---

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

TL;DR: there's no red flag here.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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..."

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I think that's the insinuation here.

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.

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.

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

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

One sentence; how'd I do?

I often teach programming. Not formally in school, but to friends and family who come to me to learn. When any of them begin to learn, there are always, always trivial roadblocks that the student seems to hit.

My brother, who is a very smart person, was beginning to learn Python, and going through Codecademy. He must have spent at least tens of hours on it. The simplest things he just didn't grok immediately. For example, the different between variables, strings, and symbols. He would type, for example:

    print hello world

    name = john
    message = my name is + john

It wasn't just my brother. I was explaining to a friend, who is a very competent hardware guy, what a lambda function is. The idea that functions can be seen as data themselves. He eventually got it, but it took lots of explaining. And even after that, the small programs he wrote employing his newly found knowledge were riddled with bugs, formatting issues, style issues, and so on.

It wasn't just my students, it was me as well. My first programs were something like

    10 REM MY FIRST PROGRAM
    20 PRINT "WHAT IS YOUR NAME?"
    30 INPUT N
    40 PRINT "HELLO ", N
    50 GOTO 10

When I was writing code for doing arbitrary precision arithmetic, I was representing the numbers as strings of digits: "12345". I was translating between digit characters and decimal value using the CHR and VAL functions of the language. When I was first introduced to ALLOCATE, typed arrays, etc. it simply did not click and took a while. Pointers, the heap, the stack, BYREF, BYVAL, FREE?

If I haven't made the point clear, there are a lot of things even we professional programmers take for granted, and things that we have long forgotten were hard, which those starting out with programming have major issues with, and almost deny the possibility of making something substantial in even a single day. Since I regularly teach programming, I am constantly reminded of them.

While I suppose it's possible to achieve the amazing feat that Jennifer claims on her own and without personal instruction, it just seems unlikely. If it's true, it's great for self-promotion of course, but I don't want it to give the aspiring programmer the idea that they should be able to reasonably accomplish the same things she did. What she accomplished wasn't just picking up programming, it was:

    * programming in multiple languages & paradigms
    * understanding how they relate to each other
    * setting up programming environments
    * setting up and understanding 3rd party frameworks and libraries
    * being able to effectively communicate with programmers
    * understanding source control and deployment

If the work was genuinely done by an artist with no technical background with little outside help, then I would consider achievement incredibly brilliant. If it was not—which is how I feel—then I think the audience deserves a bit of honesty.

I learned by having a concrete project goal motivated by personal desire that I wanted to accomplish by any means possible. This usually came down to copy/pasting existing code from the internet and fiddling with the values via trial/error without necessarily understanding the inner workings.

I've had the experience of walking through the "Learn X the hard way" programming books, as well as Codecademy, with some non-programmer friends who ostensibly 'want to learn coding' and they invariably make extremely slow progress like you describe, because without their own self-motivated project it's just blind symbol manipulation.

The copy/paste/fiddle process can work when you have some sort of understanding what to copy, paste, fiddle, and search for. Developing that understanding so quickly also leads me to doubt.

I used to help out a lot of people while at school, and most of them couldn't wrap their head around what a variable was. I was the one helping them since the first class, and I wasn't one class in front of them either. I simply understood it quickly. I could "grok" faster than them, for some unknown reason.

I am by no mean a genius. Hell, I still use my fingers to do basic additions and subtractions. However, some people learn things faster than other. Some people learn easily by themselves, some don't.

All of the feats you listed are all on the web. You can learn all about them... for free! Why pay for someone to teach them to you when you can simply read about them? All you need is time to learn them, and she had it!

I have no difficulty at all in believing she managed to learn all of that by herself.

All of the information is on the web, you're right. But just from a practical standpoint, it takes time to even learn about what you need to search for. One great piece of wisdom is that as you become more proficient in an area, you learn (1) what you need to learn, and (2) what you don't know. Jennifer seemed to not have any apparent issue figuring out what was needed, and seemed to be able to answer all the questions she needed answering with little or no delay.

I don't have difficulty believing that one can learn all of those things on one's own. I do have difficulty believing that for someone with little to no technical background, all of those things could be achieved at the rate they were achieved and in the timespan they were achieved. The reason I have an issue believing it was exemplified by the experiences I've had. My point was two-fold: firstly that I think doubt is warranted, and secondly that up and coming programmers should not be discouraged if they can't match the same throughput and output as Jennifer seems to show.

