I went on an interesting journey with this article. I first clicked expecting to see what Paul Buccheit succinctly labelled "Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization = Advice".
I found generalised advice, without a word on the author's actual experience. Which I generally dislike, because I like to know who's telling me things. I'd much rather read "Here are some things that worked for me and might work for you" than "this is what you should do".
I also nearly gave up because of poor opening sentence construction, bad jokes ("Drinking Heavily? Not Another Neckbeard?") and outright sexism ("Teh Womens").
Also offputting is the arrogance that comes through the article's tone of "the master" giving omniscient advice. Every great programmer I've personally met was humble about what they could do, and the Dunning–Kruger effect would seem to suggest that's not coincidence.
But then I started thinking about how it's hard to give advice to newbies when you have experience. I mean, my advice on "what worked for me" to start programming is "Have your parents buy you an Apple //e when you're a kid, learn AppleSoft Basic and then try to learn 6502 assember, keep making things and learning from mistakes for 20+ years and you might be on the right path to become me but then again this might be the wrong path to become you.". That clearly doesn't translate on several levels. And I'm relatively young blood who wouldn't dare give advice on this topic. If you're older and more experienced then your story is going to be even more complicated, and harder to translate.
That's when I decided to look at the author's bio. And from right here on HN: "I started learning how to program with Ruby about 10 months ago". Combined with their own bio[1], this suggests they are actually pretty new to this too.
Which would seem to be bad, but it's actually a tremendous advantage when giving advice to newbies. So my advice to the author, if they're reading this, is:
* Rework the advice you clearly want to give around your own experiences. For example, you say "read the Dragon book". Did you actually read the Dragon book? Which parts? What did you learn from it, and how did you apply the knowledge? What did you need to know before you could begin to understand it? Tell us what you did, that you think someone following in your footsteps should do.
* For a second example, you say upfront to learn both Ruby and Python (seemingly concurrently, which I think sounds like an awful idea) but your own experience seems to suggest you learned Ruby first. Why do you now recommend learning both?
* More importantly, please tell us which things you think you wasted your time learning or trying to do or practising that weren't worthwhile.
* Drop the attitude (even if it's intended tongue-in-cheek, it's offputting) and drop the sexism.
I too found the tone of "the master" offputting, so I thought, let's check out this guy's skills, see if he has something to back it up.
http://krainboltgreene.heroku.com/resume - linked from the front page - "Application Error". Real experts dot their i's and cross their t's, especially before going public...
Sexism, a term coined in the mid-20th century,[1] is the
belief or attitude that one sex is inherently superior
to, more competent than, or more valuable than the other.
It can also include this type of discrimination in
regards to gender. Sexism primarily involves hatred of,
or prejudice towards, either sex as a whole (see misogyny
and misandry), or the application of stereotypes of
masculinity in relation to men, or of femininity in
relation to women.[2]
It's not fucking sexism, for the 56th time today. It's light internet humor. It's an incomplete sentence.
post script: The dates on how long ago I started learning ruby are outdated.
There's a lot of geek feminists (myself included) who get irritated about assumptions that all geeks/hackers/programmers are male. No amount of dictionary definition quoting is going to make me think it's not sexist to put a gender-specific joke in a generalised list of advice.
post script: The dates on how long ago I started learning ruby are outdated.
It doesn't matter if you learned ruby 3 months ago or 7 years ago. The point of my comment is this - instead of giving a laundry list of canonical "do this, do that, become 'a hacker'" you could give some advice on how you learned to hack, that you think might be relevant to others. The more recently you learned to hack, the more valuable that advice is.
A generalised laundry list of "the path" is disingenuous. I don't care if it comes from you, me, DHH, Linus Torvalds, Donald Knuth, Jacob Appelbaum, RMS, Fabrice Bellard, Rusty Russell, Guido van Rossum, Jamie Zawinski, my mum, or some school kid. Everyone's path is different and personal, noone's is canonical. But therein lies the value.
I found generalised advice, without a word on the author's actual experience. Which I generally dislike, because I like to know who's telling me things. I'd much rather read "Here are some things that worked for me and might work for you" than "this is what you should do".
I also nearly gave up because of poor opening sentence construction, bad jokes ("Drinking Heavily? Not Another Neckbeard?") and outright sexism ("Teh Womens").
Also offputting is the arrogance that comes through the article's tone of "the master" giving omniscient advice. Every great programmer I've personally met was humble about what they could do, and the Dunning–Kruger effect would seem to suggest that's not coincidence.
But then I started thinking about how it's hard to give advice to newbies when you have experience. I mean, my advice on "what worked for me" to start programming is "Have your parents buy you an Apple //e when you're a kid, learn AppleSoft Basic and then try to learn 6502 assember, keep making things and learning from mistakes for 20+ years and you might be on the right path to become me but then again this might be the wrong path to become you.". That clearly doesn't translate on several levels. And I'm relatively young blood who wouldn't dare give advice on this topic. If you're older and more experienced then your story is going to be even more complicated, and harder to translate.
That's when I decided to look at the author's bio. And from right here on HN: "I started learning how to program with Ruby about 10 months ago". Combined with their own bio[1], this suggests they are actually pretty new to this too.
Which would seem to be bad, but it's actually a tremendous advantage when giving advice to newbies. So my advice to the author, if they're reading this, is:
* Rework the advice you clearly want to give around your own experiences. For example, you say "read the Dragon book". Did you actually read the Dragon book? Which parts? What did you learn from it, and how did you apply the knowledge? What did you need to know before you could begin to understand it? Tell us what you did, that you think someone following in your footsteps should do.
* For a second example, you say upfront to learn both Ruby and Python (seemingly concurrently, which I think sounds like an awful idea) but your own experience seems to suggest you learned Ruby first. Why do you now recommend learning both?
* More importantly, please tell us which things you think you wasted your time learning or trying to do or practising that weren't worthwhile.
* Drop the attitude (even if it's intended tongue-in-cheek, it's offputting) and drop the sexism.
[1] http://krainboltgreene.heroku.com/log/1/