Instagram Founder’s Girlfriend Learns How To Code For V-Day, Builds Lovestagram

http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/09/awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww/

by kloncks • 14 years ago

296 39 14 years ago

techcrunch.com

dmor• 14 years ago

The URL slug says it all: awwwwwwwww

jfarmer• 14 years ago

Kaitlyn spent the last 2-3 months learning Python just to build this, with no prior programming experience.

What's your excuse, Mr. Non-technical Person? :P

loumf• 14 years ago

More importantly, what's your excuse Mr/Ms Technical Person who can't seem to get your project released.

danso• 14 years ago

According to the article, she started in December from basically scratch. She used Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way and learned enough Python to then figure out Django and deploy to Heroku herself.

More importantly, she learned enough to gain this insight:

“Learning to program isn’t the hard part. The biggest challenge is figuring out how all the moving parts of a web application fit together. There’s no book for that,” she said."

dmragone• 14 years ago

As someone who recently started learning to code, I would agree with that statement wholeheartedly. Learning how the pieces fit together is the most difficult part, by far.

WadeF• 14 years ago

It's easy to learn just html. Or to just learn if/then statements or for/loops. Or just hosting a site.

Something that could teach how to put the whole package together would be immensely valuable. The closest I've seen is the Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl.

I'd love to see something similar done for different tech stacks.

NinetyNine• 14 years ago

The skill of learning how pieces fit together in a project you've never touched is one of the most valuable skills in a programmer. Everyone can learn it, it just takes a lot of practice reading code. It also helps if you're strongly familiar the libraries/framework the code was built on as well.

achompas2• 14 years ago

But piecing together web apps is a solved problem! Follow a tutorial, and you'll see that Django/Rails + MySQL + memcached gets you there. Toss in a bit of Twitter Bootstrap and you have a fully-styled webapp with a backend and caching. You just need to write the views.

No, I disagree with the quoted statement. Coding is hard. Try writing some code and letting it sit for 6 months. Then try to add a new feature.

Do you remember what display_user_data() does? How does that differ from format_user_data()? Wait, why did I write three model-querying subroutines when one would suffice? Oh, but now I'm passing six parameters into this subroutine...

I'm excited for everyone learning to code this year. It's a great time to learn! But remember that your code needs to (a) make sense in its design, and (b) make sense in its design six months from now. Does your code make sense after taking a vacation, working on other projects, and forgetting the abstractions you rolled with?

caycep• 14 years ago

all that in 2 months?!?!? that's pretty impressive.

demallien• 14 years ago

Ugh. No. A thousand times no. Or at least, this really isn't true unless all you want to do is glue together modules from other people with minimum code. If however you need to write a 50kLOC module for the project, then you are rapidly going to discover that programming is far and away the hardest part of the project.

Programming is hard. Learning how to write code that is sufficiently modular that you don't have to keep a whole project in your head is hard. Figuring out patterns that retain modularity whilst giving good levels of performance and memory usage is even harder, by about another order of magnitude. Learning how to put together a django project and push it to heroku doesn't even rate compared to the learning curve for being able to write large bodies of code.

matdwyer• 14 years ago

This is cool, and a great advertising story for instagram (which is almost more of a present!)

I think my valentine gift will be "why didn't you make the reservation earlier?! Where are my roses???"

ilamont• 14 years ago

I think it's an even better advertisement for Learn Python The Hard Way.

willyum• 14 years ago

Is this related? there's even a link to how to make a heart.. but I feel like it's too recent: http://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/phimd/lear...

smhinsey• 14 years ago

Wow, we should all be so lucky.

purplefruit• 14 years ago

Please don't take this the wrong way, but does this really belong on the front page of Hacker News? This is like celebrity news for nerds. I care about what Angelina got Brad for Valentines as much as I care about this.

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

It's more like one of their kids starting a successful startup, helping people out, and making money while doing it.

Ignore the fact that it's an e-lebrity's significant other; celebrate the fact that someone went from zero to fully functional app with no prior experience in less than three months.

yabai• 14 years ago

It is kind of inspiring knowing that someone with little experience can develop a pretty cool web app!

feral• 14 years ago

Doesn't this story capture something of the essence of hacker-ness?

Someone becomes curious about tech, wants to make something, does the hard work themselves, learns the hard way, gets the skills, actually makes the thing, ships it, makes people happy?

Isn't it exactly the sort of thing that belongs on the front page of Hacker News?

vigilanteweb• 14 years ago

I think the biggest part of this is the effort that she put in to have something in common with her partner. I think that it's a good reminder to everyone with a partner/spouse that putting in the effort to get your hands dirty in something they're interested is a great gift.