'When I set out on this project, I knew I wanted to learn to code dynamic interactive websites, but I also knew next to nothing about coding. Rather than try to tackle the enormous task of building a complex, fully functional social network, I took a small first step. I pieced together a few bits of html and CSS to make the website for day 1, the homepage for the project.'

So if you look at the first sentence--she clearly knew something--some terminology, some idea of the technology and what it could do. IMO, most programming (heck, most tech stuff) is just _knowing_ that something's possible. After that, you just need to look up how to do it. There are kids out there who pick up this stuff easy as breathing. I think she did the same thing, just on a slower trajectory.

It's not very hard to google "what should I learn to be a web developer?" or to simply take a look at the name of the courses on code academy.

As for your other point, I completely agree. One should not feel down because they were only to complete half of a side project in a month. Hell, that's more than what I manage to fit in my schedule!

I started off learning Objective-C; I had an app in mind and the only one that could create what I wanted was me. I learned. A string? That's just characters in order. Float? Any number that could have decimals and that wasn't an integer (though it could be 5.0). An array? Just a list of objects in a specific order. A hash map? A collection of objects where a tag signifies what object is at that location. DEAD SIMPLE STUFF. This is easy-peezy work, and very easy to abstract in my brain. I had an app on the store in 3 months and 10,000 downloads by 6 months. My app was a hugely naive undertaking, that I pulled off, despite not knowing shit about programming and setting up systems before going in. It calculated the best drink specials in my college town. That's 10,000 downloads in my college town.

I've continued programming, because I like making stuff, and have random ideas that are usually fairly easy to experiment with and get working.

Now I'm an iOS Engineer.

I have a Bachelor's degree in Graphic Design with a minor in Advertising. No knowledge is unattainable, or more sacred than the others. I'm sorry you think what Jennifer has done is just impossible to do. It's not.

If you're a programmer, think about following a similar, inverted journey: spend 180 days learning how to paint, or how to play the guitar, or writing poems- delivering a concrete outcome every day (and log it in a journal so you can trace back your progress; making that journal public, like she did, is optional but has benefits).

I have many programmer friends (and myself!) who complain that they cannot draw/write/paint/cook for nothing. Those skills, just like programming, can be learned- and while becoming a master at any takes years, if not decades, learning the basics and being "functional" with any of them is a matter of a couple of months.

Of course, taking 6 months to do just that is a bit radical (but, if you're young and in tech, totally doable- saving 6 months worth of expenses on a tech salary when you have no dependents is trivial) - but if you take 1 day a week, you'll only be 7x slower. If you take 2 hours a day instead of 8, you'll only be 4x slower. If you can work part time to keep a minimal income while working on becoming a master painter on the side, only 2x slower (of course you can nitpick with those simplifications, but the core idea is there - if you spend 2 hours a day learning the guitar, you'll go from total novice to enlightened beginner pretty fast).

Thanks to the internet, it's now really hard to not find resources about learning anything- there are sites and forums and youtube videos on everything. Additionally, never underestimate the power of your social circle - trading skills is very fulfilling. (for example, my girlfriend's sister's bf is in a band, signed to a label, etc. and loves video games. He'd like to learn how to program basic little games, and I'm the only programmer he knows. That's pretty great, because I've been dying to get a talented guitar instructor).

And learning those skills can make you even more valuable professionally- if you make entertainment apps, learning an instrument will allow you to compose your own music. If you're a freelance web developer, learning graphic design will allow you to build higher quality products and charge much much more. If you like to program video games, learning how to draw will enable you to design your own assets.

The first type graduates from college and their learning stops for the most part. They say to themselves, "well, I studied for four years and got a job, now it's finally time to sit back and relax." So they put in their regular 9-5 and then come home and waste their lives away by watching TV shows and playing video games and going out and getting drunk on weekends. Essentially, they "settle" into a middle-class lifestyle, where they earn enough money to get by and may be save a little too. They may be content, but they are also always stressed about the prospect of losing their jobs, because at their level of skill and ambition, they are almost always employees, rather than employers. Eventually, that's exactly what happens as the work they do is automated and they find themselves unemployed with little savings and no other skill that they can contribute to the economy.

The second type has a perpetual hunger for knowledge. They see college as the "launch pad" for a lifetime of learning. So they graduate and get jobs, but on the side they continue to read, discuss, listen and apply. They hang out with smart and successful people who also read, discuss, listen and apply. They look for problems and opportunities, and figure out what they need to learn to be able to work on them. These are the Jennifer Dewalt types whose ambition and discipline set them up for a continuously upward trajectory. They are the ones who refuse to settle, and therefore end up as leaders in organizations that innovate and change humanity.

