Hacker News Reader

Comment by alaskamiller | Hacker News Reader

Took me ten years to learn to code by myself.

From playing around with gorillas in QBasic to pretending to know C to learning HTML visually to getting CSS and DOM to trying to remake PacMan in C++ to finally learning Python and Django and Flask and the point of OOP to finally now realizing the modern day shift towards EDP thus how powerful JavaScript really is.

Ten years of sucking. To realize I'm not meant to be a programmer because my code is not as efficient, compact, or beautiful enough like the "pros" that keep pushing to GitHub.

And that internal chasm, that lack of confidence is what kills it for me. And if I were to do it all over again I would have definitely done all this on other people's time and money instead of my own.

But I just keep hacking away because programming is art and until the day I can bring about all the crazy things I know I see in my head that will change the world I will suffer for my art.

View on HN

Are you me? Which way's the support group?

Would you've considered using the money you've generated to launch a local devbootcamp to teach yourself among 'pros'? In these 10 years you haven't stayed out of touch since you know EDP, some people are stuck in OOP. Putting up a MVP together and using those connections you would've gained in the bootcamp to find a partner sounds better than the loner route. That's what I'm assuming. I lurk here, but comments like these puts reality down in a summary I can comprehend.

I wish there was a shortcut to all of this. You know finally landing on a legit niche and outsourcing it. Outsourcing can be an art for people like us who aren't pros.

[Edit] One of you guys in here should launch an old school way of learning how to hack hub. For Generation Y.

A lot of bootcamps are popping up in the bay area. To me it's weird and speaks more about how broken our immigration laws are than that the bootcamps are fulfilling a market niche.

There are huge leaps between the introductory levels (covered by CodeAcademy or Udemy reinventing the ...for Dummies series of the 90's) to the intermediate levels to the expert Google/Apple/Facebook levels (trained by the traditional college systems or just talented enough to self-learn).

That intermediate level is a big opportunity and I can see the pitch of the bootcamps being able to launch candidates from intro levels to get as close to the intermediate level as possible. Yet, that's a big jump.

Things like knowing about message queues, tasks queues, server provisioning, or creating REST APIs are still a lot of information to learn. If I were a funded business organization my options are to:

- hire internationally and relocate them (thus far expensive)

- setup offshore (expensive but cheaper)

- hire a 12-weeker (cheap)

In my experience of working at big corps and startups, there's just not enough introductory work to go around to make hiring a 12-weeker worthwhile.

It's even worse on the startup scale since there's just not enough money to keep a newbie around long enough to make good use of them or provide technical training. Not to mention how often people jump from companies to companies these days and OTJ training just doesn't work anymore.

I don't know how to fix that. I keep hearing that DevBootcamps are pretty successful at placing people into work though I would love to have a deep dive with the employers to know what's going on because to me they just don't seem efficient enough.

I'm working directly with a DevBootcamp grad and would be happy to talk about the experience some.

In what capacity are you working with the devbootcamp grad? What kind of hiring / working experiences have you had with other developers?

On a surface glance, it seems like you develop rails MVP's via coder.ly?

In this case, I'm building out a Rails MVP for a client wherein I'm involved in the short term. I'm pairing with the DevBootcamp grad and teaching him my process as we go and assigning smaller tasks to him. In that sense he's a very junior developer, and I work as both a consultant hacking away on product and a trainer. It's still early, but it's working well so far.

I've worked as product lead or product manager in small and mid-sized companies and have had to hire developers in PHP, .NET, and Rails shops.

And yes, I've been trying to focus on Rails as of late.

[Edit] Nevermind. Found answer: http://ventureforamerica.org/

An informal DevBootcamp-like fellowship like the one above is the solution for some Gen Y kids. They can properly contribute to https://www.hackerschool.com/ and cut formal education time.

Hey Alaska, I'm Jesse, one of the co-founders of Dev Bootcamp (http://devbootcamp.com).

Happy to answer any questions here or via email (jesse@devbootcamp.com).

Here are some employer-centric things worth reading, from companies that have hired our grads.

Exec (http://iamexec.com/blog/your-credentials-are-worthless-here) TapJoy (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4414594)

From a fall student now at Ouya (http://dmragone-at-dbc.tumblr.com/post/39338810976/thank-you...)

I don't want to hijack this thread, so happy to talk here or elsewhere if you're interested!

OOP and EDP are not mutually exclusive, like someone has already said.

EDP and OOP are not mutually exclusive. Javascript is popular simply because it's really really really underpowered. see: atwood's law

Is popular because is the only language allowed in the browsers; any other assertion is purely speculation. Just be glad is not COBOL or C (imagine any amateur's code causing memory leaks in the browser...)

Underpowered? I suppose it doesn't have a static type system. You can do OO just fine in Javascript, though.

There are fixed-sized intArrays and buffers in JS nowdays.

Yeah, but that's a far cry from a full-on static type system. Don't get me wrong, though — JS is one of my favorite languages! (Most) Lisps don't have static type systems, either, and not many people call them underpowered. Same goes for Ruby, Python, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com