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Comment by jenniferDewalt | Hacker News Reader

Just before I started the project, I looked around the internet for some resources to see what I was getting myself into. There are so many awesome places to get information out there. Stack Overflow, the Wikipedia, demos, tutorials, documentation. I spend about 10 hours a day working on the project and the vast majority of that time is me digging through those amazing resources.

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Just curious, how do you fund working on these projects 10 hours a day?

Good work on them. Perfect way to have a portfolio ready for the world.

I saved up some money so that I could learn to code full time.

Do you think your art background helped you develop the focus and dedication to work on projects for such long periods of time? Most programmers couldn't manage that.

Absolutely! When making art, you often go through a 'research' phase where you make a lot of sketches, models, mock-up, etc. Most of it is garbage but at the end you've prepared yourself to tackle the real thing. I sometimes think of this project as a really intense version of that process.

You really should blog about this! 'Build one to throw away' is a common (very insufficiently applied, in my case) programming aphorism, but it would be neat to hear a take on it from an artist's perspective where you quite literally throw it away and there is no copy-paste between projects.

That is a really great idea! I am definitely sticking that one in my queue.

I'm going to move to India to do just this.

Just curious. Where in India?

Don't know yet. Any ideaS?

I second the interest in a blog post. Jennifer, it's rare that someone develops an art background before programming so I'd love to hear your thoughts on the similarities and differences.

What on earth do you mean by this?

Do you have a list of your favorite resources. Would be great to see that path... Like I built this and used this to learn. Fantastic job btw. Kudos!

I don't have a formal list right now but I do have a folder full of random bookmarks which I'll do something with at some point. I always keep a window open with tabs to Stack Overflow, jQuery docs, Underscore docs, and Ruby on Rails Guides (if I am using Rails that day). I usually keep another window open with tabs to styling tools like http://www.colorhexa.com/.

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