HN user
Great to see that there is (almost) always a great open source alternative to expensive proprietary IP products! Splunk can become very expensive very quickly if you have a lot of data, so this is great news. Wish they would have shorter release cycles though...
Great overview, but do you think it's possible to compare package managers between different programming languages? I mean they all work quite differently when it comes to dependencies, build process etc. I'm a Python coder & pretty happy with PIP and PYPI...
Another business guy turned programmer here. It's good to see that there are more of us out there and that I'm not the only crazy one. Some advice I would give to anybody who wants to learn to code from scratch:
- 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.
It's amazing to see how little has changed over the last five years - the blog post is from 2008. I mean you would obviously pick Python or Ruby now, and use websites like Codecademy or Udacity. But the core message still applies: it's hard to learn to program and you will have to spend a lot of time on it. There are still no free rides. Makes be feel better about the long hours I've spent to learn to code.
While I really applaud his tenacity, I don't think that this is what Paul had in mind when he said "relentlessly resourceful". I borders on stalking. It's one thing to have a product and try to get YC's attention, it's a completely different thing to just promote the fact that you are applying. The time and money would have been better spent on his prototype. I don't like it.
Thanks! I think it's a great resource and have actually included some of it in the course.
no offense taken ;) it's a free course that I created to help others with their applications and to showcase the prototype of crowdcademy. There will be paid courses eventually, but on much more complicated and lengthy topics such as learning Photoshop or a specific programming language.
If anybody knows of great resources that I've overlooked, please leave a coment and I will add them asap. Thanks a lot!
This. I can't even imagine how founders with families and kids deal with the stress that goes hand in hand with being broke. Being scrapy and hungry is a good thing. But not knowing how to pay rent or having to freelance a couple of days a week is a huge distraction.
That sounds pretty sweet. Does the network of advisors only cover the traditional education space, or also e-learning/self-teaching? Because for the latter it's a whole different ball game when it comes to marketing and customer acquisition.
His LinkedIn states that he graduated last year and worked for a startup for a grand total of 3 months... nothing against the author, but he seems to be too young and inexperienced to fully understand the big picture of something as complex as boom & bust cycles in the startup ecosystem. I certainly don't understand them. Too bad that his startup-experience seems to have been a bad one. For some(most?) people a big company is just a better fit. Life is too short to be wasting it on something you're not passionate about.
The latter. I know a lot of great coders, and most of them set the bar for "decent" very high. By decent I mean that you could actually write code to solve most problems you come across. Is the code going to be less than optimal? Of course. Most of the time it's even going to be pretty ugly code (you should see my backend code for a case in point). I'm not being presumptuous, I just have lower standards than most of you guys :)
That's so true! I used to love to learn... I mean I had to learn Spanish in 6 months when I moved to Costa Rica for an internship. Plus I've read at least two books per month for the last 3 years (business and psychology stuff). But learning to code was a lot more exhausting because it's based on knowledge and there's no room for bullshitting (unlike business ;)
Not necessarily if you want to be a brogrammer... watch the video, it from the first twilio conference. it's hilarious! :)
Sorry guys if you get a server error page, seems like my heroku dev postgres can't handle ANY traffic. I haven't implemented connection pooling yet and I run out of db connections way to quickly ... will try to fix it or set up my own db!
tl;dr but I guess his point is that if you're a kickass German scientist, you don't have to use CSS and make your posts more readable. <3 the attitude!
Having been a difficult employee myself (don't know about the talented part), I've wondered if the way my old boss dealt with this problem was the right one. After some initial conflicts he decided to ignore my antics as long as my output was high. But I guess if he'd had the opportunity to replace me he would have fired my ass in a heartbeat.
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.
From my experience (German, studied and worked in the states, traveler) the list is pretty spot on. BUT I think it applies mostly to Joe Sixpack. Most of my friends and people I met are not really like that. Maybe just enough so that you can tell them apart from Canadians ;) Don't beat yourself up about it, it is what it is and you are who you are. And I personally like the American mentality, mostly because I can't take most of it seriously. And Joe Sixpack isn't any better in other countries. So keep on shouting U - S - A, U - S - A, I'll even join in :)
I'm following that thread hoping that some day they will listen to their customers. I'm pretty close to switching to another CDN because of that. Do you happen to have any recommendations?
I have the same problem and haven't found a solution that works and is easy to set up and manage. This looks promising, too bad I'm using Django and not RoR.
The combination heroku + S3 is awesome, but throw in fonts and firefox and it turns into an ugly mess.
guys, please fix your registration process. Way too much stuff that you ask for in one view and errors don't get properly displayed. I gave up after 3 tries...
But I like the idea, it's hard to find other django hackers in Berlin. Everybody's doing Rails or still PHP.
This should be a mandatory read for every business guy who wants to run his or her own start-up. I wish I could have read this post three years ago. I still look back in horror on how I interacted with coders or with my technical co-founder before I started to learn to code myself.
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!
That sounds horrible - what kind person sends victory emails to former employees/friends they fired? Maybe that's one of the downsides of having very young & immature entrepreneurs running companies.
Good idea, but I see one big problem: market of lemons, i.e. the really good teams will concentrate on getting into YC or Techstars and only the mediocre teams and ideas will participate in NCombinator. But since there are plenty of good teams & ideas that get rejected by YC, there should be plenty of fish left. I like the direction in which NCombinator is heading, a big part of the value that YC adds is in the support network and mentors. We need something like this in Berlin too!
You could use the same gamification app that Pinax uses: Django Brabeion https://github.com/eldarion/brabeion
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....
Really? I thought they only had one office in Germany, and that's in Hamburg. Did they open a second one in Berlin without throwing an opening party?