It's funny because over the years I have developed what I think to be a very reliable method for predicting someone's future success. The method involves asking the person what they do in their spare time. Based on their answer, I can picture where they will end up in five to ten years.

There are two kinds of people in this world:

1) Those who hit some ceiling and actually achieve contentment.

2) All-consuming psychopaths who love looking down on everyone else for their lack of ambition.

I was born the second, but I sure as hell don't have to stay that way.

Also, side comment: some of us don't want to be employer-capitalists. We like doing things for their own sakes, not so that we can turn every activity in life into a money pump. As such, by your notions, we simply don't have ambition.

By my notions, the default ambition you remark upon, the urge to become a wealthy, high-status leader of some sort, is indeed psychopathic. Why should I want to become a capitalist, military general, or statesman? I could stand being an activist leader, but I don't think I'd be much good at it.

On the other hand, if you ask me if I wanted to, for instance, destroy all existing social relations and have a socialist revolution, I happily say "yes". But somehow Revolution is simply not as ambitious as "become an employer", or as "become a research professor" (which is actually harder than becoming an employer).

Which, again, makes it sound to me like your definition of "ambition" is "a rise in wealth and social status" rather than any coherent notion of actual achievement.

Their comment is putting everyone in two buckets, 1 that sits around and watches TV when they get home from work, and 1 that works on personal development in their free time.

What they want to use that personal development is up to them. They could use it to start a non-profit, or learn a new hobby or learn a new skill. But... sitting around watching TV until bed certainly isn't ambitious.

But here's the thing: the "watch TV/self-development" dichotomy exists and keeps existing at every level of actual achievement. There are people who think that lawyers, doctors, and software engineers are underachievers for not becoming CEOs, after all. Lawyers, doctors, and software engineers tend to think people working old-fashioned 9-5 jobs instead of high-level professions are underachievers. People in old-fashioned 9-5 jobs think part-timers are underachievers.

And in the other direction, there are people who think that anyone who merely runs a business and doesn't build an international business conglomerate is an underachiever. There are people who think that running an international business conglomerate instead of a world empire makes you an underachiever.

There's at least a few people who think that running a worldwide empire makes you an underachiever, because you should be trying to become a god!

Sometimes all you have is an impulse to go in a direction, but not a destination. Those are the impulses to go out for, when no actual destination will sate the impulse.

Have you ever met someone with perpetual knowledge of hunger that didnt succeed , and also had a very dented personal life? I met dozens of those, and what do you think they end up regretting?

On the other hand i do agree that hunger and intelligence are very good predictors of someones ability to grow a skill. From that to 'success' there is a huge leap in many ways, from your personal concept of success to the actual real world out there.

And then ask yourself: is the stuff you're good at the stuff you want to be good at? Because if you want to be good at StarCraft or TV trivia and that's what you do with your spare time, great. But if you want to be good at programming but it's not your day job and you spend all your free time watching TV, you have some problems. Similarly, if you want to have a strong family relationship but spend all your time programming or holed up in your man-cave, you also have some problems.

Don't do it.

It's their life. While I hope it's rich, diverse and makes them immensely happy, it's not for me to say whether or not it 'works' for them or not.

People who say they are not judgmental are the worst kind of liars, because they lie not only to others, but also to themselves.

You need to meet more, nicer people.

OTOH, being downright mean, or just an annoying busybody is another thing altogether, and, yes, a lot of people have a hard time judging (maybe "evaluating" would be a better word) without at least some malice. But I think saying any kind of judgement is bad isn't at all helpful for individuals or society at large. It leads to people developing blind spots for harmful behaviour.

I wish there were a better way to disambiguate "judge".

Just because people do one thing doesn't mean they don't do other things.

You are good.He is only talking about people who only do one thing.

Except, no, wait, not gonna happen, so show some respect for the existentially purposeless, please.

The third type recognizes their passion and self-educates themselves, often finding formal education diabolical.

From the late Jim Rohn, "Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune."[1]

[1] http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jimrohn121282.htm...

TBH, as a self-educated developer, I perceive formal education as a premature optimization.

It's a fact that one needs to develop certain skills and gain insight from the knowledge that reflects the experience of expert people, but it's also a fact that one won't need everything the first moment after graduation.

