You just asked a non-sequitur question. Patrick said, "consider carefully what you mean by success; one measure is geek status ranking, another is financial success". You responded by saying "show me your code" --- in other words, by implying that there is only geek status ranking, which makes no sense as a response.
When you grok what Patrick is doing, the programming angle on it makes more sense. On HN, he's best known for Bingo Card Creator (that's the work he has the easiest time talking about). Here is the right way to think about Bingo Card Creator: it is an experiment in how much engineering effort you can apply to marketing as opposed to product features and what the payoff on that is. The engineering in BCC is invisible to users; the product itself is "hello world", hooked up to a random number generator. The result of the experiment: he matched his salary with it, and then left his full-time development job, because 5-10 hours a week of effort was paying him better than the 60 he spent as a salaryman.
Also: get past the idea that you can gauge people's skills from their Github profiles. Nerds are in love with that idea because it sure would be nice if it were true. I've been a professional developer, mostly in C, since I was ~17 years old. Only a tiny fraction of the lines of code I've written --- and virtually none of my favorite lines --- are publishable on a site like Github.
It is not, of course, about github. It is much simpler. When some scientist met, say, mathematicians, it is very normal to ask - show me what you have done. Or the same thing with writers - Oh, you're writer? What did you wrote.
This thread was about programming, and the given comment was mere a self-assertion. So, it is OK to assert oneself if one wants to. But, show us, then, what you have done.
No. It is desirable that people contribute their answers to questions. It is undesirable for people to respond to those questions not by challenging the substance of the answer, but by questioning the respondent's standing to provide the answer. There is no "but, show us then". You have no status to demand that of anyone here.
I you have lots to say, for instance about modeling natural language as s-expressions, you too can write lots of long comments and blog posts, and we will enjoy reading them. Unlike the short, nasty one you wrote above.
Sure, I have no status, and I have no demands. What I like to do is to distinguish between people who can program and people who just can talk, to form my opinion on what I'm reading. Words are cheap.
Words are cheap if you quote someone else. Probably as you are doing Linus here. Not when they come from genuine experience of being in the wild. I think, we with a fair bit of experience can make a good judgment when we hear someone who doesn’t really knows what he’s saying.
Rest assured these guys here: http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders wouldn’t be there if they could not code. Most of them have detailed profiles for you to check out first, instead of asking them ‘show me the code’ on their every comment on HN.
Writers of novelists have their works publicly available. What about someone who writes documentation for the launch code for nuclear submarines? While I will probably never ever see that documentation, it's really important that it is done well.
A corporate lawyer may produce a whole bunch of excellent work that the outside world never sees. Yet he keeps the company complaint with regulations.
If we were to do "show me the github" for stonemasons, we would want to see the pretty works of art that someone has made and select for that. But what about the guy who worked for 20 years laying the stone to keep the buildings up? He can't show off his work. But if I work in his building every day, I'm going to care a lot more that he was selected based on his ability to choose the stone that keeps buildings up than on his art.
The majority of code never sees the light of day. We are much more like miners than mathematicians in that the public cannot see our immediate work product, only the results after it has worked as a team. If you've never been hired you obviously can have all of your stuff public, but that's just selecting against people who have worked.
You're showing your bias in that question. In the spectrum outlined in the post you're replying to, from valuing "really really good at writing code" to valuing "makes a ton of money as a result of applying a little bit of coding skill in the right direction", you appear to value the "good at coding" side of the equation.
If you read the comment you're replying to again, you might notice it to be written by somebody who lies towards the other end of the spectrum. As such, you might as well be asking him how much he bench presses, as it is equally relevant (as in, not at all so) to the utility of the advice he's giving.
You're asking the wrong question. A better question would be "what have you achieved while being a programmer?".
Possible answer: Learning a skill that most programmers shy away from, are afraid of, or down-right scorn, thus giving me (him) an almost unfair advantage over virtually every other programmer out there.
He lives from selling his own software... isn't that quite an achievement in itself? Unfortunately, his software isn't open source so I don't think we'll get a chance to take a peek.
Patio11 makes some of his software, A/Bingo, available as open source. A/Bingo is a Ruby on Rails A/B testing framework, available at his Bingo card site.
Naming it "A/Bingo" and hosting it on his own site?
Nah.
Naming it "A/Bingo" and hosting it on his own site for the intent of garnering linkjuice while at the same time presenting the name choice as simply a guileless, clever pun (as he does in his announcement of the project [1]) and within the context of his normal policy of broad disclosure?
A little bit. Perhaps "grey hat" is too strong a word. Swap in "a little discomfiting".
(To clarify, my discomfort is due to the tying together of two orthogonal axes, ie, the quality of Bingo Card Creator as a result for the keyword "Bingo" and the quality of Bingo Card Creator as a source for an A/B testing framework.)
Um, "(The name sort of popped into my head and wouldn’t leave. It is a pun, it relates to my business and personal brand, and it gives the impression of Hitting the Target that successful testing should give you. "
Please name a salesperson more open and honest than Patrick. Tell us who he should emulate. If people don't emulate Patrick's style, maybe they should follow Marc Pincus or Coffeefool instead?
I think perhaps Patrick didn't intentionally name it A/Bingo for the SEO, but he did understand the value OSS and link juice. If I thought of it, he certainly did -- but the name A/Bingo totally stands on its own as a really good name for this software in many ways.
Another example, and the one that inspired me, was one of the bloggers mentioned earlier. Patrick McKenzie runs a small, online business selling bingo cards to teachers (he sold over $45,000 worth of bingo cards in 2011). One thing Patrick does really well is search engine optimization (SEO). One of his techniques for getting people to link to his site (a big part of a high Google ranking), involves open source software. “What!?” That might be your reaction right now. What does open source software have to do with bingo cards for 1st graders?
The answer is nothing. However, Patrick is a software developer that wrote the code for his bingo card website. He recognized that some of the code he wrote was valuable all on its own. So he turned part of it into an open source Ruby on Rails project, put the code up on his site along with instructions on using it, and then told the world about it. What happened? All sorts of software developers, with no interest in bingo cards but a huge interest in his software, started linking to the portion of Patrick’s website that hosted this open source project. More links to his website meant a better ranking on Google which meant more sales of his bingo card creator. So while he didn’t directly sell his offering the way Amazon sold their’s, he did use it in a way that created more business for him.
