6 ms·

the comment is combative and in poor tone, but i'm upmoding it. there's more to your education than knowing how to make a dynamic web-site. take something away

by strlen 18y ago

the comment is combative and in poor tone, but i'm upmoding it. there's more to your education than knowing how to make a dynamic web-site. take something away from undergrad: if you want practical experience work on business-wise pointless but technically interesting projects (just for yourself) or open source projects. take the time to learn mathematics (calculus, calculus-based statistics), electrical engineering and physics: web fads come and go, but solid scientific knowledge stays with you.

unalone 18y ago
This semester I've been really focusing on web development. We want to apply to YCombinator over the summer, and I want to make sure that I'm more than capable of handling the aspects of the site I'm running. My co-founder (apparently that term's inappropriate now) is very much a math-and-science person. I'm not averse to them - I took calculus in my junior year of high school - but at the same time, that's not what interests me. I'm much more an arts person: writing, music, theatre. It's a good combination, because we look at what we're developing in different ways. At the same time, I'm learning how to program, I'm in a digital arts course, and next semester I'm taking an upperclassmen programming course. I'm not planning to throw my life away on a project. But if I've got a good idea, I'm going to try to implement it. I'm young: I can risk failure.
- strlen 18y ago
  > But if I've got a good idea, I'm going to try to implement it. I'm young: I can risk failure. Sure but don't risk your undergrad. Graduate school is a much better time for this. And to quote DHH, don't treat your life like a planned waterfall project: "I want to do web development, so I will do X, then I will do Y."
  - unalone 18y ago
    Worst comes to worst, I leave college for a year or two, and come back after I've tried everything a bit older and a bit wiser. I don't think that web development is my big thing. I'm interested in the web, but I'd hate to have to work on ideas I don't love. My current project is something for writers, so it has practical uses for myself as well. And YCombinator summer happens in Boston, which happens to be the place I want to go, so I told my cofounder and we agreed we'd give it a good try.
    - crabapple 18y ago
      Worst comes to worst, I leave college for a year or two and chances are, like most dropouts, you won't return. then you won't have a viable website business or a degree. four years later you are stacking shelves at borders. one day you are asked to create a display for a book by paul graham and you just lose it and uzi the whole mall as you realize how you were guided down this path. i crack me up
    - timr 18y ago
      Crabapple is obviously trolling, but (s)he's got a point: it's a really bad idea to drop of out of college to pursue anything less than an instant success. You'll have plenty of time to chase rainbows once you've finished your degree. I realize that this isn't popular advice amongst the "school is for luzers" crowd that camps out on this site, but every good developer I know had the maturity and perseverance to finish college. It isn't that hard. Important corollary: you'll never have more free time to pursue personal projects than you do in college. You don't need to quit school to find the time to make a popular website (just ask Rob Malda).
      - strlen 18y ago
        right. it's not even about a degree or the knowledge. more than anything, as this acquisition shows, start-ups aren't about technology or knowledge: they're about executing on an idea and tons of PR and marketing. but one way to increase your chances of winning (that is, drive a start-up to profitability or a home-run exit) is to get a body of knowledge that makes you stand out from others. i certainly agree that college is the time to pursue personal projects: but personals means exactly this, personal. work on projects that will teach you the most vs. the projects that seem to be the best from business perspective. you have rest of your life to spend worrying about making a profit. for 2 years out of my undergrad career i did contract systems administration / internal web app development. however, i've learned a lot more about systems administration. in retrospect, it'd have been better spent otherwise. trying to have personal projects while working full-time and doing a part-time masters is a great luxury.
        18y ago
nostrademons 18y ago
I did something similar to what unalone is trying to do - worked on a fast-growing volunteer website in undergrad - and have no regrets. The time I spent working on FictionAlley was much more educational than anything else I did in college, and if I had to pick one, I'd say ditch college and build your project. It's not just "knowing how to make a dynamic website", too; in fact, after I finished, I vowed never to use PHP again. The most valuable skills I got from FictionAlley were all soft skills. How to balance a dozen different feature requests and pick out a design that isn't what anyone suggested but satisfies them all. How to diffuse a massive PR disaster. How to deal with a completely unreasonable customer. How to make your life a living hell by promising features to users before they've been developed. How to (roughly) estimate the time a project will take (if you're just starting out, expect it to take roughly 10x as long as you expect). How to build things incrementally so you get to the finish line eventually. I picked up a couple useful technical skills too; I learned all my UNIX, SQL and vi skills from that project, along with softer technical skills like how profiling, logging, optimizing, diagnosing performance problems, etc. Most of this, you simply can't get in college. The projects are not of sufficient scope. You'll never have an unreasonable customer for a homework assignment, no matter how much you hate your professor. ;-) You probably won't have to maintain code that you wrote 3 years ago and can't stand now. Heck, most people don't get to deal with that at work until they're in their late twenties, or even well into their thirties. I have older alum friends that graduated before I matriculated, and they're just now getting into positions where they have to balance competing tradeoffs between different groups. I actually risked my degree a whole lot more than unalone is doing - I was a physics major, and it's a lot harder to do dynamic web programming + upper-level physics than it is to do dynamic web programming + CS. It ended up working out for me (after a really nerve-wracking last semester) and I got the degree, the fundamental math/physics/CS knowledge, and the experience of working on a fast-growing website. But if I had to drop one, I'd say drop the degree, get the fundamental knowledge from textbooks, and do the project.
- unalone 18y ago
  Wow! I didn't know anybody from FictionAlley was on Hacker News. That's incredibly cool. Your interface was one of my favorite FF ones. I liked how you sorted by author name rather than genre: it put the emphasis on the writers, which was really neat.

