If you are committed to a goal, picking up any specific hands-on skills (coding included) is just the matter of sticking to it.
Something to keep in mind when hiring.
Calvin Coolidge
"If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on and the dedication to go through with it."
John Carmack
Some types of free services that go out of their way to build traffic at the expense of revenue, or computation intensive services like real time audio/video may be exceptions to that rule.
Some anecdotal evidence - I ran a cacheless Django site that more than made the server costs back monthly via a single Adsense unit, in the gaming sector where eCPMs are rubbish, and the files you serve are huge, and the server was never at any point at more than 20% utilisation.
By and large, the cloud has lowered the barriers to entry. Unless you're running Justin.tv, server costs are down in the noise. Getting users is the hard part; serving them pages is not.
John Carmacks quote becomes more pertinent as time goes on because computing power is only becoming cheaper. And to directly address your point, the common person now has access to more computing power than ever before at a cost lower than ever in history because of the cloud.
If anything the barriers to entry continue to drop leaving only our lack of persistence as what stands between us and success.
The demand for servers and compute power has increased because of the cloud. Just because server rooms have turned into datacenters does not mean they "shrunk", quite the opposite.
Cloudwise EC2 is trending down, Heroku starts free with reasonable limits, and VPS with 500M memory at Linode is $20/mon.
http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2012/03/05/new-low...
Cheap PCs in your basement, or cheap VPS machines are perfectly acceptable for starting out. Also, if you're conscious about performance and have good bandwidth, you can serve insane amounts of traffic from a single server.
I could interpret the article to say that being determined and focused, while being ready for opportunities, are the critical ingredients to success.
Saying that determination and focus are key ingredients - is just taking an event and looking at it through your own personal lens.
Heck, you could have been the hardest worker, and a genius, but if your name was Nikola Tesla your end result would still be penury.
If you had been Tesla, your "end result" would be that you were Tesla.
Luck, or what appears to be luck, generally happens to people who are constantly prepared to accept an opportunity when it presents itself. In fact this leads to another popular saying that opportunity is everywhere. The problem is that it is often dressed in overalls and looks like work[1].
[1] Very liberal paraphrase of Edisons quote.
Yes, but creating a business isn't as easy as buying a ticket. That's my point. There is more skill than luck involved in any business success.
I am in no way agreeing or disagreeing with this notion of "success", just stating how I think society in general broadly feels.
Line 1 basically refers to stuff like learning code, while line 2 seems to allude to success in terms of making bank.
However, the flip side of the coin is that it's a great weakness if you don't know what you don't know. It's only when you know you don't know that you can find someone to fill in for that or expand your skills. Because in the end it's what you do that counts.
the sad truth is, that there are no set in stone rules how to become successful. perhaps its good, because otherwise if everyone would get successful, nobody would be successful.
think it this way: imagine solid set of rules how to hit jackpot in lotto. if everyone would read those rules and applied, then everyone would win... a dollar.
yes, hard work is important. yes, who you know is important. yes, idea and execution is important. yes, luck and timing is important too. but deliberating that you cant success without this or that is a pure waste of time.
That's nice to think. Hell, I wish I had your tenacious optimisim, but you'd have to be willfully avoiding reality to truly believe this is always the case. Sadly, it just is not.
I should read more about Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.