Posted by:
Anon4this
(
)
Date: December 08, 2022 04:14PM
I'm posting anonymously, so I can be a little circumspect.
Can I rant a little?
I'm helping my daughter with a website. A "prototype" is up, but she intends to develop it further and try to monetize it. I help her with the tech stuff, because she doesn't have those skills, and I do. And since I'm retired, I have the time. And, of course, I want to help my daughter succeed.
I've mentioned it on a forum which is tangentially related, and explained the above. Then I started getting private messages from a guy who says:
"I'm not a programmer, but I'm taking a class. Can you tell me how you do such-and-such, because I'd like to learn that."
He goes on to say that he's going to put together a website for a "club" and wants a mapping feature, like ours has, and asks how can he do that.
Our site retrieves and aggregates data from various public online sources, so he asks me how he can do that.
Then he tells me he's a member of the largest related international association, with thousands of members, and says that he doesn't know how, but thinks it's possible to have a program log in and retrieve everyone's contact info, so that he can email them about his "club" (contact info is members only)!
I advise him that it's feasible, but highly unethical, and perhaps even illegal in some places. "oh... I won't do that then."
As his questions evolve and get more detailed, and don't seem appropriate for a "club," I begin to wonder and start doing a little digging and discover that this guy who is "not a programmer" has a number of commercial apps for sale on both the Apple and Android app stores.
One of his multiple websites says he's a contributor to a certain programming forum. So I click the link to his ID there, and poke around a bit, and find not only programming tips that he's dolling out, but multiple threads detailing how he developed his apps, designed and changed features, etc, etc.
So, this "not-a-programmer" very obviously *is* a programmer.
Anyway, I'll stop with the blow-by-blow, but I've been sending this clown tips and advice on how to do all these things! But it becomes increasingly clear that he's not building a "club" website. He's trying to copy what we're doing.
So, I sort of obliquely mention one of his apps, and he responds, "Oh, that? Hahaha. I have to hire programmers to do that. I draw pictures of what I want, and they program it for me."
Lying SOB!!!!
So, why mention it here? Well, I'll give you one guess as to where this unethical sack of $h|+'s "bio" says he went to college. And the bio's squeaky clean headshot is of him in a coat, white shirt and tie, along with the requisite ear-to-ear $h|+ eating grin.