Reginald Braithwaite is a GitHubber

https://github.com/blog/1567-reginald-braithwaite-is-a-githubber

by llambda • 13 years ago

202 63 13 years ago

github.com

aaronbrethorst• 13 years ago

congrats to raganwald! The link to help in the blog post is broken, btw.

northisup• 13 years ago

Why on earth is this interesting enough for the greater HN community to care about?

fishtoaster• 13 years ago

I was confused for a bit as well. Reginald is raganwald, one of the more prolific hacker new users (https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders).

_frog• 13 years ago

Somewhat tangental, it would be great to be able to sort that list by average karma. There's a lot of users in that top 100 that got there via quantity of comments alone, it'd be interesting to see who the most _valuable_ contributors are rather than just the most prolific.

simonsarris• 13 years ago

Because many of us care about raganwald's voice. He's among the top 10 in all time karma on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

joeblau2• 13 years ago

Oh wow, HN has a leader board. I didn't even know about this.

lhnz2• 13 years ago

Because he is way above the intelligence of 90% of HN users and noticeably so.

levosmetalo2• 13 years ago

Why so insulting? Is there a way to flag a comment, or I need more karma on this account?

sytelus2• 13 years ago

I think it's not interesting to vast majority of the HN users. They probably don't even know who this guy is or care if gets job at X or Y company. What is happening is here is though there is small number of people who does know him (may be < 100) and they all upvote this link or write redundant comments of congratulation in quick succession driving it to the top. This is one of the scenario that downvote button could have prevented allowing rest of the users to indicate that they are not interested. Without downvote, their only recourse is to vote something else which gets pretty thinly spread at least in some small time window while those 100+ users are upvoting this.

m0nastic• 13 years ago

I feel like you don't understand what a community is...

Hacker News is an online community. It has a pretty open membership policy, which is that, if you show up here over a period of time, and manage to not get hell-banned, you're a part of the community. Congrats!

Part of being in a community is that it's pretty common to have a kinship with other people in that community. This place isn't a real-life place, so naturally, that kinship might not develop as quickly, or spread as deeply as one might in person. But you'd be surprised that it can still develop.

So, "the vast majority of HN users" might not actually know who raganwald is, but I'd bet they've probably seen at least a few of his comments, at least if they've spent any amount of time here. However, "the vast majority of HN users" aren't actually the community. There's nothing stopping them from being part of it, they just aren't. Which is fine (I don't consider myself to be, for what it's worth).

But when someone who is a part of the community has something good happen to them that's of interest to the community, people share it.

The fact that this story is popular is a triumph of community, not a shitty side-effect of this place not operating the way you wish it did. I hope it continues to feel this way, lest it really turn into a shitty link aggregator that you so wish it were.

illicium• 13 years ago

It's called an echo chamber.

Yes, Hacker News is an echo chamber.

likeclockwork• 13 years ago

People here who know of raganwald < 100, is a pretty poor guess. He's active here, he's written a number of books, he's active on r/programming and r/javascript. He has a number of things on github and on npm, his code is out there in the wild.

I know who he is and I'm hardly a member of any exclusive in-group.

everettForth• 13 years ago

Does he ride a very shaky train to work?

mladenkovacevic• 13 years ago

That's the Toronto streetcar.. one of the few symbols of this wonderful city.

jt2190• 13 years ago

That's not just a streetcar, that's the "red rocket!" ;-)

jarek2• 13 years ago

The streetcar ride is rather smooth FWIW.

tptacek• 13 years ago

To the surprise of absolutely no-one.

Congratulations, raganwald, and good call, Github. You're on a roll with hiring these days. :)

benstein2• 13 years ago

Agreed. This a you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment. Really good match.

eieio2• 13 years ago

This is probably a really dumb question, but can you explain what a "chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment" is? I've never heard a phrase like that.

OT this is awesome. Congrats to both parties, obviously a great choice.

1qaz2wsx3edc• 13 years ago

Funny, I recognized his handle over his full name. Shout out for the homoiconic. Amazing articles, like the one on lexical scopes was a great help to me.

danso• 13 years ago

I know raganwald is a top HN user but I know him more through his excellent technical books, and so am looking forward to his contributions to Github's documentation:

https://leanpub.com/u/raganwald

thisistheend2• 13 years ago

HN is a cult and this proves it.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

Grats raganwald! Clearly articulated supporting documentation is highly correlated with successful efforts. I am certain your efforts will be richly rewarded.

AndyKelley• 13 years ago

He's currently ranked #108 on the GitHub Popularity Contest Index:

TeMPOraL• 13 years ago

Congrats, raganwald! Just don't forget to keep posting comments on HN every now and then ;).

purephase• 13 years ago

Congrats GH. raganwald is a class act.

I didn't realize that he lived in Toronto though. Awesome to see the streetcar on the GH blog!

pbreit• 13 years ago

Wow, it would be cool (and probably wishful thinking) if Raganwald could help make a dent in the documentation universe beyond Github.

I'm thinking Sphinx/ReadTheDocs in scope, version controlled docs with pull requests, output in Jekyl to Github (or other) Pages. Etc.

diziet• 13 years ago

Hope to see you climbing (in Dogpatch?)

ryan-allen• 13 years ago

Woah, congrats Reg!

marcamillion• 13 years ago

Congrats raganwald. I <3 Github, and even though I don't know raganwald personally, his comments were always intriguing and thoughtful.

I also didn't know he lived in Toronto, for some reason I assumed he lived in San Francisco.

I also didn't know about Homoiconic - and now there is a treasure trove of lots of wonderful programming (largely Ruby stuff from what I am seeing) articles that I can go through one by one...little by little.

Like this one - https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2008-10-...

For some reason, I have never used `and` instead of `&&` in Ruby. Perhaps because I have never seen it used, but now that I have seen that I can't help but try it out next time.

I am not sure if this is even valid syntax in Ruby 2.0, but I am so glad I stumbled across this.

For those that were criticizing the purpose of this post on HN - this is exactly why it deserves a place here. Raganwald is a valued member of HN, largely because of the stuff he has published over the years (and his contributions to the community) - which are still valuable today. As a relatively young Rubyist (started learning in 2009) all of these things are like gold to me.

So thank you llambda for submitting this, thank you HN for upvoting it, and thank you raganwald for not deleting this wonderful content.

Edit: Also, I think it's cool when we get a chance to 'big up' (Jamaican speak for: "send positive/congratulatory words to") someone while they are alive and can appreciate it. Don't mean to get all morbid, but with so many 'iconic' tech luminaries dying recently (or it feels like that anyway), we always see an outpouring of love after the fact - when they can't hear it. I think it's cool that even though this isn't anything "major" (like a Nobel Prize or anything like that) it's large (and meaningful) enough, for people to take time out to 'big up' raganwald.

So....cheers raganwald.

raises imaginary wine glass

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

Congrats Raganwald! Funny how seeing that streetcar suddenly made me nostalgic for Toronto.

edwardog• 13 years ago

Yeah, Reg!

raganwald• 13 years ago

Thanks, everyone! HN has been a very informative, interesting, and motivating place since its inception. You are the reason why.

Reginald Braithwaite is a GitHubber

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