Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattnewton | Hacker News Reader

Sort of off topic, but in the second picture the whiteboard says "Ajacks" (and not ajax, for asynchronous JavaScript and xml). Makes me wonder how fast and loose they were playing with instructors, unless this is just a staged shot, or maybe a joke I didn't get.

Not that you need to know what the acronym stands for (hell, no one I know uses the technique to get xml anymore anyways!), but it is weird to see the details wrong in such a detail-oriented discipline, and wouldn't people wonder where the name came from?

View on HN

No, it's completely on-topic! These bootcamps are not teaching these people how to be effective developers when they skip the "hard stuff" and bring in the lowest common idiom in lieu of that. It's so difficult to try and re-teach people this exact concept--try explaining to someone who knows nothing but jQuery and AJAX that a promise has nothing to do with fetching data.

Sure, our UX/UI guy does "AJAX" to create working prototypes of his designs before handing it off to be stuffed into React / Ionic / WhateverJS (which is quickly becoming the standard requirement for a UX person), so it's not obsolete tech by any standard. But let's not act like "boutique" web dev shops are actually still a thing... stay relevant people, especially if you're paying those sorts of fees to show up and learn how to build an Angular2 app on headless Rails in 2017.

I think it's a joke. I doubt that the instruction is exclusively verbal; they must have seen "AJAX" somewhere along the line before whiteboarding Web applications. They're just having fun.

I doubt it.

    > ["Ajacks"] Makes me wonder how fast and loose they were playing with instructors...

Yeah... but that's just one word on whiteboard totally out of context. You don't know who wrote it, it could have been a student literally writing it for the first time after hearing it uttered, or perhaps, the instructor was spelling out the correct pronunciation to discourage folks from saying "A-J-A-X". Whatever the case, this doesn't make for a good "gotcha."

IMHO, there's too many jargon-jockeys in this field and not enough people who can truly explain things. Getting the acronyms strictly correct is the least of the problems.

There's a node library named like that[0], though by reading the flowchart I doubt they're using it... It's about time they're closing.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/ajacks

If I was making dummy applications to show basics of how browsers, networks, web servers and databases work (which it looks like the rest of the picture is doing), I find it wholly plausible that someone comes up with a play of words on fundamental concepts like that.

I dont know if it was meant to be a joke but I'm laughing.

look at item 2 of the JS column in the same picture--"sepicify"

Groups pick a team name for their projects, and they clearly picked ajacks as a play on "Ajax"... Possibly they also have 2 people named jack on the team.

That's really far-fetched since the box is describing an AJAX call.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com