this post is dead on. i was approached by an undergrad at the university of maryland last weekend, and i was instantly amazed by his initiative. this guy said

this post is dead on. i was approached by an undergrad at the university of maryland last weekend, and i was instantly amazed by his initiative. this guy said "i want to help you with your project!" a bit skeptic at first, i gave him git access and we decided to have a phone call the next day where i would describe the code base. that night, before the phone call, i logged into github and saw him committing code. i was blown away that he was diving into the code without having been told what to do. and better yet, he had no prior experience in php. he was a python and ruby kind of guy. my reaction was: wow, this guy is definitely on that list of 2 or 3 people who i think of when i decide to start my next company. by the way, those 2 features were added in 2 days on hndir.com, and the post i wrote about it attracted 2k visitors (and something like 100 new hackers joined the site). this guy was technical, but he didn't know php. if you're non-technical, i'd say be willing to learn and use whatever you need to help (maybe not a language). this is how the technical guys get started. they just figure it out as they go.