Hacker News Reader

Comment by reneighbor | Hacker News Reader

I also work in a non-tech role at a startup (I run support at Twilio) and am teaching myself to code. My sentiments are quite the same as James's; it's fun and rewarding but there's so much to learn before you even know what you don't know, before you know what to Google to get help. It's like being illiterate and you don't even know enough to look up words in a dictionary.

I do think that knowing how to program and how computers work is a new form of literacy. Teaching kids programming is certainly more useful and stimulating than, say, long-division. One day people will (hopefully) say, "Wow, can you believe that in the past, only a tiny percentage of people knew how to program?"

Until then, I show my programmer friends my learning-to-program blog (http://reneecoding.blogspot.com), and they say, "This is so cool! It reminds me of what I did when I was twelve."

View on HN

It's like being illiterate and you don't even know enough to look up words in a dictionary.

One of my friends in college compared it to Japanese 101: you can't read a character like 鳥, you can't sound it out, you can't look it up in the dictionary, and you lack words to describe what it looks like to anyone who could rectify any of these problems for you.

There is a trick for Japanese for looking those up in a paper or online dictionary (outside the scope of this post). Relatedly, to learn that particular character, you just write it on a piece of paper until your fingers bleed, and put it in your journal of words with some sample sentences, combinations, etc.

The programming journal thing is a good way to learn programming. My suggestion: if you're learning Japanese, you want Japanese people to critique your characters. Find the guys you want to be like and ask them to critique your programs. (For example, the programmers you want to be like would probably say that your solution for isDivisible will function but it would be quicker and easier to use the XOR operator, and as soon as you know "XOR" you can Google how to use it in Java.)

I'm surprised that support at Twilio is a non-tech role. Considering it's heavily targeted at developers, I would imagine most queries being fairly technical, no?

Good for you though! As you say, there's a lot to learn :) (but the good news is that you don't need to know everything to make something)

The vast majority of questions are non-tech (telephony-related, account issues, and other FAQ type stuff). The next largest set of questions is technical and that's what we have the evangelists for who are all working developers. reneighbor is also more technical than she gives herself credit for :)

Checked out your blog some time ago when I was looking at Citizen Space website. It's interesting, just posted some comments ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com