone upvoted our stories (they don't -- many people don't even have HN accounts), it would only account for 5-10% of the upvotes; less for some of the more popular stories. The same is probably true for 42 floors. I find that their blog posts are quite good.

I suspect the "friendly upvote effect" has a lot to do with getting to the front page (which admittedly is important), but that doesn't make up for low quality content.

[yapcguy]

Exactly...

What next? Send out internal emails saying "Hey, the company has just posted a new blog, but you don't need the actual link, instead just use the HackerNews one, or maybe this Reddit one..."

[ceejayoz]

We don't call male coders "boy", let's not call female ones "girl" unless they're a fourteen year old or something.

[ig1]

Let's not have another semantic argument (hacking vs cracking), the term "girl" (and the term "boy" for that matter) has both the meanings of an child of the given gender but also the informal friendly meaning for an adult of that gender.

For example "lets check with the (boys|girls)" is a pretty common usage casual usage of the term for adults, especially in the 18-35 age bracket. The term boy is actually very common in uniformed occupations (military, police, etc).

Depending on the context using "women" implies a level of formality and abstraction that some could find more offensive. So whatever word gets chosen carries some risk of offence, but it's best not to get hung up on subtitles especially when so many people are non-native english speakers.

[ceejayoz]

> The term boy is actually very common in uniformed occupations (military, police, etc).

How about the tech industry? When's the last time you got called a boy? I'd be baffled to be called a boy by someone I didn't know.

> Depending on the context using "women" implies a level of formality and abstraction that some could find more offensive.

I suspect you'd have a hard time finding someone who'd have been offended by replacing "girl" with "woman" in the original post.

[percentcer]

"girl" is used in place of "guy" because "guy" has a masculine connotation. I'd be happy to see "gal" but it's a little anachronistic.

[ceejayoz]

Girl has an "immature, not yet an adult" connotation. "Guy" wasn't the only option here. It could easily have read "This woman not only became a competent front end developer..."

[jenniferDewalt]

Gal is fine, if a little forced. Person would probably be best here though.

[reledi]

Hey Jennifer,

Well done on your journey, very impressive! It's an inspiration for many of us.

You replied about the use of "girl" (and I agree, "person" would be best here), but why not reply to petea's original comment where he criticizes you? Every time your blog makes it to front page on HN, I notice you're active in the comment thread but you don't reply to the criticism. Why not? It would quickly put an end to these type of comments. I think ignoring the criticism does more harm than the truth about whether or not you received help from others or you started the challenge with some basic knowledge.

[ceejayoz]

> You don't reply to the criticism. Why not? It would quickly put an end to these type of comments.

Well, that's a novel theory on Internet commenting.

[reledi]

Thanks for the input, but not all online communities are the same. HN doesn't have the greatest community, but it's better than most.

The question keeps appearing every time Jennifer's story makes the front page. If it was answered, the answer can be easily linked to any time the question pops up in the future.

[breadbox]

What does she possibly have to gain by responding to such crticism? Regardless of the situation, her best move is to ignore it and move on with her life.

[reledi]

Alternatively, what does she have to lose by responding to the criticism and then moving on with her life?

While her accomplishment is very inspirational, it can also act as a disincentive to many who feel discouraged or stupid after having failed on much simpler beginner tasks. This can change depending on her answer to the criticism.

BTW this project is now a significant part of her life. It got a lot of attention and most people will know her because of the accomplishment. It'll be difficult to quickly move on from it - I'm sure the project will pop up in conversation with her, years from now, along with the same questions.

Whether she responds to the criticism or not, it's been exciting seeing her make progress and complete her goal. I wish her all the best.

[MartinCron]

What? Calling grown women "girls" is even more anachronistic. Seriously, the one-word pronoun "She" would have worked much better in the original sentence.

[droidist2]

That's what I was thinking too, the female equivalent of guy is gal. I've seen other people suggest "person" but that sounds stiff. I say we just use "individual" or "particular individual."

[ag80]

She mentions specifically the Ruby on Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl. This tutorial has a section on creating secret tokens within the first three chapters (while leaving in-depth discussion of it for later chapters), and starts discussing concepts like MVC and setting up a development environment in the first chapter.

I'm working through the same tutorial myself, so I see no reason to doubt that it is entirely possible to set up a rails dev environment and get started in a single day.

I would also argue she is in fact disclosing how "someone else" helped her -- "...sites like Stack Overflow, MDN, CSS Tricks, blogs and demos. I also used some great online tutorials". Using these resources is to me no different than having your experienced developer friend sit next to you. Probably better, in some cases.

[smrtinsert]

I remember looking at her first few sites and witnessing a big jump somewhere and immediately thought this is all a promotional event to be hired. She was probably helped, or already had generated a lot of the code, or whatever.

I don't think its controversial or argumentative to say its probably faked to a degree.

[heynairb]

Not to mention she uses git, which is not a trivial tool. I don't see many total beginners adopting it. A beginner usually just wants to learn how to develop before diving in and learning the complexities of version control.

[0X1A]

While I don't think you're trying to discredit her, I definitely think there was someone helping her and coaching her. I don't think that makes her effort any less important, but I think it'd make sense to at the very least acknowledge it.

[chris_mahan]

Isn't an important part of learning well finding a coach, a mentor? Evidently she was able to do that. Also, by taking the advice, she demonstrated flexibility. The fact that she did what she did also demonstrates perseverance. Damn, I wish I could get her on my team.

[lnanek2]

I don't think you can determine knowledge of things like Paperclip like this by looking at a repo. I used Paperclip once. Just follow a tutorial. Boom. Done. Looking at my repo you'd assume I just knew it too. Like others have brought up as well, women are even more likely to get help from others than guys who think they have to do everything themselves for better or worse, so there can be live tutors involved as well.

[ars_technician]

>so there can be live tutors involved as well.

I think that's the insinuation here.

[ufmace]

Most of that stuff really isn't that hard. I learned a bunch of that stuff on my own, and I've been spending less than 10 hours a week on it. Surf HN and a few Reddit boards related to coding and Rails, and you'll pick up stuff like that. I first read that the secret_token.rb file does not belong in source control in some thread on here or r/programming.

Not that it would be that tough to figure out - the name kinda invites googling, where the first few results will tell you what you need to know.

[bolder88]

She's a she. It fits into the whole hacker news agenda of championing women in tech.

The fact it's not true doesn't really matter.

If a man had done the exact same project, no one would care. So, well done her for being a woman.

[jenne313]

I wish that I had the karma to downvote you for relevance.

Like you said, "If you post some idiotic comment, and 1,000 people agree with you, that's quite a powerful feedback loop."

[thenomad]

Not true. The most obvious example of a man embarking on a similar project - which people did care about - was Jonathan Coulton, who rose to fame at least partially thanks to his "thing a week" project and the output from that.

Jayenkai's "Game A Week" project (male dev) has also attracted quite a bit of press.

[Gigablah]

Insecure much?

[dgabriel]

That is not true.

[icecreampain]

You make a mighty strong argument, but I think I'll side with the guy that wrote more than one sentence.

[jlgreco]

Several of these have unspecified gender, or are males: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=%22tau...

One sentence; how'd I do?