Instagram Founder’s Girlfriend Learns How To Code For V-Day, Builds Lovestagram
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The most wonderful thing you can ever give somebody is your time.
No matter who you are, no matter how much money you make, most people have roughly the same amount of time. In this sense we're all equal.
So yes, some of us could off and spend enormous amounts of money on each other for gifts...but if I spend a week building something, and Bill Gates spends a week building something, the gift is the same temporal size.
It's like saying "Yes, I could do anything at all with this week of time, but I decided that that week of time would be best spent building something that will make you happy."
There's something that I find profoundly beautiful about that.
This is an absolutely fantastic gift. She should be really proud of herself for learning that quickly, and I'm sure he's over the moon about this as a gift.
More importantly, she learned enough to gain this insight:
“Learning to program isn’t the hard part. The biggest challenge is figuring out how all the moving parts of a web application fit together. There’s no book for that,” she said."
It's easy to learn just html. Or to just learn if/then statements or for/loops. Or just hosting a site.
Something that could teach how to put the whole package together would be immensely valuable. The closest I've seen is the Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl.
I'd love to see something similar done for different tech stacks.
No, I disagree with the quoted statement. Coding is hard. Try writing some code and letting it sit for 6 months. Then try to add a new feature.
Do you remember what display_user_data() does? How does that differ from format_user_data()? Wait, why did I write three model-querying subroutines when one would suffice? Oh, but now I'm passing six parameters into this subroutine...
I'm excited for everyone learning to code this year. It's a great time to learn! But remember that your code needs to (a) make sense in its design, and (b) make sense in its design six months from now. Does your code make sense after taking a vacation, working on other projects, and forgetting the abstractions you rolled with?
Programming is hard. Learning how to write code that is sufficiently modular that you don't have to keep a whole project in your head is hard. Figuring out patterns that retain modularity whilst giving good levels of performance and memory usage is even harder, by about another order of magnitude. Learning how to put together a django project and push it to heroku doesn't even rate compared to the learning curve for being able to write large bodies of code.
What's your excuse, Mr. Non-technical Person? :P
Just before we were to be married, my wife had dabbled in both programming and graphic design and was facing the choice of which to specialize in. She chose to go the programmer route as that would give us more common ground.
And yet, I have no interest in learning how to knit. Maybe I should try.
In my free time I'm currently developing an app, and whilst the theory is extremely useful for understanding, it only comes into its own when I'm working my way through the everyday problems that projects provide. Kudos to Kaitlyn, more people should dive in at the deep end!
I think my valentine gift will be "why didn't you make the reservation earlier?! Where are my roses???"
I ranted about abstractions below, but this woman shipped code. Dedicated to her boyfriend, no less! I'd be incredibly flattered if I were him, and kudos to her for launching something.
I'm not a language zealot, Python just had the robust GIS, math, and other libs I needed.
Trigger suggests creating classes specifically for women who want to code as a possible solution to this particular digital divide, the trick is to not be intimidated ,“[Code] is something that nobody should be afraid of. “
A lot of universities have been trying to fix it, but it's the CS major itself that caused most of the problems. You weren't allowed to collaborate so people got frustrated early on (ie. you think you suck, you think everyone else is better than you, you quit the program based on false data). Some of the instructors were hostile toward women (they eventually retired or were replaced). And they couldn't get an intro course going that didn't appear to dumb down the material. Plus a woman only intro CS course violates Title 9.
Ignore the fact that it's an e-lebrity's significant other; celebrate the fact that someone went from zero to fully functional app with no prior experience in less than three months.
Someone becomes curious about tech, wants to make something, does the hard work themselves, learns the hard way, gets the skills, actually makes the thing, ships it, makes people happy?
Isn't it exactly the sort of thing that belongs on the front page of Hacker News?