Consider that actual rock stars often aren't the world's best musicians from a purely technical perspective - but they're experts at delivering what their audience wants.
Dan made a bit of a name for himself in a couple of ways I can think of: creating a very popular library (Redux) and communicating extremely well in English about React and Redux.
"Able to communicate about with a broad audience about complex technical topics" is a skill I wish more developers had.
So he's able to create things his audience wants and then communicate to his audience about those things. Sounds exactly like a rock star to me.
That's meant as a compliment, not an insult. The ability to communicate well and the ability to be honest about you don't know are two things the developer community needs more of.
I’ll grant you this: unless you’re actually playing music to sold-out stadiums, “Rock star” is an insipid, meaningless phrase. I’m not trying to debate the definition. Likewise, I’m not interested in the technical qualifications to be a “communicator”. There are clearly few technical standards for fame.
In every other field of engineering, there are standards of knowledge and competency. Software is notable, in that not only are there no standards, but we actually see the glorification of ignorance of even basic knowledge.
There are lots of bad, popular github projects (particularly in the JS universe, where the bar for competency is already quite low) and having a popular project is not prima facie evidence of engineering skill (how many projects was the string-reversing NPM module breaking, again?) Which is to take nothing from the author; I don’t particularly care about his level of skill, nor am I saying his projects are bad. The argument is not about the author.
What I care about is when someone says “hey, I’m ignorant of the basics of the field in which I work, but it’s OK, because I work on a big, famous project.”, and people interpret that to mean that their ignorance is dandy, too. There are dozens of comments to this effect on this page (cf every comment that mentions “impostor syndrome”)
It’s OK to not know things. It’s OK to be a beginner. It’s not OK to excuse yourself from knowing things you really should know as a professional, because someone else got famous without that knowledge.
Way I see it is it's more than OK to not know things -- it's a necessary optimization. Engineering is all about tradeoffs, and skills development is no exception. Follow one path, forego another; dive deep, sacrifice breadth (and vice versa).
So consider that maybe, just maybe, for a developer working full-time on a SPA framework, not knowing Docker or Bash scripting might not be a real impediment to working effectively or delivering quality product. If it were, perhaps React & Redux wouldn't be as great as they are. And since they are great, maybe we should consider that fact not as a celebrity get-out-of-jail-free card, but as counterevidence to your implication that these topics all constitute a universal educational imperative, and that someone lacking in any of these areas is by definition not a professional in the software field.
Being a rockstar is more often a matter of being able to work in your field effectively and efficiently. He's not a savant, and he's not working in a space where knowing sorting algorithms is meaningful to his day to day activity. He's still great at how job and the space he works in, and not knowing these things doesn't heavily affect that
That’s mostly just an indictment of the Javascript space, not a defense of lacking fundamental knowledge.
I don’t routinely write sorting algorithms either, but I know what they are, how they differ, and how to implement them. And it’s useful knowledge - it comes up often in lots of domains.
I see lots of comments about how this is a bold stance against “imposter syndrome”, but at some point, it isn’t a syndrome. There really is basic knowledge that defines professional competence in this field, and it can’t be replaced by github stars.
He knows (is aware of) what he doesn’t know: you can be sure that he will learn by himself or seek someone with more knowledge when he faces a challenge involving a new (to him) topic / concept / technology.
