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m0ntizzl3

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IMO, if you have 1-2 years and you're very motivated/disciplined, you should try to get to the point where you could be a professional software engineer or web developer. I think that having strong programming skills will increase your odds of success more than anything else in the software startup world.

(1) The time it takes you to develop a solid product/prototype will decrease.

(2) The quality of the product/prototype will increase.

(3) You will be able to tackle more technically challenging ideas (I think a lot of the juicier ideas go beyond the difficulty of a trivial web app).

(4) Good software developers will be more likely to partner up with you if they know you are a good developer.

(5) Your ability to come up with good solutions to technical problems will increase. You'll start thinking, "how long will it take me to automate this?" instead of, "I need to go hire a person to do X". Your technical toolbox will almost always have a good tool for the job.

(6) What happens when you fail? Startups are always in need of good programmers.... However, I've never seen a job description asking for a mediocre programmer who is also an ideas man. It's possible that you'll need to get money from a day job and work on your startup ideas on nights and weekends. Being a good programmer is a good way to get a good paying day job.

The way to accomplish the above: program every day! Take all of the programming intensive courses that you can (the ones you listed are good), but you need to program more than just the projects. You don't need to overdo it on the quantity of languages at this point. I would focus on JS, Java, and Ruby (look into debates about learning languages and see why it's important to learn languages from different classes (scripting, oop, procedural, functional, etc...) I think C/C++ are very good to learn... but since you're already on the java track, I'd just keep going.

If you code for 2-3 hours a day, you'll improve immensely. Make sure to go back and refactor your old code. It's a good exercise.

Finally, if I have not persuaded you, I'll answer your well defined question :P. Take the programming courses that you plan to take and simultaneously hit ruby on rails (scratch your online curriculum except for #7). 2-3 hours a day (min) of JS, CSS, HTML, and RoR. Find a website (e.g. twitter, facebook, hacker news) and clone it using your RoR stack. Get them to look visually similar and have the same functionality. Don't quit at 90%... try to copy everything exactly (the main functionality at least). Once you can clone these popular websites in no time, you're ready! Just be prepared for a lot of struggling in the beginning.

Start your hacker news clone today.

Honestly, of all of the sites I frequent, Hacker News has the worst user experience. This is how I use the site:

1. Go to page 1

2. Read a couple of articles on page 1

3. Hit next page and receive error.

4. Go back to page 1

5. Go to page 2

6. Read a couple of articles from page 2

7. Go to next page and receive error.

8. Go to page 1

9. Go to next page

10. Go to next page

11. Read article from page 3

...

I would be curious to know what percentage of requests to HN return "Unknown or expired link". If I were in control of this website, I would consider this behavior to be unacceptable.