I prefer to research and learn about something the moment I need it, than to be forced to learn it (and probably forget about it) some years in advance.

Anyway... The first skill you need to develop to become self-educated is self-confidence, because nobody is going to believe in you. I have been accused of being an idiot numerous times for dropping college...

If you don't turn the same way as everyone else or risk your university's funding by having an opinion or a better idea than the status quo, you're no longer entitled to an education.

University for me was an exercise in cock sucking rather than education and that was a UK red brick.

Below is a quote that I found very illustrative of the downfalls of living a life too focused on success:

“Man surprised me most about humanity. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”

This is not necessarily even a lack of ambition -- we're all allowed to aspire to whatever lifestyle we think will suit us best.

You can't say one way is better without describing what better looks like -- and when we have different descriptions of that, the best thing to do is just tink your drinks together and keep your "How can he live like that?!" to yourself.

Yes, it is completely fine, as long as they are fully aware of the type of life they will have if they keep up their current habits. For example, if a regular 9 to 5 is what you want, good for you. Just understand what kind of life it will give you. This may sound obvious, but most people don't get it - they work 9 to 5 and complain when they lose their jobs or don't get the promotions they want or realize that the work they do is actually meaningless. What I'm trying to say is that, in the grand scheme of life, you reap what you sow.

9 to 5, cruising along in a steady-state of knowledge doesn't necessarily imply failure. It depends on that knowledge, of course.

Frankly, with the new-graduate economy like it is, a steady, well-paying 9 to 5 is a luxury, but you make it sound quite bleak.

People are pretty dynamic, even if common traits exist (and "knowledge / seeking knowledge" is not citable), its a dumb claim.

There are people who think life is something they do and there are people who think life is something that happens to them.

That being said, at what point is relaxing and enjoying yourself with random hobbies ok? If you take the hard and fast line you have here, people would just work till they die. A large part of the point to success is so you can enjoy leisure time comfortably.

I do agree video games and TV are in a in a sense "bad" and it would be better if people engaged in creative hobbies.

One of the things I've learned over the years is that it's impossible to tell whether being obsessed with something other people consider foolish or trivial is genius or idiocy. Obsessively playing Starcraft might turn out to be a lucrative profession. We just never know.

See, for example, the Julie/Julia project, where one woman decided to cook her way through the entirety of "Mastering The Art Of French Cooking" by Julia Child. ( http://web.archive.org/web/20021217011704/http://blogs.salon... )

Wow.

TL;DR - pick something you want to do and immerse yourself in this. Every day take action. Learn only what you need to advance yourself forward right now.

What she's done is pretty difficult -- executing a new concept daily -- and it's amazing she managed to keep it up when most others would drop out/fail.

I personally think "a lot of knowledge" comes through those lost hours spent fixing obscure, annoying problems and bugs and inconsistencies that force someone to really think through how that system works.

As Aristotle said: "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."

Just a point : coding is free. Cooking, wood crafting, electronic, or any physical activity requires you buy some material.

Free otherwise though.

I have no dependants, I am 25 and I would love to be earning the kind of money in my tech job that made saving 6 months worth of expenses "trivial". Where are these jobs and how can I get one?

That was in Idaho

Here in the valley I make a typical dev salary and have 2 dependents but still save 1k, invest 1k and put 1k down against my principal every month.

Tech jobs pay well and if you can't easily save large amounts of money as a developer you'd better be having a whole lot of fun.

Think of it this way: in order to save 6 months of living expenses on a year of salary, you need to put away 33% of your income. There are graduate students out there - several are probably your classmates - that live on $20K/year. Therefore, as long as you make over $30K/year, you can live like a grad student and save 6 months living expenses in a year.

Of course, if you live in the valley, you could save more, but the point is to illustrate that many (single, no dependents) tech workers can live in SF and still save.

http://www.payrollforamerica.com/calculators/California-payr...

suggests the numbers are: $13.4k to feds, $5k social security, $1.1k medicare, $5k california, $800 CA SDI

Leaving you with $54,725.

$24k to housing and $20k to savings would leave you with just over $10k to eat, shop, pay for transportation, etc. So, don't try to have a car. Even carless, though, it seems much easier / more likely / more realistic to do it the other way around - $20k on food/entertainment/shopping/etc and $10k to savings.

The effective tax rate in Cali after federal and state is closer to 40%. That leaves 48k after taxes. Take out the 24k you blew on the 2k/mo apt and you're down to 24k and you haven't even put food on your plate or paid for transportation costs.

