top | item 4798271

Show HN: I'm 15 years old, and I released my first NPM module: Wizardry

98 points| remixz | 13 years ago |diy.github.com

86 comments

order
[+] orangethirty|13 years ago|reply
On behalf of all the idiots that decided to rain on your parade, I would like to apologize. All of you should be ashamed. How dare you insult this young person whose only wish is to share his work with us?

In terms of the module, can't really comment much on your code. It looks clean and well written. I'll try and run it during my free time to get a good feel for it. Well done. Now go back and build something bigger.

PS. Shoot me an email (in profile). You might enjoy hanging out with the Nuuton team.

[+] chris_p|13 years ago|reply
Who is insulting him? People are just saying that his age is not relavent to what he did, and I agree. His post should describe the project. It should be about how awesome his project is, not about how awesome he is.
[+] donpark|13 years ago|reply
Here, here. Courage can be shared without making the giver poorer. It can also be stripped away but that won't make the pillager any richer. Why discourage without gain when you can encourage without loss?

Well done, @remixz!

[+] remixz|13 years ago|reply
Hi all! Thanks for the great feedback. I did realize the title might have been controversial, but I have a small argument for it.

A few weeks ago, there was the 14 year old who posted their rad iPhone game on HN. Their post did inspire me to post my own work. I have a tiny hope that someone else who's doing something like I am will see this and post their own work. I doubt it, but you never know! :D

[+] tylermauthe|13 years ago|reply
I'm currently in University studying Comp Sci; I can say with confidence that the level of competence demonstrated by you doing this surpasses the majority of my peers and your work-ethic is certainly much higher than those of us who have skills.

Good show dude! Keep up the awesome stuff and you'll have money & praise showered on you.

[+] drewmck|13 years ago|reply
The thing I notice about a lot of software/games/whathaveyou made by people <18 is that it basically fits my expectations ("Nice going kid! This looks meh. I'll reserve any critique as you're 15")

Looking at this module, had you not informed us otherwise, I would have not have guessed the person that made this was 15. It's impressive both in its focus and goals, and having no prior experience with IM/GM I'm now even more interested in using this as a pickaxe.

You should be proud of what you've done outside of the fact that you're 15 - it's really cool!

If you're looking for praise because of your age+abilities I would warn you that this praise is short-lived, and efforts to do so can backfire to the delight of douchey tech writers: http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app-deve...

[+] drpancake|13 years ago|reply
Ignore the obligatory haters. These kinds of posts are inspiring for younger HN readers and a collective kick up the arse for those of us burning a few more candles.
[+] loceng|13 years ago|reply
This is a perfect reason to have sub-communities. There's nothing inherently wrong with stating your situation, and some people will love this. Others will be grumpy and feel the title is being manipulative. If this had a specific sub-HN (category) to post it into then people could simply unsubscribe to it if they didn't like it. It would be a place for different groups to gather around and feel apart of, welcome to, and then if a post is mis-categorized then it can be properly categorized to avoid all of the negative and non-constructive commentary. Glad you followed up on here. Your reasoning I imagine is what many people figured was happening.
[+] kephra|13 years ago|reply
Never mind the bollocks, who flamed you for the title.

You did it right, your posting got 85 points, so far. Its on HN about for 10 hours. So around 8500 people did read your page. This will likely triple by the long tail of twitter and facebook.

Well done. Tomorrow about 24000 people will know that you are a great coder. That all that counts.

[+] SoftwareMaven|13 years ago|reply
Well done. One question, though: Shouldn't the commands be a list instead of an object? I would think you would want to be sure to keep order for image processing. For instance, I don't want my image down-sized for the web until after all the processing is done to it.

The Ecmascript spec leaves the object attribute iteration order undefined (though it appears most implementations iterate in the order attributes are added).

[+] ComputerGuru|13 years ago|reply
Sorry, I don't see that your age is relevant.
[+] bdcravens|13 years ago|reply
The "HN" ethos tends to reward those who go against the odds: founders who jumped off a cliff financially, teams working crazy hours with too few employees, working a full time job while bootstrapping, trying to have a family life, etc. In the end, none of that matters: you either ship good stuff, or you don't. However, whether you have a full-time job or are dealing with the time-suck that is high school, we're here to support, sympathize, and empathize, so it's all relevant.
[+] tylermac1|13 years ago|reply
I think that it's a great achievement for someone his/her age to do. I wish I could've had the determination and knowledge required to write and publish a module at that age.
[+] guiomie|13 years ago|reply
His age is totally relevant. I wish that at 15 I could have known just to code, he actually published code!

It's great that we see youth influenced and impacted by HN.

[+] rymith|13 years ago|reply
And I don't see why this comment is relevant.
[+] bdcravens|13 years ago|reply
Many didn't like posting the age in the title. Yeah, no one ever words their HN submissions to be inflammatory and get to front page, right?

