130 karma · joined August 30, 2011
- Focus. Don't do it on the side, it would take too long. Treat learning to code as if it was your regular job(I tried to do 40-60hrs per week, I did about 2000hrs of coding in my first year)
- Don't hurry. Don't obsess about efficiency and how you use your time. You will waste tons of time on stupid bugs and knowledge you don't really need, that's just part of the learning process. Focus on putting in those hours week after week and you will see results.
- Work on a project. The only way to truely understand how things work is to actually use them. Don't hide yourself behind books, try to apply everything you learn asap.
- Give yourself permission to suck. This is really hard if you're older (I was 30 when I started to code). If you already have a career, you're not accustomed to be utterly clueless anymore. I had already forgotten how slow and painful it is to learn something from scratch. So give yourself a break and judge yourself the same way you would judge a stranger. Don't expect to become stellar in a matter of months just because you're smart. Hint: so is everybody else who is coding for a living.
Which brings me to my point: Most of the advice is sound ("if they're not playing by the rules, let them go", "the team is more important than an individual contributor") and I'm sure they work in a corporate setting. But do they work for startups? If you have a bunch of average people, you'll end up with a mediocre product. You need talented people who can do more than what their job description asks of them. And unfortunately talented people are also notoriously difficult to manage, because they have better alternatives than others, because they don't think rules apply to everyone the same, because the lack social skills or because they're just jackasses. Stay away from the jackasses, but for the rest of the talented misfits there must be a way to manage them and make it work.
The combination heroku + S3 is awesome, but throw in fonts and firefox and it turns into an ugly mess.
But I like the idea, it's hard to find other django hackers in Berlin. Everybody's doing Rails or still PHP.
I guess the bottom line to the whole discussion started by Jeff is: Not everyone should become a coder, not everyone can become a (good) coder, and not everyone wants to become a coder. But if you really feel like learning to code is the only way not to get left behind in this rapidly changing world (vs just doing it becomes everybody thinks it's cool nowadays), go for it!
I just started using it, so I can't tell you much about it. But it was the only gamification app with a decent amount of people watching and forking it on Github....