Take out 4k for food assuming you don't eat at nice restaurants. Take out 2k for a train pass and maybe another 0.5k for other transportation when the train isn't adequate. You are now down to 17.5k and you haven't saved anything or done anything 'to play'.

There is a reason the poverty level is around 70k in that area. 80k looks good on paper but in reality it's crap. It's about parity with a 37k salary in Austin, TX. http://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/san-francisco-ca/au...

It won't.

At 2013 rates, on $80k of total income for an individual ($73,900 in income subject to income tax with the $6,100 standard deduction, but no other deductions/credits):

  Effective federal income tax on total income: 18.0%
  Effective CA income tax rate on total income: 5.72%
  SS+Medicare: 7.65%
  California State Disability Insurance tax: 1.00%
  Total effective income and payroll tax rate: 32.4%

Oh, sorry, I thought we were talking about someone who is making the bare minimum effort to save money. My mistake.

OK, I'm done talking about this shifted scenario from what we started talking about. When you want to talk about how hard it is to save money in SF if you actually make any serious effort, I'm happy to resume.

>I thought we were talking about someone who is making the bare minimum effort to save money

Do you know what the bare minimum effort means? You are the one suggesting bare minimum effort now.

If I'm wrong about that I really need to go get an American Visa from somewhere...

I'm living quite comfortably in San Francisco and spending a fraction of what I was spending in Texas. Why?

- No car. No gas. No upkeep. No payments. No insurance. No inspections. No car.

- Roommates. I HATE living alone so this was a no-brainer. If you insist on having your own place, then yeah it's probably going to sting. If not you can often find good deals.

- Food. A tech job often provides free or free-ish food. Plus I can get reasonably-priced staples at the market on the corner of my block. The culture here makes it much less likely I'll spend $400/mo at Olive Garden, Chili's, and The Red Lobster.

- Stuff. Don't need much. When I was in Texas I lived FAR away from anyone who really shared my geeky interests. I'm surrounded by them here. I simply don't have the urge to buy so much stuff to keep me occupied. I have the stuff I need and I spend most of my time doing things with people. These things are often free. Speaking of which...

- "funcheap". SF is famous for this (as is NYC). You can ALWAYS find cool stuff to do that costs little or no money. You can also, of course, find stuff that costs a lot of money. It's your choice, day by day.

Now if I couldn't stand to live with roommates or had a family to support, this would be a whole different story. Also, "high cost of living" really means $$$/sq ft vs $$/sq ft. It IS outrageous in places, but I'm much happier in my apartment with 1 bedroom to myself than I was in a 2600 square foot house in Texas. So yes, price per square foot is going to hurt on paper, but if "size doesn't matter", you might end up paying less by actual dollars.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but I'm pretty passionate about this since I stuck around in places that weren't right for me a lot longer than I should have... simply because I let popular rhetoric convince me that only dot com millionaires could afford to live in the Bay Area. They were wrong, and I was a fool for listening to them instead of exploring it for myself. Don't make my mistakes.

The roommates part seems essential. There are a number of reasons but if I had to guess:

- With roommates you can often take advantage of someone who has been living there since before some recent price spikes (especially in certain neighborhoods). If you find a place by yourself, the landlord is free to charge whatever they want unless you can find a rent controlled apartment, but those have multi-year waiting lists.

- Vacant units are often renovated so the rent can be raised.

- Economies of scale. If you live by yourself chances are you want a place with your own kitchen, bathroom, etc. These are shared spaces in a roommate situation.

- There seems to be more competition for single-residency housing. I have no data to back this up, but just from talking to people it seems that there are more people who hate living with roommates than who hate living alone.

I am not very familiar with San Francisco, so I left myself some wiggle room ("(at least in most of those cities)") but having a roommate is not a requirement for anybody making a tech salary and wanting to save money in those other cities.

Because they value different things than you do; whether that's the food, the theaters, the museums, the climate, or the social culture, or something else. Different ones of those for different people.

> It's one of the most depressing place I've been to, it's like those dystopian movies...

Other than in the generic ways that most urban environments are "like those dystopian movies" to someone whose lived most of their life in a suburban environment, I don't really see it.

They were right if you ever want to have a family. You are building no equity in rent so you will essentially have to leave and start over somewhere else to have kids. Your story is fine as long as it ends with you being single and alone without any real assets.

