5 ms·

As a 17 year old, this makes me feel under accomplished. While I do have skills in regards to computery things, I'm hitting a block when it comes to developing

As a 17 year old, this makes me feel under accomplished. While I do have skills in regards to computery things, I'm hitting a block when it comes to developing backends to sites. I know HTML and CSS decently but programming languages that I'd need to learn just seem to bounce off. On the plus side, I'm good at other things too, like photography / producing electronic music (no Madeon though. He makes me feel under accomplished as well). And I know that I shouldn't be too hard on myself to be good at things - I'm only 17. But part of me wants to be known as someone who's really good at something at a younger than normal age. This person's story is really cool - it's too bad immigration has him caught up. Startup visas would be nifty. Could he go to college in the US? Even though he clearly doesn't need a college education (and questionably a bit of those who go to college, but that's another debate), it could serve as a sort of foot in the door for getting settled in America. I'm probably wrong about this but also curious as to what would make this not a viable option.

sudonim 14y ago
I'm 30. If I can give you advice to live by: don't measure yourself by others' accomplishments. If you focus on what other people have done, you'll end up chasing your tail trying to compete with an idealized notion of 20 different people. Blaze your own trail. Find the things you do well and double down on them. You'll get to where you want to be. It may not be by 18, so don't be impatient. Just keep doing the things that make you a better person and ideally happy and you'll care less about doing X by age Y.
- DontBeTaken 14y ago
  Hm, that does make sense. I see what you're saying. Thanks for the advice. I think I'll try to blaze my own trail. Though it seems kind of hard. There's lots of external pressure. Mainly having to do with college. Then again, focusing on what other people have done is sort of a way of putting pressure on myself so steering clear of that will help. Being a teenager is weird.
  - amcintyre 14y ago
    Let me suggest that a lot of the pressures you feel in high school probably have little to do with "real life." It's amusing to think back to all the things I (and authority figures around me) worried about when I was in high school, because it's all long since irrelevant to me now. I can't really comment on college pressures because I didn't go to college until I was over 30, so I don't know what it's like to be a real college student. My own experience suggests this: If you've learned to work hard when necessary to meet your own internal standards, and make sure you keep pushing those standards up, you'll probably wake up one day to find you're way more competent than most people in at least one area. That can be really fun (and sometimes lucrative), even if at the same time you're self-aware enough to know you're not a world-class expert that somebody would find interesting enough for an article.
  - pitt1980 14y ago
    seems relevent - "What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn't worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know? [4] This is easy advice to give. It's hard to follow, especially when you're young. [5] Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like. That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you're going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies. Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself. Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious. Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what's admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one." http://paulgraham.com/love.html http://paulgraham.com/love.html probably also worth a read http://paulgraham.com/hs.html http://paulgraham.com/hs.html
- javajosh 14y ago
  I'm 37. And if I can give some life advice, it would be to always start from the end. If you're building sites, start with the host. Make sure you understand how to deploy your thing. Then work backwards, and setup your build-test-debug loop with deployment as the final goal. Once you get something working, you can incrementally improve your process - but you need to start with some way to get your stuff online. Note that you must be very careful to define the scope of your project. "Putting something on the public internet" can be achieved with a blogger blog - no programming necessary. Or a hacker news comment, for that matter. But if you want to do arbitrary things with web browsers on the web then I highly recommend getting a VPS - I like linode, but there's plenty of other options. Another interesting option would be something like Google App Engine, which takes a lot of the pain out of system administration, while still allowing you to serve arbitrary applications (and it's cheaper than linode, too).
  - 108 14y ago
    You are so right about learning to deploy your app alone. Learning to deploy using the Free Amazon on AWS server is a must.
  - bertomartin 14y ago
    You're so right about learning how to deploy your app. I'm using linode myself. I've been investing some time learning to use Chef to provision my servers. And Capistrano for deployment. This is a bottleneck of uncertainty for me, so I just finally decided to forget everything else and focus and figuring this thing out. By the way, if anyone has a good link to a tutorial on provisioning linodes with Chef Server, I'd love to have a link. In the meantime, I'm grinding...
- readme 14y ago
  It's better to learn something in your 20s or 30s then say "I should have done that when I was 12" and then never learn anything and become an ignorant 40 year old! It pains me when people compare themselves to the upper 1% of upwardly mobile people and then lose their self-worth over the whole deal.
dobetaken 14y ago