MartinCron• 14 years ago

My wife's father is a retired mainframe programmer. As a child, she thought it was sad that her mother couldn't follow (and didn't even try) what it was that he did all day.

Just before we were to be married, my wife had dabbled in both programming and graphic design and was facing the choice of which to specialize in. She chose to go the programmer route as that would give us more common ground.

And yet, I have no interest in learning how to knit. Maybe I should try.

kragen• 14 years ago

Knitting, like programming, runs the gamut from boringly easy to beyond human mental capacity.

blhack• 14 years ago

Dear Everybody:

The most wonderful thing you can ever give somebody is your time.

No matter who you are, no matter how much money you make, most people have roughly the same amount of time. In this sense we're all equal.

So yes, some of us could off and spend enormous amounts of money on each other for gifts...but if I spend a week building something, and Bill Gates spends a week building something, the gift is the same temporal size.

It's like saying "Yes, I could do anything at all with this week of time, but I decided that that week of time would be best spent building something that will make you happy."

There's something that I find profoundly beautiful about that.

This is an absolutely fantastic gift. She should be really proud of herself for learning that quickly, and I'm sure he's over the moon about this as a gift.

uladzislau• 14 years ago

Love the URL for the story :)

crntaylor• 14 years ago

On one hand, awwwww. On the other hand, this makes me feel terrible. I've been learning to code for about a year, I have a job which involves plenty of coding, I have a PhD, and I'm pretty sure that I couldn't build and deploy a web app right now. Very well done to her!

manish_gill• 14 years ago

Same. I've been jumping between C, C++ and python for god knows how long, and I still can't make something as awesome as she did. Kudos to her.

apricot13• 14 years ago

this was lovely, until you get the the last part, which just completely ruined the story.

Trigger suggests creating classes specifically for women who want to code as a possible solution to this particular digital divide, the trick is to not be intimidated ,“[Code] is something that nobody should be afraid of. “

marquis• 14 years ago

Why do you see this as a bad thing? It's been discussed on HN hundreds of times that it's hard for women to know where to start, how to jump in and find out if they even enjoy coding. I'm a complete outlier in my field as a woman in technology, as an actual developer I rarely engage with other women on my level. I was recently at a dev conference and there was another woman there - it was really nice to feel that the space was opening up (and to find out she'd been in the industry longer than me made me even happier).

yardie• 14 years ago

For an introductory class she might be correct. While many other domains have their trolls gaming and programming just seem to bring out the most. I've been at the group table when some idiot CS major has decreed that only his ideas are worthy because he's been programming since 9 and you only started a month ago. This was an intro course, he wasn't that great to be around and 1/5 of the class was just like him.

A lot of universities have been trying to fix it, but it's the CS major itself that caused most of the problems. You weren't allowed to collaborate so people got frustrated early on (ie. you think you suck, you think everyone else is better than you, you quit the program based on false data). Some of the instructors were hostile toward women (they eventually retired or were replaced). And they couldn't get an intro course going that didn't appear to dumb down the material. Plus a woman only intro CS course violates Title 9.

davidu• 14 years ago

Why not? It works for science and math classes.

donky_cong• 14 years ago

This is news ?

pandeiro• 14 years ago

Seriously.

willhines• 14 years ago

As someone currently sitting in class being lectured on a strictly theoretical view of computer science, I cannot agree enough that actually working on something tangible and interesting is the best application and way to learn.

In my free time I'm currently developing an app, and whilst the theory is extremely useful for understanding, it only comes into its own when I'm working my way through the everyday problems that projects provide. Kudos to Kaitlyn, more people should dive in at the deep end!

rdg• 14 years ago

Am I the only one who doesn't believe this? It's way too strange...

zedshaw• 14 years ago

No, it is true. People learn to code from absolutely nothing all the time with my books. Depending on their motivation they then go on to make all kinds of stuff.

quadhome• 14 years ago

Do you have a collection of links to things people have made? I'd love to see them!

asreal• 14 years ago

There seems to be this recurring theme in tech media that "gee, wiz! anybody can be 'coder'!". I call bullshit - this article smells like a PR gimmick. While I have no doubt that she picked up the rudiments of programming within this time, I think it's fairly clear that she had "spilled the beans" in order to take this project to the extent that it is available today.

achompas2• 14 years ago

Man, this is so awesome. So soooooo awesome.

I ranted about abstractions below, but this woman shipped code. Dedicated to her boyfriend, no less! I'd be incredibly flattered if I were him, and kudos to her for launching something.

Instagram Founder’s Girlfriend Learns How To Code For V-Day, Builds Lovestagram

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