Presumably, the person we are chatting about is striving to save money, they may be in stocks or bonds instead of real estate... which are sometimes, though not always a better investment. They are assets, if not real.

So, this hypothetical person will have at least six months of salary to put towards whatever they decide to when they settle down.

America is not all subdivisions and white picket fences...

>You dont need to own property to have equity and to state otherwise is a disservice.

Again, you do if you want your cost of housing to go towards building equity.

Sure, theres equity in a house, but is that everything? Do I really need to leverage a loan against my own property to live comfortably? To send any future children to a great school? Do I need to end up so underwater with a mortgage to consider myself successful? The answer to all of these is no.

Since I'm annually paying around 3% of the market price of my apartment, and you're paying X% interest annually on your mortgage (minus tax breaks, but plus maintenance costs, etc.), there is some value of X at which I'm not really losing much money by renting, right?

http://patrick.net/housing/crash1.html

> They were right if you ever want to have a family.

Not entirely. "Ever" is a really strong word. If you want to have a family later in life, that should not prevent you from living in places you'd like to experience. You will likely regret being so cautious at the exact time in your life when you had the least reason to be so.

> You are building no equity in rent

If you are saving a dramatic amount of money per month and putting that money away in savings or another investment vehicle, then I would argue that you very much are. People underestimate how little "equity" they actually build up when they didn't happen to buy before or early in a real estate bubble. In reality, the closing costs of acquiring the property, maintenance, insurance, and property taxes, and the (optional but likely) 6% sales commission the realtor takes when you decide to sell all add up and chip away at effective equity. True, equity will eventually outpace these costs, but the time that takes is a function of how well the market is doing and other externalities.

There's also a cost of liquidity. $10,000 sitting in a bank account at 0.1% is arguably worth more than $10,000 of equity in a house that might take 3 months to sell.

All of this means that unless you know you're going to buy a place and stay put for a while, you'd probably be better taking the cost difference and building "liquid equity" that you can use later.

> so you will essentially have to leave and start over somewhere else to have kids.

True, but that may be a complete non-problem depending on your disposition. Personally, I don't get attached to places. They're just boxes with soft places to sleep. Relationships make it a home. In my case, in the unlikely event I decided to start a family, I could buy a house relatively close to the apartment I live in now (if I so desired). I wouldn't call that starting over. By the way, I'd be able to buy that house because I was able to save a metric crap-ton of cash while living on next to nothing with cheap rent.

> Your story is fine as long as it ends with you being single and alone without any real assets.

As I believe I have demonstrated, you have no justification for this statement; none whatsoever. It's simply not the case that a person who choses to spend one part of his or her life saving money living with roommates in a fun town will be forever "trapped" by that choice.

Also, you might not have intended it this way, but that statement was mean-spirited.

You make a big assumption with that statement. It strongly (and wrongly) assumes that the monthly payments for owning a home are the same as the rent plus whatever you would be putting into savings. There are plenty of homes in other places you can buy for $2000/mo vs spending $2000/mo on rent in SF while saving separately in either case to maintain the liquidity you are talking about.

>As I believe I have demonstrated, you have no justification for this statement; none whatsoever. It's simply not the case that a person who choses to spend one part of his or her life saving money living with roommates in a fun town will be forever "trapped" by that choice.

The point is that the numbers in his story only work for the "fun" part of the life. Life experiences are great, but it's difficult to pay for your kid's college and save for retirement when you are pouring thousands a month down the drain with nothing (other than a good time) to show for it.

That's really what I'm getting at: if you're single and don't have a family, and you're happy with roommates and not living in a palace, then you can enjoy SF and not only not go broke, but you might save a penny or two.

Now if your life situation is such that the whole "single and don't have a family" thing doesn't apply, well then it... doesn't apply :)

In my opinion, your argument is very much valid if you want to raise a family or you just prefer to have your own place. Unless you make a lot of money, you're probably better off doing that elsewhere.

More details, please? I've been trying to look for places recently and everything seems to be exorbitantly priced.

- Everyone else is looking for that, too, so you need to act fast.

- It's not a dealbreaker to live in, say, the Tenderloin in SF, but do some research and make sure you're comfortable.

- People in SF will get 10 - 60 replies per day on an apartment listing, especially if the price is reasonable for the area. Stand out and be awesome.

- The same goes for the interview.

- Have stuff like bank statements and recent credit reports handing, and have the cash to make the move. So many people make it past the screening phase but then put their roommates on hold waiting for the "check in the mail". Money talks.

