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Comment by sudonim | Hacker News Reader

I'm 30. If I can give you advice to live by: don't measure yourself by others' accomplishments. If you focus on what other people have done, you'll end up chasing your tail trying to compete with an idealized notion of 20 different people. Blaze your own trail. Find the things you do well and double down on them. You'll get to where you want to be. It may not be by 18, so don't be impatient. Just keep doing the things that make you a better person and ideally happy and you'll care less about doing X by age Y.

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I'm 37. And if I can give some life advice, it would be to always start from the end. If you're building sites, start with the host. Make sure you understand how to deploy your thing. Then work backwards, and setup your build-test-debug loop with deployment as the final goal. Once you get something working, you can incrementally improve your process - but you need to start with some way to get your stuff online.

Note that you must be very careful to define the scope of your project. "Putting something on the public internet" can be achieved with a blogger blog - no programming necessary. Or a hacker news comment, for that matter. But if you want to do arbitrary things with web browsers on the web then I highly recommend getting a VPS - I like linode, but there's plenty of other options. Another interesting option would be something like Google App Engine, which takes a lot of the pain out of system administration, while still allowing you to serve arbitrary applications (and it's cheaper than linode, too).

You're so right about learning how to deploy your app. I'm using linode myself. I've been investing some time learning to use Chef to provision my servers. And Capistrano for deployment. This is a bottleneck of uncertainty for me, so I just finally decided to forget everything else and focus and figuring this thing out. By the way, if anyone has a good link to a tutorial on provisioning linodes with Chef Server, I'd love to have a link. In the meantime, I'm grinding...

You are so right about learning to deploy your app alone. Learning to deploy using the Free Amazon on AWS server is a must.

Hm, that does make sense. I see what you're saying. Thanks for the advice. I think I'll try to blaze my own trail. Though it seems kind of hard. There's lots of external pressure. Mainly having to do with college. Then again, focusing on what other people have done is sort of a way of putting pressure on myself so steering clear of that will help. Being a teenager is weird.

Let me suggest that a lot of the pressures you feel in high school probably have little to do with "real life." It's amusing to think back to all the things I (and authority figures around me) worried about when I was in high school, because it's all long since irrelevant to me now. I can't really comment on college pressures because I didn't go to college until I was over 30, so I don't know what it's like to be a real college student.

My own experience suggests this: If you've learned to work hard when necessary to meet your own internal standards, and make sure you keep pushing those standards up, you'll probably wake up one day to find you're way more competent than most people in at least one area. That can be really fun (and sometimes lucrative), even if at the same time you're self-aware enough to know you're not a world-class expert that somebody would find interesting enough for an article.

seems relevent -

"What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn't worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know? [4]

This is easy advice to give. It's hard to follow, especially when you're young. [5] Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.

That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you're going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies.

Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.

Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what's admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one."

http://paulgraham.com/love.html

probably also worth a read http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

It's better to learn something in your 20s or 30s then say "I should have done that when I was 12" and then never learn anything and become an ignorant 40 year old!

It pains me when people compare themselves to the upper 1% of upwardly mobile people and then lose their self-worth over the whole deal.

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