
My journey from high school to a feature in Forbes (thanks to you) - mxstbr
http://mxstbr.blog/2016/12/a-dream-come-true/
======
6stringmerc
Great story, quite inspiring and a testament to new media being useful for
professionals and innovators alike (e.g. his use of Twitter & HN connecting
his work to how it was being used / viewed).

For all of those who are now offering to hire the guy, could you be any more
stereotypical? It's just like in music - every record label or tech company
wants somebody to show up on their door already famous and/or already with a
reputation of success - you know, basically the total package. Invest and
develop new talent? Well, that's what unpaid internships are for - slave
labor, and then we pick the best of the bunch...maybe! Same old song and
dance. "Come back when you're famous."

This example is truly good for him, because he invested in himself when big-
time names and others wouldn't bother at first, and now I hope he takes his
time to pick and choose his opportunities now that he's earned his industry
status.

------
jventura
> I tried (again) to study Computer Science at the local technical university,
> but my joy of programming was (and still is) sadly not accompanied by a joy
> for converting numbers from the binary to the decimal system and back (much
> to the dismay of my parents).

As a teacher on a local technical university, I completely understand what
you're talking about here. However, the purpose of technical universities is
to teach broads concepts on computer science (or computer engineering).
Therefore, we have to start somewhere, building from basic concepts such as
the need for digital "codification" up to the dozens or hundreds of concepts
which will provide students with a better understanding of the field.

In your case, you pretty much decided that you would want to do frontend web
development, so you made a choice. Where I teach, students only have one
course which they will ever learn about html/css/js, and on a very basic level
(there's a lot of information to fit into 3 years!). Assuming that most
technical universities are like this, I think you made a good choice for you.
However, if someday you decide to switch to backend development, making your
way down the stack for DBs, or eventually up the stack for higher-level
things, such as data analysis, ML, etc., you may probably find difficulties
related to the lack of breadth on your understanding of the field.

All in all, just to say that you made a good choice for you, but that
technical universities can provide students with a breadth of information
which allows students someday, after some years of experience, to grok the
similarities between most CS subfields..

~~~
lkrubner
"the purpose of technical universities is to teach broads concepts on computer
science"

Which might be a fine way to teach in those nations where college is free, but
even there, ignoring the interests of the student, and sticking with a
standard canon of course work, undercuts the uniqueness of each student.

And in those nations where college is not free, then the cost of spending time
on broad topics needs to be balanced with the student's ability to pay for it.

The style of teaching that you describe is criticized by Paulo Freire in his
book "Pedagogy of the Oppressed".

"In the book Freire calls traditional pedagogy the "banking model" because it
treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a
piggy bank. However, he argues for pedagogy to treat the learner as a co-
creator of knowledge."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed)

This is a model of teaching that can work well if the student is affluent
enough that they don't have to worry about money for several years, but it is
a style of teaching that really breaks down for 2 important groups:

1.) adults who need to learn a new skill

2.) just about everyone who lives in a poor country

Freire developed his ideas while he was teaching adults to read and write.

There is a teaching style that caters more to the full circumstances of the
students, taking into account their age and their economic situation and their
interests, so that the teaching empowers them with knowledge, without also
disempowering them in other ways (such as crushing them with debt).

~~~
jventura
> Which might be a fine way to teach in those nations where college is free,
> but even there, ignoring the interests of the student, and sticking with a
> standard canon of course work, undercuts the uniqueness of each student.

Public college here and throughout most Europe is almost free and most
students attenting public universities do not incur much debt (if any at all).
That is a trap that you have set up for yourselves (assuming you're from the
US).

Nevertheless, every student (computer engineering, that is) can chose is own
courses, so, they can follow their own interests. We just make sure that each
student starts from a good technical point so he can be a "true" engineer (as
in having an engineering degree).

> There is a teaching style that caters more to the full circumstances of the
> students, taking into account their age and their economic situation and
> their interests, so that the teaching empowers them with knowledge, without
> also disempowering them in other ways (such as crushing them with debt).

