Comment by richardburton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by richardburton | Hacker News Reader

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I have been trying to learn to code for about 3 years. Recently - I succeeded (in getting started!).

I had been on courses, bought books, read tutorials etc. but at the end of each forced exercise I still could not build a decent rails app. Then, after coming back from the US 6 months ago, I decided I wanted a GroupMe clone for the UK. So I built one.

http://bit.ly/groupmeclone

The SMS is disabled on that version as I have no intention of subsidising peoples' group-messages but the fact is it WORKS and finally learnt to code.

The controller is fat, the model is thin, there are no tests, there are lots of lengthy if-else statements, there are lots of bugs but I do not care because I finally learnt to code.

I have built little scripts for managing my kindle (https://gist.github.com/1404068) and scripts to get my Instragram pics (https://gist.github.com/1399696) and I love it.

I feel like I can finally call myself a rank amateur nuby Hacker. It feels good.

>> The SMS is disabled on that version as I have no intention of subsidising peoples' group-messages

If you are interested in advancing that project, you may want to consider sending the SMS messages via email, which would be free. Each user would need to define their gateway when they set up their account. Many carriers have SMS gateways, and an easy way to translate a phone number into an email address that delivers by SMS.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMS_gateways

Oh that is very cool. I would definitely invest the time if I was still interested in the project but I have finally found something I want to focus all my attention on. Thanks!

That's quite inspiring. I would like to be where you are at, skill wise, in a few months time. Overcoming the inertia (and finding time after 12 hour work days), is proving quite the challenge.

How many hours did you spend per day, roughly, and how many all told?

I would guess I spent at least 40+ hours a week for about 6 weeks. That is when I started having a much higher number of "ah-haaaa" moments. It must be very hard if you hard if you have a full-time job.

Is there something that you really want that is not available? That could be the driver you need to get you excited about firing up terminal.

Congratulations on your first app. It's a good feeling indeed. :)

I recently wrote a ton of Node.js example scripts (chat, group chat, notifications, interaction with PHP, etc), because I had never worked with Node before. I knew PHP, a bit of Rails, and C, but it really feels good to learn a new language or way of programming. I didn't need books or anything, just a bit of example code.

Obviously, since I knew JS, Node wasn't too difficult, but it's an extension of what I previously knew so it took a while to get used to. I also learned a lot more about JS in the process. Self-teaching yourself to code has amazing results.

Thanks a lot! Node looks really clever. Right now I am learning C as I am really interested in computer vision. It is a massive leap above my current skill-set but you have to start somewhere.

Congratulations on your work, pretty cool! I'd love to talk to you about the process you went through, any chance to reach you through email?

Sure! burtonic [at] gee male dot com

I am also on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ricburton

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