4 ms·

Some ppl simply are rock stars. They are better than everyone else at the whole open-source lifecycle. They know how to do the marketing, manage scope, ship fea

• bloomca 10y ago
  Well, the thing is that in JS community there are tons of rock starts who basically do simple stuff (which was done 100 times before them), but only after their presentations it goes crazy. People retweet them, use as a credible source, etc. Also, there are a lot of people who are very opinionated and just push it and by this become famous in JS land. Yeah, that's true, that they invest a lot of personal time in this stuff, and they do a very good job in balancing, but the problem is that people trust them in important questions like performance even despite the fact many of them don't know CS basics properly (like data structures, etc). I don't want to say all of them are this way, there are some well-educated people who definitely know a lot and deserve all of this. But as it was mentioned earlier, a lot of them are just 22 years old hip guys who released something what became mainstream/were involved in it and became ambassadors.
  • erlich 10y ago
    > people trust them in important questions like performance I think this is part of the tradeoff that they excel at. There is a huge difference between perfecting and optimizing vs. shipping and growing an ecosystem.
• titzer 10y ago
  > I think rock stars earn their status. I think that's mostly bunk. For every rockstar there's 100 equally talented individuals who will never get recognition because they were not in the right place at the right time. Rockstars are incredibly lucky.
  • erlich 10y ago
    And if Steve Jobs didn't build Apple, someone else would have.
• fsloth 10y ago
  As an outsider to the community, I see it as a pathology that there are people you are supposed to recognize outside of the language creator. Not that a culture is a bad thing but in a healthy technical community recognition should come from decades of hard work - not from a nice landing page and a framework of the week. IMO, social media and blogosphere driven complex work cannot be deep, just confused.
  • erlich 10y ago
    I think its democratic which is the best system we have. Any kid with a new idea can have his ideas listened to. This means we don't get stuck.
    • fsloth 10y ago
      Democracy is not about deep work, thorough understanding or the best architecture. It's about negotiating compromise in a situation where there is no shared goal. It works great for ruling countries where it's sluggishness and confusion is a feature and not a bug. I would claim that any technical undertaking without understood goals using a process whose main design feature is not efficiency but sluggishness is a pathological one. A computer system is far more simpler than any countrys political system - it's tractable and optimal solutions can be found. Unless, of course, unless the design process is lost in confusion and bafflement. I would claim a place where any kid is listened to is precisely the one where everyone will get stuck. If people spend more time reading blogs rather than on CS basics they cannot understand a great ideas because they are on the Kruger-Dunning level of skill development.
• nix0n 10y ago
  > They know how to do the marketing This is the only necessary component of stardom. When something is actually good, it'll retain its popularity.
• EpicEng 10y ago
  Yeah, I don't know about that. In my mind, the true rockstars are the people solving hard problems, e.g., kernel contributors, safety critical code, driverless vehicles, etc. I couldn't care less that you can quickly tape together 100 libraries and 7 frameworks to get the latest rendition of pets.com off the ground.
  • Can_Not 10y ago
    Making people who are incapable of kernel work, drivers work, writing safe critical code, etc. capable of being safe, secure, and highly productive, if only by glueing hip new libraries, is a rockstar task.