by strlen 18y ago

unalone 18y ago

This semester I've been really focusing on web development. We want to apply to YCombinator over the summer, and I want to make sure that I'm more than capable of handling the aspects of the site I'm running. My co-founder (apparently that term's inappropriate now) is very much a math-and-science person. I'm not averse to them - I took calculus in my junior year of high school - but at the same time, that's not what interests me. I'm much more an arts person: writing, music, theatre. It's a good combination, because we look at what we're developing in different ways. At the same time, I'm learning how to program, I'm in a digital arts course, and next semester I'm taking an upperclassmen programming course. I'm not planning to throw my life away on a project. But if I've got a good idea, I'm going to try to implement it. I'm young: I can risk failure.

strlen 18y ago
> But if I've got a good idea, I'm going to try to implement it. I'm young: I can risk failure. Sure but don't risk your undergrad. Graduate school is a much better time for this. And to quote DHH, don't treat your life like a planned waterfall project: "I want to do web development, so I will do X, then I will do Y."
- unalone 18y ago
  Worst comes to worst, I leave college for a year or two, and come back after I've tried everything a bit older and a bit wiser. I don't think that web development is my big thing. I'm interested in the web, but I'd hate to have to work on ideas I don't love. My current project is something for writers, so it has practical uses for myself as well. And YCombinator summer happens in Boston, which happens to be the place I want to go, so I told my cofounder and we agreed we'd give it a good try.
  - crabapple 18y ago
    Worst comes to worst, I leave college for a year or two and chances are, like most dropouts, you won't return. then you won't have a viable website business or a degree. four years later you are stacking shelves at borders. one day you are asked to create a display for a book by paul graham and you just lose it and uzi the whole mall as you realize how you were guided down this path. i crack me up
  - timr 18y ago
    Crabapple is obviously trolling, but (s)he's got a point: it's a really bad idea to drop of out of college to pursue anything less than an instant success. You'll have plenty of time to chase rainbows once you've finished your degree. I realize that this isn't popular advice amongst the "school is for luzers" crowd that camps out on this site, but every good developer I know had the maturity and perseverance to finish college. It isn't that hard. Important corollary: you'll never have more free time to pursue personal projects than you do in college. You don't need to quit school to find the time to make a popular website (just ask Rob Malda).
    - strlen 18y ago
      right. it's not even about a degree or the knowledge. more than anything, as this acquisition shows, start-ups aren't about technology or knowledge: they're about executing on an idea and tons of PR and marketing. but one way to increase your chances of winning (that is, drive a start-up to profitability or a home-run exit) is to get a body of knowledge that makes you stand out from others. i certainly agree that college is the time to pursue personal projects: but personals means exactly this, personal. work on projects that will teach you the most vs. the projects that seem to be the best from business perspective. you have rest of your life to spend worrying about making a profit. for 2 years out of my undergrad career i did contract systems administration / internal web app development. however, i've learned a lot more about systems administration. in retrospect, it'd have been better spent otherwise. trying to have personal projects while working full-time and doing a part-time masters is a great luxury.
      - 18y ago

nostrademons 18y ago

I did something similar to what unalone is trying to do - worked on a fast-growing volunteer website in undergrad - and have no regrets. The time I spent working on FictionAlley was much more educational than anything else I did in college, and if I had to pick one, I'd say ditch college and build your project. It's not just "knowing how to make a dynamic website", too; in fact, after I finished, I vowed never to use PHP again. The most valuable skills I got from FictionAlley were all soft skills. How to balance a dozen different feature requests and pick out a design that isn't what anyone suggested but satisfies them all. How to diffuse a massive PR disaster. How to deal with a completely unreasonable customer. How to make your life a living hell by promising features to users before they've been developed. How to (roughly) estimate the time a project will take (if you're just starting out, expect it to take roughly 10x as long as you expect). How to build things incrementally so you get to the finish line eventually. I picked up a couple useful technical skills too; I learned all my UNIX, SQL and vi skills from that project, along with softer technical skills like how profiling, logging, optimizing, diagnosing performance problems, etc. Most of this, you simply can't get in college. The projects are not of sufficient scope. You'll never have an unreasonable customer for a homework assignment, no matter how much you hate your professor. ;-) You probably won't have to maintain code that you wrote 3 years ago and can't stand now. Heck, most people don't get to deal with that at work until they're in their late twenties, or even well into their thirties. I have older alum friends that graduated before I matriculated, and they're just now getting into positions where they have to balance competing tradeoffs between different groups. I actually risked my degree a whole lot more than unalone is doing - I was a physics major, and it's a lot harder to do dynamic web programming + upper-level physics than it is to do dynamic web programming + CS. It ended up working out for me (after a really nerve-wracking last semester) and I got the degree, the fundamental math/physics/CS knowledge, and the experience of working on a fast-growing website. But if I had to drop one, I'd say drop the degree, get the fundamental knowledge from textbooks, and do the project.

unalone 18y ago
Wow! I didn't know anybody from FictionAlley was on Hacker News. That's incredibly cool. Your interface was one of my favorite FF ones. I liked how you sorted by author name rather than genre: it put the emphasis on the writers, which was really neat.