5 ms·

How i became a developer from coal miner?

50 points by akarambir 15y ago

daimyoyo 15y ago
The link is borked. Anyone have a cache?
- akarambir 15y ago
  now its redirected and working...
olalonde 15y ago
Account suspended, here's the cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fennovates.com%2Fengineering%2Fyes-you-can-do-it%2F http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- ez77 15y ago
  We have 35 upvotes for this story, 30kB for the content... say 100 visitors (a 3:1 visitor-upvoter ratio is more than generous). Is it normal for the resulting 3MB traffic spike to suspend a shared-hosting account? It just seems too bad to be true!
  - BasDirks 15y ago
    I don't think you're even close on the 3:1 visitor ratio. I'd like to see some numbers on this.
    - rawsyntax 15y ago
      Anecdotally, I got 130 upvotes, and something like 8000 visitors on a recent article posted here ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2597973 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2597973 ), which is more like 60:1
    - akarambir 15y ago
      I'm the owner of this website and talking about the numbers. It was about 2000 visits until my account was suspended. And after redirection to http://ennovates.wordpress.com/ http://ennovates.wordpress.com/ visits were 1900 there till writing of this comment. so 44 upvotes and around 4000 visits.
      - ez77 15y ago
        Thanks for the actual figures, and sorry for my poor estimate. So the load was 60MB instead of 3MB. Just out of curiosity, was your account rightly suspended? What quota applied?
john2x 15y ago
An inspiring post. Thanks.
- new-techie 15y ago
  ya really inspiring
piaskal 15y ago
There is an interesting followup to that story on quora. http://www.quora.com/Mircea-Goia/In-your-journey-from-coal-mining-in-Romania-to-web-consulting-in-the-US-what-were-some-instances-where-you-felt-like-giving-up-but-persevered http://www.quora.com/Mircea-Goia/In-your-journey-from-coal-m...
- jbellis 15y ago
  ... and the first part is lifted from http://www.quora.com/Im-about-to-quit-my-job-to-learn-to-program-What-should-I-do?q=im+about+to+qui http://www.quora.com/Im-about-to-quit-my-job-to-learn-to-pro...
latch 15y ago
It's a good story. From a naive distance (the only perspective I have to offer), coal mining is equal parts romantic and disgusting. We can worry all we want about sitting at a desk all day long, but our life expectancy has to be considerably better than a coal miners. I do wonder if such stories become less likely (more difficult) over time. Ever watch the movie The Aviator? Average movie, but what struck me in that movie was that you had someone who knew nothing/little about planes, learn to fly, build planes and build an empire on them. Try to do that today. The cost of entry, the licensing, the vastness of knowledge..forget about it. You could probably spend your entire life learning about a single little widget. Software is crossing that same chasm. Simple "i could have done that" ideas aren't as frequent as they used to be (although mobile computing has rejuvenated this many times over). Building software is becoming increasingly complicated. You can't beat facebook without being better than facebook, you can't build source hosting without beating github. You can't build a mobile phone without copy and paste (well...at least, you can't really sell one...).
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  It's always the new emerging discoveries that are easier to get into. This is why software is crossing the chasm- it is leaving/has left the new emergent status. Bioengineering, purported to be the next wave, seems to be continuing this tradition, though not entirely dirt cheap to enter.
- apsurd 15y ago
  If everyone believed what you are saying then nothing would get built. It's easy to think creating/inventing things was so much easier back then. Think of how famous I could be if I lived hundreds of years ago. I could easily invent the light bulb, radio, motors, computers. Hell kids today are building these things right! The concepts are so simple, everything was up for grabs back then! Only they weren't. As vain as we want to be the truth is we haven't reached any kind of technological limit. Creating stuff is as hard as it always was. Hard. The facebook thing is a bad one. It's been mentioned time and time again that Zuck could have said the same about myspace... Github also a bad one. They are a TINY. Github is awesome, I love them, but they are TINY. I think ruby and javascript are the most popular languages on github. Yet php is the most popular language on the internet. Point being, github is tiny, HN is tiny, Rails is tiny. Feel good about all the opportunities that exist out there! edited to add: For some motivation, here's what a solo modern inventor can do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Kamen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Kamen
lkozma 15y ago
The story is not as improbable as it sounds at first. To be clear, he was not a coal miner, but an electrician in a coal mine. He said he started work at 6am, but ended at 1pm. This is not too bad actually. In communist Romania, miners were actually one of the envied professions: high salaries and bonuses, feeling of camaraderie, celebrated as heroes of communism, early retirement (with a relatively large lump sum in the end). Mining was of course very dangerous and demanding work, but as an electrician in a mine, one would get most of the benefits without most of the dangers. Electrician's workshops, as any workshop during communism, really, were hotbeds of what we would call today hacking. With low quality equipment but plenty of raw material, people would use their inventiveness to produce whatever the work required and whatever they or their extended families could use at home. Also they would fix tv's, radios, make antennas, etc. The mindset formed in this way is not too far from a programmer's mindset. (Remember, that at the time, there weren't too many programmers, even in the West.) Also, I've seen some very elaborate devices for grilling steaks and sausages (still in operation today) that people made in their free time at work some 30 years ago in some machine factory. As the communist economy was tanking, people could pretty much do whatever they wanted at work. Some people developed skills they could later use after the change of regime, others turned to alcohol out of boredom, some did both. Just to add some background... Otherwise very nice story and kudos to Mircea. ADD: With the risk of idealising communism, there is another benefit many people got from it, and that is a healthy dose of cynicism and skepticism. Seeing all the mechanisms of state propaganda, many people came out of it with a well tuned bullshit-detector, easily seeing through the relatively milder propaganda of advertising, political campaigns, media, etc. The dark side is that a significant portion of that generation have become conspiracy theorists.
- gaius 15y ago
  many people came out of it with a well tuned bullshit-detector, easily seeing through the relatively milder propaganda of advertising I've often wondered about that, traveling in Eastern Europe, are people there really less susceptible to brands? McDonalds, Starbucks, Nike, Coca-Cola, etc...
  - lkozma 15y ago
junklight 15y ago
I worked for a chap in Yorkshire who had been a miner and had lost his job in the Thatchers war against the miners. He'd taken his redundancy money and taught himself to program.
dongsheng 15y ago
Off topic but in Australia coal miner is not a too bad job, miners earn much more than software dev, and of course, it's a much tougher job.
akarambir 15y ago
Awww.. I didn't even realize that i made it to the top page of HN. And off-course this happiness came with a sad news that my shared hosting account have been suspended. But I've redirected this link to my Wordpress.com blog. You can read on there...

