darth_mastah's comments

> “It’s very difficult to label the underlying emotion,” he said, since external expression and internal feeling don’t always correlate well.

Not true. Paul Ekman spent most of his professional life studying micro expression and he developed pretty accurate system for recognising emotions leaking though micro expressions. The science presented in the TV series "Lie to me" was largely based on his work. https://www.paulekman.com/

It's as if you were describing my own experience. With the only difference, that I had to figure out how to use vi. Such fun! I took me some time to figure out how to exit the editor, let alone how to make changes or write the file.

We didn't have all the resources at out fingertips back then. Just the books. We couldn't find copy-and-paste hideous solutions on StackOverflow, we had to figure it out on our own. Programming had the air of wizardry.

I do believe that nowadays it's much easier to learn the basics of programming, considering massive number of resources available just a few keystrokes away. On the other hand the expectations have changed a lot after programming went mainstream.

In my line of work, before I became a consultant, I had interviewed a lot of candidates for web development positions. In my rough estimate only 2 out of 10 are cut out for it. And no wonder - the demand on the market is massive, the money is all right, so more people jump on the bandwagon and try to get by. They don't want to learn a great deal, they don't have a real interest in the domain. They just want to do the job as painlessly as possible and get paid good money.

This also means, they have to cut corners. They don't have time to figure things out and build solid foundations. They are after quick results. They just want to become employable. The passion in our profession is hugely diluted, with the inflow of people who want to do the job just because it pays nicely. It's pure economy.

And because it is economy, the expectations have changed. Maximising return on investment, where the time spent on learning something is the investment, means that steep learning curve is no good anymore.

So maybe let's not dwell on how hard it is to become a programmer these days. In my view it's definitely harder to stay one, than to become one, with everything changing so fast. However becoming a programmer is not more difficult today than it was 20 years ago.

This is great. Does it mean we finally have cure for cancer? My granddad died because of that shit, and so did my uncle. Maybe there is still hope for me.

> The author seems to think that React users choose Flow and Angular users choose TypeScript. > However, TypeScript works really well with React and has for a long time.

I don't believe the two statements above contradict each other. React users can prefer Flow even though TypeScript works with React. In truth, I believe it's only natural to choose Flow if one is working with React. After all both are FB creations and are meant to work together out of the box. TypeScript on the other hand is promoted in Angular documentation. Considering the above, it's really hard not to get an impression that most devs would choose to work on well supported pairs: React+Flow and Angular+TypeScript.

+1

It's all fine and dandy except Amazon could not handle the volume. Two of my guaranteed next day deliveries were awfully late, one of them over a week. Apparently my case was not at all isolated, as people were complaining all over the Internet. Reading their boasting leaves quite a bad taste.

Same here. +1

Depends on the context, I guess. While working on a code base employing DOM manipulation it's absolutely fine. Having said that I would think long and hard before starting a new project with jQuery, and then probably used another library. There are other ways to get things done quickly, efficiently and in a way which promotes maintenance.

Considering current trends for creating complex applications for the client I do not believe jQuery has much of a future anyway. It had been good while it lasted, I used to like jQuery a lot until better tools came along. These days libraries for DOM manipulation seem not only obsolete but also standing in a way of focused and efficient development. Let jQuery rest in peace and be remembered for its past greatness.

> I don't think that after 12 years you can say it didn't work for Munich. It worked for 12 years and now, for political reasons, it's going back to Windows.

Very good point. Also, it's really sad to see political agenda driving technological decision making.

Thanks for sharing. Really good and honest write-up. Everyone needs to put bread on the table. It's much more rewarding investing your time in your own project than selling your time to some corporation. At least you actually have something to show for it. Respect. And if people found your project useful - you succeeded. The mere fact that the apps were making money shows that those apps were used by some other people who found them worth using.

+1

W3schools is contributing to poor education amongst junior web developers.

Absolutely. I second that. I would be willing to spend a couple of hours on an interview task, which could give the interviewer an idea about my skills, but more than that I would see as an overkill. Besides, in my view, showing some OS repos on GitHub can be a good alternative.

I hate to say that, but I just seem to have broken it. Here's how: I put 0.1 in A1, 0.2 in A2 and =A1+A2 in B1. Now B1 displays "=A1+A2" instead of the result.

From web dev perspective Safari is becoming new IE6. CSS3 written to spec, working fine on anything else including IE11 tends to fail on Safari. I'm sure I will get a lot of hate from Apple fun boys and girls, but that has been my and my colleagues' experience recently.

Really good article, somehow missed by HN audience.

No matter what framework or library you choose, if you go past the to-do list project you will encounter certain pain points. I worked with jQuery when it was the new kid on the block, with Angular since it first came out and now with React. Every one of them gives you grief now and again. However if you develop pragmatically you learn how to avoid those pain points early on in the process even if it means investing some time. It will pay off later on. And if there is absolutely no way to mitigate the pain - just move on to another library.

It makes me sad to see people ranting about how much typing there is in Redux or Typescript or how much boilerplate and so forth. To me this behaviour screams immaturity, because I don't know how else to explain spending energy on wining instead of finding a solution. Especially, that you don't need to look far - take redux-actions for example. Nice and simple, makes all the heavy lifting for you. If that's not cool in your view how about you actually contribute and write something of your own, rather than moan?

I found it really enjoyable and rather funny. I really liked the attention to detail as well, e.g. replicating last 5 searches in order to stay stealthy. I imagine that lots of effort went into the hacking exercise and the write-up. Nicely done.

The skill tree is absolutely great.

I get 404 on this link.