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aqeelon Ask HN: How can I learn how to paint?

Full time coder here, who started to draw/paint 2-3 years back. (You can see my journey so far here: https://www.instagram.com/aqeelvn/)

Haven't read all the response here, so I probably might be repeating, but the basic idea is to spend some quality time actually doing it.

Like other arts this is also something one could learn. Take the time to educate yourself with the concepts in visual art. There is a lot you can learn on your own from resources out there. That was the option available to me mostly.

A solid grasp in drawing is required for making any serious work in representational painting.

Andrew Loomis has written a bunch of books that are now mostly available freely on the web. Its really old but its very good.

For painting, I recommend "Alla Prima" by Richard Schmid. This is not a casual read(even though anyone could enjoy the great paintings). Its full of solid technical concepts and advice. You learn more and more from it as you develop yourselves.

Draw from life as much as possible. Don't depend on photographs during your learning phase(although that is never really over) If you don't understand why that matters, don't bother and just stick to it. Soon you will see the difference :)

Good luck!

aqeelon Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight

Where I work, BCC-ing on all mails is not scalable. Instead a random sample of the mails is sent to ourselves.

aqeelon Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight

Exactly what I thought!

aqeelon Be lazy, build better systems

Every one knows the importance of DRY but only few follows it genuinely. This article is a good reminder.

aqeelon Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

You can use longer passwords now!

aqeelon Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

Done!

aqeelon Scheduling morning emails with Python and Celery

Haha, its so funny! especially considering the fact that http://www.cucumbertown.com is a recipe site :)

aqeelon Scheduling morning emails with Python and Celery

Agree. Its not the most useful class.

aqeelon Scheduling morning emails with Python and Celery

When it comes to scheduling emails, what we want is user's to get emails at a specific time as exactly as possible. For this all we need is the UTC timezone offset including DST, which javascript gives us. The jstimezonedetect script is a good one if we wan't to know the real timezone. Problem here is we wouldn't know how often this script could remain updated. Any change in DST will have to be provided by the script which if it doesn't there will be in-accuracies. Not to mention the trouble of keeping the script updated. But in general, the script is indeed awesome.

aqeelon Scheduling morning emails with Python and Celery

Good one! People relying on Cron could benefit from this.

aqeelon Scheduling morning emails with Python and Celery

getTimezoneOffset() would return the value after taking care of DST. So there shouldn't be any DST related inconsistencies. Now if the user moves to another timezone, and never hits one of our page, there is no direct way of tracking his/her change in location.

aqeelon Scheduling morning emails with Python and Celery

It does take care of DST: http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_gettimezoneoffset.asp