50 points by akarambir 15y ago

daimyoyo 15y ago

The link is borked. Anyone have a cache?

akarambir 15y ago
now its redirected and working...

olalonde 15y ago

Account suspended, here's the cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fennovates.com%2Fengineering%2Fyes-you-can-do-it%2F http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ez77 15y ago
We have 35 upvotes for this story, 30kB for the content... say 100 visitors (a 3:1 visitor-upvoter ratio is more than generous). Is it normal for the resulting 3MB traffic spike to suspend a shared-hosting account? It just seems too bad to be true!
- BasDirks 15y ago
  I don't think you're even close on the 3:1 visitor ratio. I'd like to see some numbers on this.
  - rawsyntax 15y ago
    Anecdotally, I got 130 upvotes, and something like 8000 visitors on a recent article posted here ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2597973 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2597973 ), which is more like 60:1
  - akarambir 15y ago
    I'm the owner of this website and talking about the numbers. It was about 2000 visits until my account was suspended. And after redirection to http://ennovates.wordpress.com/ http://ennovates.wordpress.com/ visits were 1900 there till writing of this comment. so 44 upvotes and around 4000 visits.
    - ez77 15y ago
      Thanks for the actual figures, and sorry for my poor estimate. So the load was 60MB instead of 3MB. Just out of curiosity, was your account rightly suspended? What quota applied?

john2x 15y ago

An inspiring post. Thanks.

new-techie 15y ago
ya really inspiring

piaskal 15y ago

There is an interesting followup to that story on quora. http://www.quora.com/Mircea-Goia/In-your-journey-from-coal-mining-in-Romania-to-web-consulting-in-the-US-what-were-some-instances-where-you-felt-like-giving-up-but-persevered http://www.quora.com/Mircea-Goia/In-your-journey-from-coal-m...

jbellis 15y ago
... and the first part is lifted from http://www.quora.com/Im-about-to-quit-my-job-to-learn-to-program-What-should-I-do?q=im+about+to+qui http://www.quora.com/Im-about-to-quit-my-job-to-learn-to-pro...

