This will be another story about an interaction on Discord. For the first one, see the bagel post.
The user that this post frequently mentions has consented to their name being used.
I was chatting on Discord a day or two ago, and a user asked about how to get the Active Developer badge. It's a badge that appears on people's discord profiles. Here's mine.
Here was his message:
I asked what he needed help with.
This ended up being a typo, but we'll get to that.
This is like nohello, don't do this.
I, of course, don't know how After Effects has anything to do with this, so I ask what he means by "AE"
He then says that he typed Discord Active Developer.
Which is fine, typos happen but.. at least go back and re-read your previous message.
He was so convinced of his inability to typo that he accused me of hacking Discord and changing his message, I guess.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand: becoming an Active Developer.
Of course, to figure that out, all it takes is a quick DuckDuckGo search for "discord active developer badge" to find the right support article.
All he needed to do was make a Discord bot and use it once a month, simple enough. I asked what programming languages he knew.
You can make a discord bot in JS and py, but HTML isn't a programming language.
Uhhhh... you did mention it but okay
With each passing minute, this person is showing more into their experience level.
After they insisted I tell them how to make an app, I told them to RTFM.
He asked again, and I answered the same thing again.
He was, however, too eager to start to actually pause and read the docs.
He means, "where is my IDE".
This was the tipping point for me. I finally understood his position for what it was.
Turns out, the only thing this person ever knew was the Tampermonkey code editor. I was looking at the person's userscripts, and they were genuinely quite good! A floating time and battery indicator onscreen, which is very impressive.
It really goes to show just how much someone can accomplish with a limited toolset. They taught themselves userscripting from the confines of their Chromebook, and that's something to be applauded. Unfortunately, give someone a hammer and all they see is nails. They accomplished so much within unserscripting that they entered the Dunning–Kruger effect, which can be boiled down to "newbies think they know it all and are confident, but as their knowledge increases, they realize just how much more there is that they don't know, and they grow less confident. Once they gain true mastery of the given subject, they feel more confident, but this time slowly."
After only experiencing having one place to write userscripts, he assumed that not only could he tackle a Discord bot, but that Discord had its own code editor. He had never used (or heard of) an IDE or shell, and it was quite jarring. It was like talking to some uncontacted tribe who had done nothing but study coconuts for 2000 years, and could teach you all about coconut medicine or coconut water or whatever, but show them a grapefruit and their head explodes.
So... how did this person end up in such an odd situation, on an island of Tampermonkey surrounded by a sea of nothing?
School.
He (like millions of students) had his only device be a Chromebook. Sure, that's restrictive in terms of the ability to develop things, but you can still throw Linux on it! Unfortunately, his school threw out the baby with the bathwater and locked it all down. All for what? To stop kids from being distracted in class? The school blocked your expected stuff like Instagram, but they also blocked GitHub. Other notable blocks include YouTube Music, but not YouTube, as a big fat "fuck you" to anyone who focuses better on homework with music. Not spotify though, because yeah. Also Apple? Why? Nobody is distracted in class by apple.com. Also, some random people's personal coding portfolios?? Why in the even? I have no idea.
Also, not a single web proxy? One that can bypass all the blocks? This blocklist is really dumb.
Anyway, point is, by blocking GitHub, they effectively shut out this kid from the coding resources he needed to expand his knowledge beyond Tampermonkey. I've been DMing with him, and he's clearly eager to learn, but these anti-educational practices by his school made him into a highly effective example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, instead of into a talented programmer. He can't install Linux on his machine because they've locked that down too. All for what? So a kid can't learn to code?
Chromebooks are a harm to the students who use them, because if they learn to code on a Chromebook, it's in spite of it, not because of it. Schools, give your students the tools they need to learn and grow, and stop penning them in, letting them simmer in the few scraps of programming you accidentally leave open to them.
I do not blame this kid at all for where he is. Shutting off Github and Linux is such a blow to his ability to learn programming, and I entirely blame the school.
This kid will have spent a long time learning userscript all by himself, and had no idea what an IDE or shell was. This is what happens when you don't let kids grow. It's like those square watermelons in Japan they grow in molds. Let people grow naturally, and stop confining them to your weird idea of how computers work.