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irishman_irl

22 karma · joined May 6, 2010

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irishman_irl··on Where to learn Ruby on Rails
Like any crafts person be it a carpenter or indeed a surgeon, even once you learn the tools of your trade & fill your head with all of the theory and academic knowledge required - learning how to apply this, to actually create a great product takes practice & experience.

If you are aiming to quickly develop and bring an idea to market, I would recommend hiring or partnering with a developer with a solid background, maybe reduce the feature set you intend to develop for version 1 to the bare minimum. Try and use the best resources you can within your budget.

While non-developers do learn to code & launch applications in short periods of time, these cases tend to be the exception, I've seen people with sales & marketing backgrounds struggle for years to code products and never get them launched.

I don't want to sound negative, but taking a product through the entire lifecycle yourself, while also trying to drum up sales, with no technical background....it's going to be tough going.

irishman_irl··on Where to learn Ruby on Rails
Why do you want to learn RoR?

If this is for a single project that you have in mind...better off to outsource the development or partner with a developer & focus on marketing, sales and other revenue generating

If you want to become a programmer, check out book "Learn to Program" by Chris Pine. Be warned though, its not just RoR you will need to learn but also database design, HTML, CSS, JavaScript at the very minimum before you will really be able to do anything.

irishman_irl··on Ask HN: What do you perceive as worth spending money on?
I like my BMW 5 series as I am a driver at heart. To me driving a well designed car like, with a 1000 tiny well thought out performance tweaks is an experience I enjoy every day.

Having struggled with noisy, underpowered, no fun, front wheel drive Toyota's & Hondas for years I would be hard pressed to give this up.

However if you just buy something like this for the badge, you need your head examined.

irishman_irl··on Review my startup idea, is this a dud?
Its targeted towards websites that have a large number of independent content creators such as a forum, auction or classifieds website.

Within the users admin panel on those websites, users will be able to view metrics, kind of like Google Analytics, showing statistical performance for each of their listings on that website - so they know how they are performing. It will also inform them of any external websites, tweets or other web content that contains a link back to their listing.

Right now, analytical packages seem to be focused on providing statistics back to the owners of websites, but there is not much focused on providing feedback to the individual content creators.

irishman_irl··on Is Programming Getting Less Popular?
I read an article that the number of students enrolling in ICT / Software courses has dropped off a cliff. Obviously this is more anecdotal than hard fact, but thought it was interesting all the same.