My story of learning to code to build a side project. | Hacker News Reader

My story of learning to code to build a side project.

blog.capography.com

25 pointstimae12 comments

Thank you for sharing! I always like to read this kind of stories. For me, I started coding in a silly way. First wave of motivation was when I tried to impress my current girlfriend, her sister needed a website and I said I can code it for her. Right after saying that I jumped into YouTube and searched for "How to create a website". Then somehow I forget about coding when I got my internship at one company, which required me to visit hospitals and some other boring stuff. I didnt want to do it, but it was a requirement internship at university. My roommate was a great programmer so I requested a transfer to software department counting on my friend and knowing only a little bit of HTML/CSS. Suddenly, even a single week didn't pass and my friend had to leave, so I was kinda forced to learn ASP.NET and other stuff. After that terrible time of continues googling, stackoverflow, youtubing I became a programmer for a living :)

Great story. Can you add some detail on how much time you've dedicated to learning on a daily/weekly basis and how it fits into your family and work life?

Thanks. Sure: My typical schedule on weekdays is getting home at 7, then spending time with the family until the kids go to bed b/t 8:30-9. Then from 9-12 or 1 I tried to spend as much time as possible on building the app. In my approach the "learning" and "building" were intertwined. I didn't make up much ground on the weekends, as I kept that to family time.

How consistent I was from that 9-12 slot went in waves. For a couple weeks in a row I'd be at it every night, and then I'd have a couple weeks where I wasn't as productive. The summer I went through a productivity lull for some reason.

Thanks. I have a somewhat similar story to yours, and I ended up building my first app during the first 6 months after my daughter was born. I'm trying again now (slightly different approach), but I actually am finding it more difficult now that she is older.

I hope you keep it going and good luck with it!

Great story. Great blog post too. And it looks like a great tool. You just earned another potential user :)

Good luck and keep up the great work!

Inspiring! I am also trying to learn Ruby on Rails. Like you, I also have an itch for startup. Learning Ruby on Rails is on my top list for 2012!

Great insight. I love the "outsiders" view on programming you take. Finding out that the learning curve isn't that great is encouraging.

Very compelling story, I appreciate the amount of detail you went into to explain your adventure.

Thanks for sharing

How much time have you spent doing tutorials / projects vs. pair programming? 50/50?

I didn't really code through any tutorials. I used them to learn and followed them but adapted the steps to my own project to the extent possible.

No pair programming, but that sounds like that would be a huge help.

Did you know HTML/CSS/Javascript before, or was all that new too?

Yes, I did know HTML/CSS. Not so much JavaScript, but I still don't do any of that by hand (not condoning, that's just my current experience level).

The pre-existing skills did help a bit, but HTML/CSS are not that hard to pick up. Add maybe a month to get up to speed with there. Twitter bootstrap is a good help in that area.

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