WP-A: A New URL Shortener

[Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn]

Rick Johnson wrote:

> On Tuesday, March 15, 2016 at 5:54:46 PM UTC-5, Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn
> wrote:
>> Vinicius Mesel wrote:
>> > I'm a 16 year old Python Programmer that wanted to do
>> > something different. But, like we know, ideas are quite
>> > difficult to find. So I decided to develop a URL
>> > Shortener to help the Python community out and share my
>> > coding knowledge, and today the project was launched
>> > with its first stable version.
> 
> Although Thomas makes some very valid points, don't let
> anybody discourage you Vinicius. If you want to build
> something, and everyone in the *ENTIRE* world say's it's a bad
> idea, do it anyway -- if for nothing else than to spite
> them. :-P

You are giving bad advice to a junior developer, advising them to *waste* 
*their* *youth* developing for the recycle bin.  It can no doubt be 
educational to play with programming.  But if actually the *entire* world 
says a it is a bad idea, then it probably is.  Unfortunately, there is 
prevailing the common misconception of the misunderstood genius, and that a 
real genius would sink so low as to do things just in order to prove 
everybody wrong.  But to do so is not genial, it is outright stupid.  
Because what if it does not work out in the end?

Instead, they should find out what problems people have, and what kind of 
software people *really* and *desperately* *need* to solve them, and *then* 
go for it no matter what other people who are not in need say.  Often the 
people that desperately need something solved are close; in fact, it is very 
likely that the first person that really needs something solved is oneself.

For example, what really got me into programming was that I was tired of 
typing commands to run my favorite DOS games, so I learned batch file 
programming to write myself a menu to start them if they were in the paths 
where I expected them to be.  Being limited by the shortcomings of that 
language, I learned Turbo Pascal to search for the games, and in doing that 
I learned a lot of other things that I had never thought of before (like 
creating GUIs, and mouse pointers with embedded Assembler code, and OOP).  
And so on, eventually to Python (IIRC, the second-last programming language 
that I learned).

Want a more prominent example?  Linus Torvalds wrote a kernel for an 
operating system because, although it started his fascination for operating 
systems, MINIX did not suffice for *him*; only later he announced *on 
Usenet* (comp.os.minix) what would become the Linux kernel, and look what 
arose from that.  Because the people he announced it to thought, “Hey, that 
could be really *useful*!”.
 
-- 
PointedEars

Twitter: @PointedEars2
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