okay, i'm going to take the unpopular opinion here (based on the karma votes i see in this thread), and say that those two linked blog entries show a profound lack of programming ability. since when is it wrong to expect a programmer to be good at programming?
Judge talent at its best and character at its worst.
Naively posting about one or two topics says little about one's programming ability, and much more about one's willingness to be open. It would mean a lot more if Pownce wasn't any good. But it was featureful, it seemed to work well, and quite a few people liked it. Dissing Leah for posting a few silly things is just nastiness.
i agree in theory, but ... converting a float to a string to compute an average? that's too much.
and i don't see any evidence that leah had that much to do with pownce's features. if her blog is indicative of her code, my first guess is the other pownce people were doing all the work.
I've written a lot more code that's both more convoluted and didn't work. I'm not judged for this, because I don't often talk about it. But people should have the right to be occasionally mistaken on their own blog! I don't think the presence of such mistakes takes at all away from accomplishments.
Hers is basically a coded version of what you'd do manually, eyeballing past the decimal. She's more familiar with string conversion than ceil, floor and round. So? That merits public judgment of incompetence? Of being an impostor?
"Hers is basically a coded version of what you'd do manually, eyeballing past the decimal. She's more familiar with string conversion than ceil, floor and round. So? That merits public judgment of incompetence?"
Yes.
I am not trying to be nasty here, but code like that makes me cringe. And yes, if I saw code like that, I would make a strong presumption of programming incompetence.(which is all right. Not everyone has to be a good programmer. As pxlpusher notes above, "get it done" competence is often more valuable).
Since it was publicly posted code, I don't see a problem with "public judgment" either.
"Of being an impostor?"
No. Programming Incompetence != Being an impostor. Anyone can be genuine and incompetent in a particular skill.
She took computer science at a university. I would expect that she knows how to deal with different hashing functions for hash-tables, different types of trees and knows some graph theory among other things. To not be familiar with ceil, floor and round after taking computer science courses is very sad.
i agree in theory, but ... converting a float to a string to compute an average?
I like beautiful, elegant code as much as the next person. But I've done worse than this, often on purpose, in the name of just getting something working.
I went back and read the star rating code again after reading this. I didn't get it the first time because I'm not familiar with Python and am a beginner, but when I realized what she did my brain hurt.
However, I can't say I haven't said embarrassingly stupid things from time to time...OK, at least not since treating ADD, but still...nobody's perfect. I would also like to point out that there is merit in the approach she took, in that she just got it done instead of hesitating and thinking over what the optimal solution would be. A good example of iterating on a functional original.
I concur. Cherry picking stupid mistakes form ones past does paint an accurate picture of talent. I have made several stupid coding mistakes at 2 am only to fix them in a minute or two when I start back up the next day, refreshed.
The CouchDB post is about someone writing something others might find useful, acknowledging that it might not be the best solution, and graciously accepting corrections from others. In short, everyone's a winner.
The rounding number post simply reflects that the days where a computing bachelors was taken under the Faculty of Science have long since past.
We've all written code that was stupid beyond all comprehension - even PG will cop to that - so never having written bone-headed code isn't a prerequisite for being a good programmer (edit: the opposite is probably true). You need to judge a body of work.