latch 15y ago

It's a good story. From a naive distance (the only perspective I have to offer), coal mining is equal parts romantic and disgusting. We can worry all we want about sitting at a desk all day long, but our life expectancy has to be considerably better than a coal miners. I do wonder if such stories become less likely (more difficult) over time. Ever watch the movie The Aviator? Average movie, but what struck me in that movie was that you had someone who knew nothing/little about planes, learn to fly, build planes and build an empire on them. Try to do that today. The cost of entry, the licensing, the vastness of knowledge..forget about it. You could probably spend your entire life learning about a single little widget. Software is crossing that same chasm. Simple "i could have done that" ideas aren't as frequent as they used to be (although mobile computing has rejuvenated this many times over). Building software is becoming increasingly complicated. You can't beat facebook without being better than facebook, you can't build source hosting without beating github. You can't build a mobile phone without copy and paste (well...at least, you can't really sell one...).

sliverstorm 15y ago
It's always the new emerging discoveries that are easier to get into. This is why software is crossing the chasm- it is leaving/has left the new emergent status. Bioengineering, purported to be the next wave, seems to be continuing this tradition, though not entirely dirt cheap to enter.
apsurd 15y ago
If everyone believed what you are saying then nothing would get built. It's easy to think creating/inventing things was so much easier back then. Think of how famous I could be if I lived hundreds of years ago. I could easily invent the light bulb, radio, motors, computers. Hell kids today are building these things right! The concepts are so simple, everything was up for grabs back then! Only they weren't. As vain as we want to be the truth is we haven't reached any kind of technological limit. Creating stuff is as hard as it always was. Hard. The facebook thing is a bad one. It's been mentioned time and time again that Zuck could have said the same about myspace... Github also a bad one. They are a TINY. Github is awesome, I love them, but they are TINY. I think ruby and javascript are the most popular languages on github. Yet php is the most popular language on the internet. Point being, github is tiny, HN is tiny, Rails is tiny. Feel good about all the opportunities that exist out there! edited to add: For some motivation, here's what a solo modern inventor can do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Kamen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Kamen

lkozma 15y ago

The story is not as improbable as it sounds at first. To be clear, he was not a coal miner, but an electrician in a coal mine. He said he started work at 6am, but ended at 1pm. This is not too bad actually. In communist Romania, miners were actually one of the envied professions: high salaries and bonuses, feeling of camaraderie, celebrated as heroes of communism, early retirement (with a relatively large lump sum in the end). Mining was of course very dangerous and demanding work, but as an electrician in a mine, one would get most of the benefits without most of the dangers. Electrician's workshops, as any workshop during communism, really, were hotbeds of what we would call today hacking. With low quality equipment but plenty of raw material, people would use their inventiveness to produce whatever the work required and whatever they or their extended families could use at home. Also they would fix tv's, radios, make antennas, etc. The mindset formed in this way is not too far from a programmer's mindset. (Remember, that at the time, there weren't too many programmers, even in the West.) Also, I've seen some very elaborate devices for grilling steaks and sausages (still in operation today) that people made in their free time at work some 30 years ago in some machine factory. As the communist economy was tanking, people could pretty much do whatever they wanted at work. Some people developed skills they could later use after the change of regime, others turned to alcohol out of boredom, some did both. Just to add some background... Otherwise very nice story and kudos to Mircea. ADD: With the risk of idealising communism, there is another benefit many people got from it, and that is a healthy dose of cynicism and skepticism. Seeing all the mechanisms of state propaganda, many people came out of it with a well tuned bullshit-detector, easily seeing through the relatively milder propaganda of advertising, political campaigns, media, etc. The dark side is that a significant portion of that generation have become conspiracy theorists.

gaius 15y ago
many people came out of it with a well tuned bullshit-detector, easily seeing through the relatively milder propaganda of advertising I've often wondered about that, traveling in Eastern Europe, are people there really less susceptible to brands? McDonalds, Starbucks, Nike, Coca-Cola, etc...
- lkozma 15y ago

junklight 15y ago

I worked for a chap in Yorkshire who had been a miner and had lost his job in the Thatchers war against the miners. He'd taken his redundancy money and taught himself to program.

dongsheng 15y ago

Off topic but in Australia coal miner is not a too bad job, miners earn much more than software dev, and of course, it's a much tougher job.

akarambir 15y ago

Awww.. I didn't even realize that i made it to the top page of HN. And off-course this happiness came with a sad news that my shared hosting account have been suspended. But I've redirected this link to my Wordpress.com blog. You can read on there...