This always surprises me. If you get dozens of replies the instant you put a listing on CL, isn't that a sign your price is way too low? Why not add a few hundred $ per month and maybe have to wait three days to rent it out?

As long as they don't have a family or want to build equity in a home. The justifications for the costs in this thread are so myopic that it's baffling.

Okay, you said it's trivial for an entry-level engineer to save six months living expenses. That's $12k for housing and ~$4k for food and transportation. That's the majority of the leftover money after rent, taxes, transportation, and food for a year without any savings. I'm not sure you are correctly using the term 'trivial'.

As far as addressing counterpoints, I've grown tired of quibbling. I think that you can live comfortably spending 66% of your income net of taxes per year without any undue effort if you make $80k a year in SF. I think anyone who looks into it would find the same to be true. That's my last word in this conversation.

Don't eat out everyday. Bring your lunch everyday. It can be done.

EDIT: Just checked Craigslist and I can STILL find stuff for under $1000/mo in numerous places in SF. The trick seems to be looking under "rooms / shared" and also not expecting to find a place in Pac Heights ;-)

Step one is to develop a condescending attitude towards people who need to spend money. This will make it unthinkable for you to become such a person. Personal identity is a powerful thing.

The rules are: don't drink, don't drive, live with friends, and budget.

http://nyansandwich.info/cheapskate.html

As a rule of thumb you shouldn't be spending more than a third of take-home on your housing. That leaves you with 33% for your cost of living.

To see how that breaks down in "real-money", the take-home of an average CS graduate working at a typical large company in a developer role in London would be around 20k.

So that would be around £550/month (£6600/year) in rent, so a shared flat in a cheap-to-average part of town.

Food would cost you about £2000/year

Personal goods another £2000/year

Travel around £1200/year.

Leisure around £1400/year.

Leaving you with £6.6k in savings, enough to afford all of the above for another six months without pay.

Council tax doesn't increase with the number of people in a flat (>1), so when you're sharing the price for that goes down dramatically. You could easily reduce your spending in other categories as well if you wanted to spend more on rental (i.e use busses rather than the tube).

Gumtree currently lists 19k flatshares below the £125/week mark:

http://www.gumtree.com/search?property_room_type=&property_t...

mind sharing the cheap-to-average parts of town? I am just curious how far out they are. thank you.

One thing did stand out to me:

Having to produce something everyday forced me not to get hung up on understanding all the details of how something worked.

This is actually one downside of this method. In the end you don't really learn anything deeply. In development, deep understanding does matter a lot. It matters for selecting the right tools, being proficient with them, and solving the problems that others can't.

Again, bravo to the OP!

"The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time." (attributed to Willem de Kooning).

I firmly believe that a person can learn anything other fellow human can. Mastering is a different beast. But you can definitely get started. This is the also the reason, why I don't criticize 'Learn programming in X hours' or 'Programming for dummies' kind of books. They get people started, and that is all you need at times.

In fact one must always have a hobby and 180 day cycle seems to be a good enough cycle for a new hobby. New hobbies keep you excited and on the edge. Most importantly they keep boredom from setting in and keep you going.

No it has not, and no it has not.

Don't get me wrong A+ for the effort... but it is a very small niche oriented effort.

Comprehensive? Watch Rich Hickey talks (http://www.infoq.com/author/Rich-Hickey), try reading and exercising data structures (b-tree, rb-tree, bitmaps, and a long etc), try different problems like database reporting and read "Code Complete" AND "The Nature of Code". You are up to a great start, but got a long way to go to call it "Comprehensive"

Broad foundation? not really, no. Just today's popular areas of front end development. And today's popular is actually a very small area, common and with a lot of hype, but just a relatively small section of front end development

Great project... keep going, there is much to discover!

So for her it is a broad foundation to jump off of, more so than assembly language programming or toying around with clojure.

So much better to have 6 months experience building web sites before you say "I'll just make a career in building web sites" :-)

Some people just like to build stuff; much akin to someone who might just want to change the oil in their car. You would never ask them to build an entire transmission for their first project.

To understand something implies some grasp of scope and size. And if you're continually working on toy problems, you'll never encounter problems of the appropriate scope or issues of scale.

So that's kind of what people mean when they say you need to work with something complex. To understand a complex system is to know which parts are important and which aren't and at which levels of examination.