(Throaway so I can be more candid) I'm approaching 21 in a few weeks and I've been making 6 figures since 19, I could have articles written about me but I choose to remain relatively quiet about my "success", millions of people use the things that I produce. My advice to you would be just do it, just do whatever it is you want. It's probably unique to each individual but I personally find that when someone tweets about my products or the things that I have produced it's the greatest feeling in the world, but when someone says "whoa you're 20 and you've done that?!" it's so hollow. Imagine your achievements being talked about because of your age? The internet is not discriminatory towards age, you can be 15 or 90 and achieve great things, why have them trivialized by an uncontrollable personal attribute. As an aside I am also a poor programmer, although I can do everything I need to I am not a "rockstar" like a large portion of HNers would lead you to believe you need to be, but you don't, what matters is that you actually do stuff. Sit down, write code and maybe you'll achieve something great, but if you spend your time lamenting about how it's never going to happen then it never will.
- petitmiam 14y ago
  Did you aim for the sky right from the beginning? I guess you either had great people around you who told you you could do anything, or you just ignored the ones who said you couldn't.
- DontBeTaken 14y ago
  Hm, interesting points. In particular, the part about age being hollow. Hm. And also, the poor programmer part. HN does sometimes seem to convey a message that if you aren't a good programmer, your code won't succeed in what you make, if that makes sense. Lamenting isn't good, true. It's just so hard to be motivated sometimes. Also, I like your name. I have an account on HN but my usual passwords aren't working on it. So this name it was.
- larrys 14y ago
  "I could have articles written about me but I choose to remain relatively quiet about my "success", millions of people use the things that I produce." I'm a bit older so let me give you some advice based on my experience and observation. Use your age and accomplishments to your advantage. If you can get something written about yourself and publicity do it. Don't be bashful. No reason not to toot your own horn. Doesn't matter what jealous people might think. In the end the publicity will help you more than any negative effects or what you think someone thinks (because maybe that is what you think when you read about someone).
pazimzadeh 14y ago
"[Julius] Caesar served in 63 BC as a quaestor in Spain, where in Cadiz he is said to have broken down and wept in front of a statue of Alexander the Great, realizing that where Alexander had conquered most of the known world at thirty, Caesar at that age was merely seen as a dandy who had squandered his wife's fortunes as well as his own." http://www.roman-empire.net/republic/caesar-index.html http://www.roman-empire.net/republic/caesar-index.html
- bertomartin 14y ago
  Just wow. Some motivation there!
joshu 14y ago
I did my first startup at 29ish. Practice every day and you will get there. Don't worry about it otherwise.
dbh937 14y ago
I'm thirteen, and this person's story has made me feel the need to start a company by the time I turn fourteen, just to match this kid. Also, udacity.com has a great course on backends of webapps (CS263) that I just finished, and it helps a lot!
lachyg 14y ago
If you'd like to contact me at all, feel free. lachygroom @ gmail. Best of luck to you!
dools 14y ago
It's such a cliche but worth repeating: there will always be someone more X than you are (rich, skilled, fast at running 100m, skilled at coding, effective at business) whatever it is. If you're attempting to derive your sense of happiness through relative goal posts like that then you'll never stop - you won't ever get to a point at which you have an "absolute" sense of success. The good news is you can get that sense of absolute success now: just focus on what you have and practice being happy (which is both a choice and a skill). Secondly: don't think about what you can do out of the context of how that helps someone else. "I can code" "I can make music" "I can ride a horse backwards" All these are fantastic skills - what problems do they solve? You'll notice in each of the cases referenced in the original post, he is picking a very specific problem with a well defined revenue model. These are everywhere. Practice looking for them, and practice releasing anything (there are so many free services out there now you barely even need a backend for your site in order to make money - for example you could create a static site to generate affiliate revenue without a backend, then pay someone to build the backend once you have cashflow). At any rate, don't focus on what you have to offer, focus on what other people need and eventually you'll see something where you think "you know I can do that - I could solve that problem" then you do it - and it might work or it might not, but you just keep trying. Also just some context: I'm 31, I was "the kid to started the lemonade stand" etc. etc. I never had any business success, studied engineering at 21, got trapped in technology and emerged about 2 years ago and have been reconnecting with my business/sales self ever since. I currently gross about $200k per year but have a team of 2 people and a wife and child to feed so whilst we're subsisting we're not rich. We are growing, and with each year I find that my focus on solving problems and keeping my clients' and customers' needs at the front of my mind at all times, and not getting wrapped up/absorbed in the technology, not only does the business grow but that rate of growth increases as well.
tluyben2 14y ago
Go to flippa.com and check out what kind of sites are working; he probably sold his sites mentioned in the article there. In the world of the not venture capital sites, Flippa is a very good way to make your first $100k+. I know plenty of 17-20 year olds who made well over $100k there in a relatively short timespan. If you check there you'll see that backends don't mean so much :) In fact, by some kind of evil universe rule; the sites for sale which mention 'advanced backend' sell for the smallest amounts or not at all. Most sites are just some of Wordpress with a bunch of (commercial) plugins and some bad hacking.
dakimov 14y ago
You're already 17 and you haven't done at least 7 figure startup yet? Nowadays most people start their business at the age of about 10 and make 8 figures. You should step up.
T20120621 14y ago
Another throwaway here. There are plenty of people who complement your skillset perfect. I know--I'm one of them, and there are many others like me who are much better at the backend work than the frontend work. If you do have an idea, finding a partner might help it take off.

