A Newbie’s Frustration

Ryan Tomayko made a post outlining a newbies frustration about trying to get into the world of Blueprint/Compass. What Ryan pointed out struck me in a couple ways, and in the most significant way it encouraged me to take pride in how much I know. It encouraged me to try to get YOU to appreciate how much you know as well. Before I leave you too much in the dark, take a look at what Ryan quoted and then his comment.

The newbies post

… one way or another it seems I need something called EMACS.. WTF..!!!!! I dare you to install it and see how many WTFsss you will say…. it’s like some text editor that is so smart that you dont use the mouse dont even use the cursor keys..if you want to go back one character you hit control then B!!! Brilliant!!! two random keys instead of one with an arrow!!!! WWWTTTFFFF!! ok I might not need this crap…. lost a day learning to use the Rubik cube of text editors.

Ryan’s thoughts:

It’s easy to pfft and blow off this kind of … criticism, but if you can look past the make believe grammar and punctuation you really do get a sense for how hard it is for newbies to wrap their heads around even very basic set of tools needed to build things on the web. Maybe what we do is just hard and complex and there’s nothing we can do to make it simpler. I’m just always surprised when I get to peek through someone else’s eyes and see just how fucked up everything must seem.

My Thoughts

Now, to iterate on his thoughts a little further – we’ve gone through so much as developers to get to the point where we can pick up the ideologies of new frameworks and ideas at a rapid pace. I encourage all of you to take credit for that; give yourself a pat on the back – you’ve accomplished a lot.

Perspective of Wisdom

I think Bradley Grzesiak (how do you pronounce that?) summed this journey up rather perfectly later in that google group thread:

The professor wrote L’ = -ρVΓ on the board. We all marveled at the
simplicity when he told us that it defines the lift of a 2-D wing.

“What? That can’t be,” someone said.

“It is. In fact, it describes the lift of any 2-D body in an incompressible
fluid,” he stated.

Span-wise lift equals the negative fluid density times the free-flow velocity times the circulation.

We then spent the next few classes of this aerodynamics class learning the proof behind this incredibly simple equation. We dove into Taylor expansions, Green’s Theorem, and (if I recall correctly) Laplacian Transforms. Once we got done, we each had a number of pages that fully decomposed this simple equation into something that was finally intuitively provable. We then spent another couple weeks applying the formula to various shapes as point vortices and finally panel vortices.

I bring this all up because it took me a long time in school to get to the point where I could even keep up with the professor. Even though the equation looked simple, showing that it actually meant something took a ton of effort.

Blueprint is great. Compass is awesome. Haml, as far as I’m concerned, absolutely rocks. But I say this as someone who has spent years making my way to the point where I can read the “quick start” guide and simply go. When I found out about Haml, Sass, Compass, and Blueprint, I had already
made it 95% of the way there. I already knew linux, os x, ruby, rails, etc. I had, in effect, taken all of the pre-requisites for something like an Aerodynamics class.

DogBot, you’re not there yet, but I wish you the best. When you get stuck, ask for help from friends, IRC, mailing lists… whatever is at your disposal. If you stay positive and open your mind like a sponge, you’ll get there with the help of your persistence and various communities.

In Closing

The way that Bradley expresses the significance of a journey for knowledge is just perfect to me and eye-opening at the same time.

I hope you got an interesting perspective on knowledge and the journey that we all have to go through to get to the point we are all at right now. Kudos to you. Kudos to the community.

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