> Make For the Sake of Making<p>I don't get this strange virtue of new-age geeks. If you said "Make For the Fun of It", i'd get that; making can sure be fun. But making things for no point whatsoever, other than to keep yourself busy? At least with knitting you eventually get practical use out of what you spent time on.<p>I have a shelf of unfinished projects and directories full of thousands of lines of unfinished code. In retrospect I wish I had spent my time flying a kite.
> Tell lots of people<p>Sure, that works for making websites. In fact, I'd argue that website-building is one of the most easily-publicizable things on the Internet, which is mostly composed of websites.<p>But what about niche things? I'd greatly enjoy "180 traditional Scottish dance tunes in 180 days", but there's not an HN-ish outlet for that. I'd also enjoy "180 reflections on philosophical readings from the Enlightenment in 180 days", but any philosophers I have easy access to aren't going to be interested—they're beyond that. Similarly for topics I don't actually care about. 180 new meals? Only a few people can eat them. 180 poems? Deliver us.<p>Dewalt's feat became famous for two reasons: a) It's a common task done in an uncommon way (everyone knows what website-building is, very few think it's reasonable to pop one out every day for six months) and b) The demographic who would be most supportive of it is very easily-accessible in large numbers.
Not everyone will be able to pull a Jennifer Dewalt. Attention is a zero-sum resource. As more people attempt to get front page on Hacker News for their self-promotion, fewer and fewer will end up getting that exposure. Also, the signal to noise goes down.<p>Let's see the quality people can produce, not just quantity. And let's focus on the quality, not on the people.
The ending: "Try this: build 1 website in 1 day" reminds of something an internet spam/dark arts guru said that really inspired me (won't link for reasons): "If someone held a gun to your head and said you have 24 hours to build a website, you'd have a website built within 24 hours."
I appreciate that Jason here refines some of the key things about Jennifer's approach that helped her be successful. I find I am most effective when I use similar things (like well defined steps with a start, middle, end definition) and least effective when my goal is more amorphous. An example might be "Learn Clojure" versus "Build 5 apps in Clojure."<p>Usually when I'm stuck on something its because I don't have a concrete enough definition.
I know that a certain group of people find this story inspiring. I find it to be a huge turn off. It seems more like the story of how easy it has become to google search for code snippets and copy paste them and tweak them until they work.<p>Is this actually a good way to learn how to program? I really doubt it.