Heather Arthur

>"...try programming for a day without Googling. Then two days, maybe a week. See how it feels. Remember that there was a time we programmed without copying our work."

Once I decided I really wanted to learn to write code I just plain stopped with the copying and even referencing anything beyond docs or a thorough book.

I work to create a functional implementation of whatever it is I'm looking for, no matter how naive, convoluted or narrow my solution ends up being.

Only once that's done do I go about searching out solutions. Sometimes I'm delighted to find that what I've come up with comes very close to established solutions, other times I learn some new, concise way of going about the problem.

In any case, that first sort of experimental phase is incredible for informing everything that comes after. I'd say experiencing 100 less than optimal ways to do something is far more valuable than memorizing a single optimal solution.

Thing is, around the web, this sort of approach seems pretty ripe for ridicule as the Internet standard response is something like this [0].

There's a culture against discovery and creation. You either come out of the womb writing clever, idiomatic code and using or the hottest framework/library or you're an idiot.

0: http://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/771/

An addition that most posts, including this would benefit from:

Be incredibly kind when judging other people for their projects. What goes around comes back around.

IMO a lot of the problem is not in finding things to blog about, but the fact that the Internet hive mind will casually toss off incredibly unkind criticism about your projects.

I remember https://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/771/ making the rounds almost ten years ago, and it played a big part in making me and many others nervous about exposing our projects to the world. The fact that there was any debate at all around whether or not the people criticizing that project uninvited was terrifying.

Of course, I have developed a thicker skin since then. And things are a lot better in 2022, and I imagine (or at least hope) that most people around here would not have such negative reactions to a hobbyist project. But it's good to remind ourselves every now and then.*

> Someone who bullies women programmers

Whoa...slow down there, hoss.

Steve explained that his tweet about @harthur's replace utility was not meant to disparage its author, or its code, but was meant to express his feelings about Node (i.e. the ecosystem for which replace was written). And, he apologized, "unequivocably", for the fact that his tweet had caused pain to @harthur:

http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node

And, @harthur then said this in a followup to her original post,

http://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/open-source-rocks-follow-up/

My last blog post was quite a downer, so I want to do a short follow up for posterity.

First of all, there were some nice responses to it from Steve Klabnik and especially Corey Haines, who gave a very sincere straight-up apology. Several people have told me they are usually very nice, so keep that in mind.

So, your characterization appears to be incorrect and unfair.

This is why I love programming -- and the programming community, warts and all. Tiffany's an Environmental Science major who had a month of free time so she decided to learn how to make web pages. That's the same way I started (albeit as an English major), and the cocktail of instant feedback and ease of discovery kept me as a happy addict of the command line ever since.

To me, accessibility and approachability are two of the most important tenets of any discipline. I think it's important that we make sure there are more Tiffanies and less stories of overharsh criticism (eg. http://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/771/)

You might not think that everyone should learn how to program, and that's okay, I agree with you -- but at the very least, I think people should have the ability to learn what they want to learn, as ably and quickly as possible.

I'm intrigued by how long this thread has gone without anybody mentioning Heather Arthur's gender. Did her critics know she was a woman at the time they ridiculed her code? If so, did that fact embolden them or make them more prone to belittle her work? Would a man's friends have come so quickly to his defense, over a piece of code? Would the men who had made her cry been so quick to feel shitty about it and apologize?

When I first saw the part in Arthur's article [1] about sobbing, I thought it was tongue-in-cheek. Only after I realized Heather was Heather did I reread that section and realize she had shed literal tears. Not sure what that says about me, that I made different assumptions based on gender.

[1] Not the "I'm sorry" article, but the one he links to: http://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/771/.

This idea can be extended even further, to users who do not know how to (or cannot) build the software in question.

One example of this is mozregressionfinder [1] that was created by Heather Arthur [2]. The tool automatically downloads Firefox nightly builds (in the same binary search pattern of bisect) and lets the user check for the bug they observed in each version. Once the nightly build where the bug was introduced is found, a Mercurial pushlog URL is displayed which can then be pasted into a bug report to aid developers in chasing down the bug.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/mozregression

[2] http://harthur.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/mozregression-update/