I'll take a million hackers showing their projects and trying to win brownie points with their age than a single freakin smart phone troll blog post any day of the week.

[+] ianstallings|13 years ago|reply
Yeah no doubt. And this kid is miles ahead of the SEO goons as far as I'm concerned. Besides I always assume that means "I don't have experience so I'm just putting that out there before you stone me for something I did wrong". And as harsh as some of these comments are you can see why. I guess we all have to be tempered by the flames.
[+] tylermauthe|13 years ago|reply
Agreed! But personally I found it inspiring so perhaps I misunderstand their rage.

Seems like they drank too much haterade.

[+] chill1|13 years ago|reply
"Wizardry is a task-based library for GraphicsMagick / ImageMagick that focuses on simplicity and getting one thing done right: processing images."

Why I like these words: It's not enough to be able to write code, or even to package up a module for a framework. Knowing that you can't do everything, and that you should not try to do everything, with a single module, is a promising sign in and of itself. Having a clear goal to reach makes getting there all the more possible.

[+] remixz|13 years ago|reply
Thank you! This is something my bosses really helped me out with. I've been pretty lucky to have them mentor me. :)
[+] smoyer|13 years ago|reply
Hmmm ... when I was 15, I spent all my time playing ultimate frisbee and riding my bicycle. Except when I was poring over the schematics and ROM code for the 1802-based COSMAC Elf.
[+] lewisflude|13 years ago|reply
Here we go with another one of these "I'm (under 18) and I did x" posts and an equal amount of people complaining why that isn't relevant.

But yeah, this is a really cool little module, congrats.

[+] thejosh|13 years ago|reply
You see the same thing everywhere in regards to tech. I am X years old, please show me validation that I am doing good.
[+] lclarkmichalek|13 years ago|reply
And an equal amount of people who are outraged that anyone is discussing that it's relevant.
[+] nkohari|13 years ago|reply
Already at 15 you've done more than (I would wager) most of the people on this site -- you've shipped open source.

Congratulations, and ignore the haters. Remember that it doesn't matter what you think or say, it matters what you do. Creating software is more important than talking about it.

[+] bdcravens|13 years ago|reply
Maybe a good rule of thumb: When someone complains about a Show HN that links to Github, post their own Github profile, or STFU? :-)
[+] josephagoss|13 years ago|reply
Whoa quite a few comments here seem a bit negative, remixz you shipped something, that is good, power on! :)
[+] remixz|13 years ago|reply
Thanks! I don't mind the negative comments either, I always love to know what I can do better.
[+] geuis|13 years ago|reply
Guess I'll leave one of the few comments about the project itself.

I'm going to evaluate this when I get home. If it works as described, I think I'll be integrating this into an imaging service we're building. The interface looks great.

Keep coding man. This looks really good.

[+] remixz|13 years ago|reply
Wow, that's really cool! Thanks! :D
[+] Skywing|13 years ago|reply
One thing to notice about this module is that it's spawning a sub-process out to imagemagic itself. I'm not saying this is good or bad, I'm just pointing it out. There are also other modules that wrap the imagemagic libraries themselves and do not spawn sub-processes. Just be mindful about the different implementations.
[+] mnicole|13 years ago|reply
This post is a few days old, but I think it would have really limited the amount of criticism if you'd also noted that you work at DIY (a company that is promoting kids and teens to make all sorts of things - programming or otherwise) in the post somewhere (even though technically people can see the name in the URL). It makes a lot more sense to note his age when the company he's working for is specifically trying to help younger generations.

Great work regardless, I love everything DIY is doing and it's fantastic they have their target audience in the office!

[+] mkr-hn|13 years ago|reply
This thread is an early lesson in how age often makes people focus too much on little things and miss what's important.
[+] homakov|13 years ago|reply
I am 19 years old and I don't give a fuck
[+] taras_v|13 years ago|reply
I am 25. Same shit.
[+] kmfrk|13 years ago|reply
The font-weight on your link is very close to being too small to be legible - in Opera on Windows - hello to edge case asshats like me!)

And my vision is pretty decent.

I know you're probably using a default or something, but it's really bothersome to someone like me to read it.

Great job on the project itself, though.

[+] vaidik|13 years ago|reply
Good one! Seriously! For the work you have done according to your age is tremendous. I certainly was not able to do anything even close to it when I was 15. So I'd say, hats off!!
[+] shaunxcode|13 years ago|reply
This is rad, keep it up! Seriously when others detract remember minor threat: "what the fuck have you done?"
[+] KaoruAoiShiho|13 years ago|reply
Why this instead of gm?

https://github.com/aheckmann/gm

[+] tferris|13 years ago|reply
I used this one few times and though it's good it doesn't offer the full API to the underlying libraries.

So, I appreciate any new NPM and if it's just for the sake of competition pushing the boundaries of the entire Node ecosystem.

[+] remixz|13 years ago|reply
As tferris said, gm is a bit restrictive. I wanted something a lot more open and extensible.