sudonim 14y ago

I'm 30. If I can give you advice to live by: don't measure yourself by others' accomplishments. If you focus on what other people have done, you'll end up chasing your tail trying to compete with an idealized notion of 20 different people. Blaze your own trail. Find the things you do well and double down on them. You'll get to where you want to be. It may not be by 18, so don't be impatient. Just keep doing the things that make you a better person and ideally happy and you'll care less about doing X by age Y.

DontBeTaken 14y ago
Hm, that does make sense. I see what you're saying. Thanks for the advice. I think I'll try to blaze my own trail. Though it seems kind of hard. There's lots of external pressure. Mainly having to do with college. Then again, focusing on what other people have done is sort of a way of putting pressure on myself so steering clear of that will help. Being a teenager is weird.
- amcintyre 14y ago
  Let me suggest that a lot of the pressures you feel in high school probably have little to do with "real life." It's amusing to think back to all the things I (and authority figures around me) worried about when I was in high school, because it's all long since irrelevant to me now. I can't really comment on college pressures because I didn't go to college until I was over 30, so I don't know what it's like to be a real college student. My own experience suggests this: If you've learned to work hard when necessary to meet your own internal standards, and make sure you keep pushing those standards up, you'll probably wake up one day to find you're way more competent than most people in at least one area. That can be really fun (and sometimes lucrative), even if at the same time you're self-aware enough to know you're not a world-class expert that somebody would find interesting enough for an article.
- pitt1980 14y ago
  seems relevent - "What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn't worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know? [4] This is easy advice to give. It's hard to follow, especially when you're young. [5] Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like. That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you're going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies. Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself. Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious. Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what's admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one." http://paulgraham.com/love.html http://paulgraham.com/love.html probably also worth a read http://paulgraham.com/hs.html http://paulgraham.com/hs.html
javajosh 14y ago
I'm 37. And if I can give some life advice, it would be to always start from the end. If you're building sites, start with the host. Make sure you understand how to deploy your thing. Then work backwards, and setup your build-test-debug loop with deployment as the final goal. Once you get something working, you can incrementally improve your process - but you need to start with some way to get your stuff online. Note that you must be very careful to define the scope of your project. "Putting something on the public internet" can be achieved with a blogger blog - no programming necessary. Or a hacker news comment, for that matter. But if you want to do arbitrary things with web browsers on the web then I highly recommend getting a VPS - I like linode, but there's plenty of other options. Another interesting option would be something like Google App Engine, which takes a lot of the pain out of system administration, while still allowing you to serve arbitrary applications (and it's cheaper than linode, too).
- 108 14y ago
  You are so right about learning to deploy your app alone. Learning to deploy using the Free Amazon on AWS server is a must.
- bertomartin 14y ago
  You're so right about learning how to deploy your app. I'm using linode myself. I've been investing some time learning to use Chef to provision my servers. And Capistrano for deployment. This is a bottleneck of uncertainty for me, so I just finally decided to forget everything else and focus and figuring this thing out. By the way, if anyone has a good link to a tutorial on provisioning linodes with Chef Server, I'd love to have a link. In the meantime, I'm grinding...
readme 14y ago
It's better to learn something in your 20s or 30s then say "I should have done that when I was 12" and then never learn anything and become an ignorant 40 year old! It pains me when people compare themselves to the upper 1% of upwardly mobile people and then lose their self-worth over the whole deal.

dobetaken 14y ago

(Throaway so I can be more candid) I'm approaching 21 in a few weeks and I've been making 6 figures since 19, I could have articles written about me but I choose to remain relatively quiet about my "success", millions of people use the things that I produce. My advice to you would be just do it, just do whatever it is you want. It's probably unique to each individual but I personally find that when someone tweets about my products or the things that I have produced it's the greatest feeling in the world, but when someone says "whoa you're 20 and you've done that?!" it's so hollow. Imagine your achievements being talked about because of your age? The internet is not discriminatory towards age, you can be 15 or 90 and achieve great things, why have them trivialized by an uncontrollable personal attribute. As an aside I am also a poor programmer, although I can do everything I need to I am not a "rockstar" like a large portion of HNers would lead you to believe you need to be, but you don't, what matters is that you actually do stuff. Sit down, write code and maybe you'll achieve something great, but if you spend your time lamenting about how it's never going to happen then it never will.

