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I envy that the author learnt programming and web development now as opposed to even a few years ago. Without devolving into "in my day I walked ten miles in th

by kreek 15y ago

I envy that the author learnt programming and web development now as opposed to even a few years ago. Without devolving into "in my day I walked ten miles in the snow just to compile"; it's just so much more pleasant now. Stack Overflow, Heroku (and similar), GitHub, PDF Books. Obviously it takes time and effort to get better everyday but the learning curve is a bit flatter now.

tryitnow 15y ago
I second this. Although my story is different. I would put my toe in the water and try to learn to program, but it all just seemed so absurd to me, so I pursued other areas of study. Then earlier this year I started doing Hartl's Ruby on Rails tutorial and things just started clicking. Now I am teaching myself Ruby on Rails and I am looking for explore other more difficult languages (just for fun, I don't want a career as a developer). For whatever reason, Ruby just got me more interested in programming. Now I am dipping my toes into SICP, which I would have never have guessed I would be interested in. I think once you get your hands dirty with something relatively easy like Ruby on Rails, you start seeing the need for all the other computer science concepts and languages and that piques your curiosity. However, I can say that teaching myself a little coding has really helped out in my day job, I notice I think differently about problems. My thought process is much more structured.
marquis 15y ago
There's also a lot more to learn and possibly more confusing. In 'my day' it was just CGI with MySQL, Apache and perl, then comes Java, then along came PHP then Python, Ruby, now there is JQuery and Redis and Hadoop and.. and on HN now you see a hundred new frameworks each saying 'we're great, use us!'. While I welcome that there are easier ways to actually learn all these things and the amazing communities, I'm not sure it's really easier to actually just get started. Oh, and you've got Reddit and Facebook and HN sucking up your time and a fast internet connection to procrastinate on Netflix and Youtube.. I could go on.
- kreek 15y ago
  Very true that there are so many choices now. Easy to suffer from analysis paralysis before you even get started. I answered a questionnaire for Manning in exchange for a free book recently. I wanted to learn something new so that cut out a few topics. However, I still sat staring at their catalog for an eternity before deciding on one that was interesting/potentially useful (Lift in Action).
bdr 15y ago
It's going to keep happening...
deleted 15y ago
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by kreek 15y ago

tryitnow 15y ago

I second this. Although my story is different. I would put my toe in the water and try to learn to program, but it all just seemed so absurd to me, so I pursued other areas of study. Then earlier this year I started doing Hartl's Ruby on Rails tutorial and things just started clicking. Now I am teaching myself Ruby on Rails and I am looking for explore other more difficult languages (just for fun, I don't want a career as a developer). For whatever reason, Ruby just got me more interested in programming. Now I am dipping my toes into SICP, which I would have never have guessed I would be interested in. I think once you get your hands dirty with something relatively easy like Ruby on Rails, you start seeing the need for all the other computer science concepts and languages and that piques your curiosity. However, I can say that teaching myself a little coding has really helped out in my day job, I notice I think differently about problems. My thought process is much more structured.

marquis 15y ago

There's also a lot more to learn and possibly more confusing. In 'my day' it was just CGI with MySQL, Apache and perl, then comes Java, then along came PHP then Python, Ruby, now there is JQuery and Redis and Hadoop and.. and on HN now you see a hundred new frameworks each saying 'we're great, use us!'. While I welcome that there are easier ways to actually learn all these things and the amazing communities, I'm not sure it's really easier to actually just get started. Oh, and you've got Reddit and Facebook and HN sucking up your time and a fast internet connection to procrastinate on Netflix and Youtube.. I could go on.

kreek 15y ago
Very true that there are so many choices now. Easy to suffer from analysis paralysis before you even get started. I answered a questionnaire for Manning in exchange for a free book recently. I wanted to learn something new so that cut out a few topics. However, I still sat staring at their catalog for an eternity before deciding on one that was interesting/potentially useful (Lift in Action).

bdr 15y ago

It's going to keep happening...

deleted 15y ago

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