1 to 1 teaching, although desirable, would not come cheap in any place in the
world!

------
acemarke
Max has turned out to be a prolific contributor to the React community and an
expert on the subject of React component styling approaches. He's also a
pretty good speaker :)

I had a sorta-similar path to getting involved with Redux over the last year
and a half, which I wrote about at
[http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2016/09/how-i-got-here-
my-j...](http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2016/09/how-i-got-here-my-journey-
into-the-world-of-redux-and-open-source/) . I'm also pleased to note that Max
has been one of the biggest supporters of my efforts to improve Redux's
documentation and provide help to people learning React and Redux, and I
really appreciate his encouragement.

~~~
mxstbr
I remember first meeting you in the Reactiflux Discord during a lively
discussion about Redux or somesuch. It's been amazing to follow your journey
and I can't wait to see where you'll be going!

------
noonespecial
_> My original plan was to find a job, but most of the companies I contacted
didn’t even want to interview me. _

If you happen to be in a position of authority in a tech company in the bay
area, I would personally contact this guy and ask if one of these companies
was yours. If it was, you have some serious work to do because your hiring
practices are costing you more than you can easily imagine.

~~~
austincheney
I am curious how you come to that conclusion. Framework lust, particularly in
the JS ecosystem, is inflated and often not representative of technical
authority, experience, or sometimes even competence.

If I were a hiring manager and the candidate couldn't write very basic vanilla
JS I wouldn't hire them either. I don't care that they have a bunch of github
stars. The inability to solve simple problems without a framework is a
liability.

~~~
TAForObvReasons
Github stars mean very little. It is free to give one and many people just
star every repo they see.

The #1 repo by stars is FreeCodeCamp. I have not used the service, but if
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11911647](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11911647)
is to be trusted then the count is inflated:

> GitHub part is so flawed... because FreeCodeCamp inflate their popularity by
> requiring during onboarding for the user to star their repository yet
> keeping them at the top. It's like if I told everyone to vote up my Hacker
> News posts... and gave them the link to do it and GitHub has no remedy for
> that inflation.

I'm also guilty of starring repos that seem cool but have not read the code or
tried to use it. I've never used D3 in a project and can't speak to its
quality, but I've seen some wicked cool demos and starred it as a bookmark of
sorts.

~~~
minimaxir
Free Code Camp is a _massive_ outlier. It received most stars of any repo at
177,914 stars in 2016, and the second most (the google-interview-university
which has appeared a few times on HN) has only received a fraction of that at
28,727 stars in 2016, which likely did not use as much growth hacking.

Full list of the Top 1000 Repos, freshly queried from BigQuery:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11bGpZq6ixlhrmQnzEUqb...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11bGpZq6ixlhrmQnzEUqbgbwTQwQVdtvILjp32vaOKBc/edit?usp=sharing)

~~~
tskaiser
While it is an outlier it is also proof that it is a poor system of
measurement.

~~~
bcook
It is? I think the problem is how we (mis)interpret the data to mean anything
more than what it actually says.

~~~
wlesieutre
So what's the takeaway, "Repo stars are an accurate measurement of how many
stars a repo has"?

------
fahimulhaq
Congratulations Max.

Max worked with us to create an interactive course on React/Redux[1]. Just
wanted to say that he's an awesome guy to work with. Always willing to help
and giving constructive feedback.

Keep doing the good work Max. Congratulations again. Looking forward to 2017
and beyond.

[1]:
[https://www.educative.io/collection/5642398931615744/5741031...](https://www.educative.io/collection/5642398931615744/5741031244955648)

~~~
mxstbr
Hey Fahim, thanks for the kind words!

\----

I have a discount coupon for the course... It was originally meant for my
friends, so I hope Fahim doesn't mind me sharing it, but if you enter "au-
christmas" during checkout you can get yourself 60% off the original price! (I
hope it's alright to post this, if not let me know mods and I'll delete this
part!)