petitmiam 14y ago
Did you aim for the sky right from the beginning? I guess you either had great people around you who told you you could do anything, or you just ignored the ones who said you couldn't.
DontBeTaken 14y ago
Hm, interesting points. In particular, the part about age being hollow. Hm. And also, the poor programmer part. HN does sometimes seem to convey a message that if you aren't a good programmer, your code won't succeed in what you make, if that makes sense. Lamenting isn't good, true. It's just so hard to be motivated sometimes. Also, I like your name. I have an account on HN but my usual passwords aren't working on it. So this name it was.
larrys 14y ago
"I could have articles written about me but I choose to remain relatively quiet about my "success", millions of people use the things that I produce." I'm a bit older so let me give you some advice based on my experience and observation. Use your age and accomplishments to your advantage. If you can get something written about yourself and publicity do it. Don't be bashful. No reason not to toot your own horn. Doesn't matter what jealous people might think. In the end the publicity will help you more than any negative effects or what you think someone thinks (because maybe that is what you think when you read about someone).

pazimzadeh 14y ago

"[Julius] Caesar served in 63 BC as a quaestor in Spain, where in Cadiz he is said to have broken down and wept in front of a statue of Alexander the Great, realizing that where Alexander had conquered most of the known world at thirty, Caesar at that age was merely seen as a dandy who had squandered his wife's fortunes as well as his own." http://www.roman-empire.net/republic/caesar-index.html http://www.roman-empire.net/republic/caesar-index.html

bertomartin 14y ago
Just wow. Some motivation there!

joshu 14y ago

I did my first startup at 29ish. Practice every day and you will get there. Don't worry about it otherwise.

dbh937 14y ago

I'm thirteen, and this person's story has made me feel the need to start a company by the time I turn fourteen, just to match this kid. Also, udacity.com has a great course on backends of webapps (CS263) that I just finished, and it helps a lot!

lachyg 14y ago

If you'd like to contact me at all, feel free. lachygroom @ gmail. Best of luck to you!

dools 14y ago

It's such a cliche but worth repeating: there will always be someone more X than you are (rich, skilled, fast at running 100m, skilled at coding, effective at business) whatever it is. If you're attempting to derive your sense of happiness through relative goal posts like that then you'll never stop - you won't ever get to a point at which you have an "absolute" sense of success. The good news is you can get that sense of absolute success now: just focus on what you have and practice being happy (which is both a choice and a skill). Secondly: don't think about what you can do out of the context of how that helps someone else. "I can code" "I can make music" "I can ride a horse backwards" All these are fantastic skills - what problems do they solve? You'll notice in each of the cases referenced in the original post, he is picking a very specific problem with a well defined revenue model. These are everywhere. Practice looking for them, and practice releasing anything (there are so many free services out there now you barely even need a backend for your site in order to make money - for example you could create a static site to generate affiliate revenue without a backend, then pay someone to build the backend once you have cashflow). At any rate, don't focus on what you have to offer, focus on what other people need and eventually you'll see something where you think "you know I can do that - I could solve that problem" then you do it - and it might work or it might not, but you just keep trying. Also just some context: I'm 31, I was "the kid to started the lemonade stand" etc. etc. I never had any business success, studied engineering at 21, got trapped in technology and emerged about 2 years ago and have been reconnecting with my business/sales self ever since. I currently gross about $200k per year but have a team of 2 people and a wife and child to feed so whilst we're subsisting we're not rich. We are growing, and with each year I find that my focus on solving problems and keeping my clients' and customers' needs at the front of my mind at all times, and not getting wrapped up/absorbed in the technology, not only does the business grow but that rate of growth increases as well.

tluyben2 14y ago

Go to flippa.com and check out what kind of sites are working; he probably sold his sites mentioned in the article there. In the world of the not venture capital sites, Flippa is a very good way to make your first $100k+. I know plenty of 17-20 year olds who made well over $100k there in a relatively short timespan. If you check there you'll see that backends don't mean so much :) In fact, by some kind of evil universe rule; the sites for sale which mention 'advanced backend' sell for the smallest amounts or not at all. Most sites are just some of Wordpress with a bunch of (commercial) plugins and some bad hacking.

dakimov 14y ago

You're already 17 and you haven't done at least 7 figure startup yet? Nowadays most people start their business at the age of about 10 and make 8 figures. You should step up.

T20120621 14y ago

Another throwaway here. There are plenty of people who complement your skillset perfect. I know--I'm one of them, and there are many others like me who are much better at the backend work than the frontend work. If you do have an idea, finding a partner might help it take off.