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Comment by princess3000 | Hacker News Reader

Would you mind going briefly into what "I learned to code" entailed? Did you identify the languages/technologies you needed to learn at first? How did you go about learning them, etc.? There's a ton of info about learning languages out there but a lot of it tends to be abstract, I'd be very interested in hearing how you learned within the context of actually launching a product.

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Sure. I wrote a little bit about it here http://spencerfry.com/why-and-when-to-learn-to-program and I'll write more about that on my blog in the near future. We're using Ruby on Rails as our backend code and mainly picked that because that's what most of my friends were good in and I knew that I could go to them with any questions.

Given the title of this HN post, you should really be linking to your blog post, not the product itself. I clicked around your site a bit searching for your "learning to code" story to no avail.

I think this is an error on your part, not the OP. The title was set up to show off a product IMO.

I respectfully disagree. A title such as "Show HN: My Employee Rewards Site" would have been more applicable.

However, I don't begrudge the OP, as he's certainly gaining lots of useful feedback for his site.

I just can't help but feel slightly gamed ;)

Not my intention. I'll follow up with more how I learned to program posts. I have some from a few months ago. See http://spencerfry.com/why-and-when-to-learn-to-program for example.

I agree. Call me crazy, but it just seems intuitive that the title "I learned to code to launch my new startup" should be about, ummm, learning to code.

I also think that the blog post would have been much more pertinent to the OP's experiences and conducive to good feedback. Conceivably he chose the title because he wanted feedback on his experiences while learning to code, yet he got feedback about the product in general. If he was looking for advice about the site in general, a Show HN would have been more appropriate.

"I learned to code to launch my new startup" .. and here it is. That's implicit to me.

I did the same thing but it doesn't really matter. It's on the frontage which I'm sure was his goal. I'd say mission accomplished.

Awesome, thank you 8]

Great work on the look and feel of the portal. Looking forward to read your story on the blog.

Not sure why adsense at my place of work blocks your blog for the reason: Not allowed to browse Anonymizer category.

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