Exactly, his weirdo vibe works because he pairs it with an incredible love for music and respect for the artists he speaks to. I think Drake said it best in the hourlong interview they have together, along the lines of "I don't do interviews because most people want to catch me slipping up and find some dramatic quote to drag me with, but with Nardwuar it's 100% about the music, that's why we're here"
Best example of this is probably the first Pharrell interview. This was before Nardwuar was famous at all, outside of Canada anyway, so Pharrell wouldn't have heard of him, and Pharrell spends the first part of the interview obviously a little weirded out at the goofy-looking guy in front of him and probably wondering why his manager booked this for him in the first place. About five minutes later Pharrell says "This is one of the most impressive interviews I've ever been a part of" and as mentioned in the OP article immediately calls Jay-Z and says hey you gotta talk to this Nardwuar guy.
I agree with all of this advice, and would just add that if you find yourself turning in PRs that then need some changes before they can be merged, a strategy that worked for me early in my career was reviewing my own code as if I was reviewing another person's pull request. If you have turned in a few PRs that needed work then you already have a few examples of the kind of thing that your colleagues are looking for, and you can look at your own code with those things in mind. If you can, I would try to put a little time between writing the code and reviewing it so your mind can reset a bit. For me that meant wrapping up the code in the evening and then reviewing it first thing in the morning.
I like making digital art and little tools to help with creating digital art... happy to see this thread, here are a few things I'm proud of from over the years
An app for pen plotters focused on drawing and creating art manually more than the generative side of things [1]
A Ruby script that takes still images and recreates them entirely out of emojis [2]. Someone used it to make a music video [3]
And finally a Twitter bot that combines Marmaduke comics and Erowid trip reports at random [4]
I don't think there are stupid questions or even poorly worded questions. Even "bad" questions like "It's not working, help!" are a learning and a teaching opportunity, which I think is mostly up to how the more senior developer responds and works with the more junior one. It's true that "it's not working, help" is not all that actionable by itself, but I assume we all had moments like that when we were learning to write code. I certainly did. (and still do sometimes lol).
I think the tweet thread's thesis is "allow messing up," which I'd couple with the senior developer's responsibility to be nice and friendly and supportive. Anyone's first dev job is going to be a formative experience and if they ask "stupid" questions and are met with kindness it's going to echo through their entire career, the same way being met with rudeness would also have a lasting effect. I don't really have any hard or fast rules about how juniors should ask questions, I don't think they're really necessary as long as you make them feel supported and comfortable in a general sense.
As someone who also remembers Garfield being funny as a kid, I don't read the OP as saying it was never funny, but that being funny was a secondary concern to Davis after being marketable. I just looked up a random Garfield strip from 1988 [1] and I have to say, it's kind of a funny visual gag. Nothing groundbreaking but for a daily strip in a newspaper, it's not bad, and I'm an adult now, as a kid I probably would have found it hilarious. Combine decent humor like that with recognizable and cute characters appearing in the newspaper daily and it's not surprising that the strip became so popular.
I created a similar task at my company as the parent commenter, building a small frontend to an existing API that can be completed in a couple of hours. There's no time limit for turning it in (we suggest two weeks but don't enforce it) and we specifically tell people that a good, concise solution to the problem at hand is perfectly fine, and even might be better than a sloppier solution that tries to add bells and whistles.
When I set it up the goal was to avoid a lot of the issues I've personally had or heard about with coding challenges: they take way too long, they're too abstract, or you feel like the company might just be using you to get a couple of days of free work on their actual codebase. For this reason I feel fine about not paying people, as it's just a small part of the application process and not free work for us.
I think it's worked pretty well so far. It happens after the initial phone screen and before the first technical interview. We send people the challenge, they return it whenever they want, and if we like it we set up a technical interview. Since the challenge uses our tech stack and is similar to the work we actually do, a large part of the first technical interview is discussing their solution. Why they chose certain patterns, why they added a certain library, how they'd consider testing it, why a certain function might be slow with 10k entities, and so on.
Best example of this is probably the first Pharrell interview. This was before Nardwuar was famous at all, outside of Canada anyway, so Pharrell wouldn't have heard of him, and Pharrell spends the first part of the interview obviously a little weirded out at the goofy-looking guy in front of him and probably wondering why his manager booked this for him in the first place. About five minutes later Pharrell says "This is one of the most impressive interviews I've ever been a part of" and as mentioned in the OP article immediately calls Jay-Z and says hey you gotta talk to this Nardwuar guy.