As the ecosystem of toolsets, frameworks and libraries mature, the number of opportunities for well-informed "commoners" with the right motivation to make computers do what they want them to increases violently.

Lemma 1: Simple CRUD-style web-apps and scripts can be very useful.

Lemma 2: Before-mentioned tools can be build to a perfectly serviceable standard without a comprehensive understanding of computer science.

These two combined suggests that the author can indeed be a perfectly productive and effective creator of computer programs. I see no reason "coder" isn't a perfectly good title for such a person.

I think its accurate, not "elitist".

> You seem to confuse "coder" with "computer scientist" or "software engineer".

The claim was that the experience provided a broad foundation with regard to "software development". That is a broad field. Lots of experience in CRUD-style web apps isn't a broad base for "software development" generally, its a narrow (but potentially deep within that narrow domain) base.

That's not to say its not a useful base, but its not broad. Also note that the response in GP to the claim of a broad base -- while pointing out that it was not broad -- also wasn't judgemental in way which justifies the claim of elitism. It explicitly recognized the project as great and encouraged continuing from there.

> These two combined suggests that the author can indeed be a perfectly productive and effective creator of computer programs. I see no reason "coder" isn't a perfectly good title for such a person.

Nothing in GP was contrary to these points, so you seem to be arguing against things no one said.

She's becoming a coder, not a computer scientist.

And calling her work 'niche', then linking to a guy raving about Datomic, something that is even MORE niche?

Man... I'm wasting my time calling you out.

What she did is a niche, but linking to another niche is the whole point, not a counter-argument to what he said. The idea is to expand your view of programming, not spit on things that aren't in your field.

Also agree with the other comments, this is pretty elitist. There's just no reason to comment and say, "well I'm not impressed".

I post one answer to all the posts

The foundation I jumped off of was being able to edit numbers in GORILLAS.BAS to change the size of the explosions.

Web development has not become the equivalent of software development. There are multiple other areas, Web development is currently a good entry point for self tough people, but not the only either. I know a lot of people that start with VBA macros in Excel.

Let me put it this way: I learned how to change the brake pads in my car. Then I decided that I was going to change the brake pads in 100 different car brands and models, so I did. Can I call my self a car mechanic? Nope, not even a brake specialist because I am forgetting a lot of other pieces and mechanism. But I can make a career out of it, fast brake maintenance.

Now I see someone that has the stamina, the admirable dedication to actually go through it, so I see someone that has the ability to go much further than the average guy. Tease her, give her some pointers and directions, if she likes challenges, challenge her to go more out there.

It is easy to sit back and clap at an accomplishment, and is no small accomplishment in this case. But she is thirsty for more, challenge her to more!!!... unless you don't know where that more is because the belief that web development is all there is to it

Some areas of web design is programming... JavaScript, server side, and a long etc certainly are. HTML is document painting. It is important, it requires some serious skills, skills that for that matter I don't have, but HTML is not programming because there are no conditionals, no loops. The basics building blocks in programming are those. If this hurts, I am honestly sorry, but you have 2 options, either react in anger (which is a secondary feeling, and you need to see what feeling is the primary), or research what else is there and maybe you will learn a thing or 2. HTML plus JavaScript it is programming, HTML and some CSS can be stretched to call it programming

Elitist? Confusing with "Computer Scientist"? I was just giving some pointers into other areas of software development. I did not mention Discrete mathematics, set theory, compiler construction, semantic analysis, etc, etc, etc. Those are areas for a Computer Scientist, and putting her against that can become discouraging instead of challenging, but then again, another computer scientist would have known that, wouldn't he?

If all that you see about Rich is Datatomic and Clojure, then you are missing a lot. Simple vs. Easy is more what I am talking about, or functions as the thing that make data time travel, aha! that can change the way you think about software development. That is programming BBQ, not HTML salad.

If you don't know what I am talking about... Google meet my friend here, friend meet Google. If there is something where she is above is that she took a challenge and meet it

What the original article did is nothing short of amazing... so much accomplished, so much stamina, so much potential. She claim that she wants to jump off... well, I mention a few pools where she can dive in

And finally... what is the difference between a jerk and tough love? can you recognize when you see it? There is really no absolute answer, but if you write it and read it back, you have a chance to see the color of the glasses that are in front of your eyes

Yes.

> But she is thirsty for more, challenge her to more!!!... unless you don't know where that more is because the belief that web development is all there is to it

Here's a thought exercise: what if you don't know were she should go because of your belief that her goals should align with yours?