I hope you enjoy the course and Merry Christmas!

------
pen2l
mxstbr, I just want to sound one comment: the seamless way that 'max stoiber'
transitions to the "<mxstbr>" "logo" when scrolling down, the smoothness of
the metamorphosis, is really impressive. Lots of sites do this type of thing,
but for some reason they all suck. Yours doesn't. Great job.

~~~
photogrammetry
It's a little annoying on mobile - if you read to the bottom, you have to
press back ~15 times to cycle back through the sections get to the previous
page.

~~~
mxstbr
Extremely sorry about that, was totally unrelated to the header. Finally
managed to replicate it and fixed it!

Really super sorry for the horrible experience.

------
nickstefan12
While I am happy for his success, a part of me can't help but wonder: "Is
being popular on twitter a big part of front end development these days?: JS,
CSS, HTML and Twitter Followers"

------
the_rosentotter
This site messes up my browser navigation worse than anything I have ever seen
before.

~~~
spinlock
I thought about making the same comment but then figured I was just being
salty because my 2016 was a failure :(

------
GFischer
Congratulations ! It seems you built something people needed and loved :) .

Your story is an inspiration to people who think they're too "green" or "new"
to contribute :)

~~~
mxstbr
Thank you for the kind words!

I absolutely agree, many junior developers are afraid to jump into open source
– even though they totally don't have to be!

The pain points you have while developing, no matter at which level of
experience, other people probably have them too. Some of them are already
solved, but many of them aren't! If you solve one of them, it can only be good
for you to generalize it a bit and push it on GitHub and npm.

Worst thing that can happen? Nobody uses your solution, oh well.

Best thing that can happen? It could change your live.

So why not do it?

~~~
paulryanrogers
"So why not do it?"

Because giving your work away too freely devalues your work and that of your
peers.

That may be offset by the benefits depending on the circumstance.

------
petetnt
What a great story! As a fellow React developer (amongs other things) I really
appreciate the stuff you have given back to the ecosystem (and in a really
short time to boot!) Keep up the good work!

------
jdcarter
Does anybody know the font used in the screenshot [1]? It looks like a pretty
typical monospace coding font but has fantastic pseudo-cursive italics. I
can't figure out what it is, but I want it!

[https://twitter.com/mxstbr/status/786478628829814784/photo/1](https://twitter.com/mxstbr/status/786478628829814784/photo/1)

~~~
niftich
It's Operator Mono [1][2]. It was asked and answered further down the thread.

[1] [http://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-
operator](http://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-operator) [2]
[http://www.typography.com/fonts/operator/styles/](http://www.typography.com/fonts/operator/styles/)

~~~
jdcarter
Thanks! I didn't see it mentioned here or in the HN comments, and looking at a
bunch of font samples didn't turn it up, either. However I did stumble into
Fira Code [1], which has some awesome ligatures for programming!

[1]: [https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode](https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode)

Edit: _ouch_ Operator Mono is $199 and up. I've purchased quality fonts
before, but that's well above my impulse-buy threshold.

------
runbmd
That's awesome and everything, but why can't I back out of your site??

~~~
alexdgg
my thoughts exactly, lol

~~~
mxstbr
Tracked it down and fixed it, should work fine again now – sorry about that!

------
jumasheff
"Books read: 40"

WOW. How did you find time for this?

~~~
NoWhiteHorse
Airports visited: 24 Airport visits: 76 Airplanes boarded: 62 Kilometers
travelled: 323,877

------
hkon
Cool, a real inspiration.

------
ggregoire
Happy user of Styled-Components here. :)

Thanks for your amazing work!

------
aantix
>My original plan was to find a job, but most of the companies I contacted
didn’t even want to interview me.

@mxstbr - Contact me at jim@techleads.io and send me your resume/cover
letter/cold email that you used to approach these companies.. You probably
just need a few tweaks with your personal pitch.

