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Love this article... my first computer was an Apple II back in the 80s which I taught myself to program in a very rudimentary fashion. How? Hong Kong knock of
by richardjordan 14y ago
Love this article... my first computer was an Apple II back in the 80s which I taught myself to program in a very rudimentary fashion. How? Hong Kong knock off backstreet copies of Applesoft and BASIC manuals. That and those old home-computer magazines with program listings in that you could type in and make a lunar lander game etc.
Programming wasn't available at school so my next chance to get my feet wet was on my final year Physics degree project. With a few math projects in FORTRAN along the way :-/
So given that my skillset was pretty much BASIC only at this point I took one look at C in 1995 as I graduated and balked. Pointers? WTF? I am never doing that ever. Programming ain't for me. Just not that smart I guess.
In reality I did a lot of early web programming, I just never thought of HTML and very early javascript as being programming. I'd build the occasional page or two myself with HTML JS CSS in the intervening years.
But it wasn't till 2010 and I was having technical co-founder issues for the second time in back-to-back startups (not his fault, visa issues with a family member), when I realized I needed to be my own technical co-founder.
Ruby! WTF? Nothing like that old C that scared me away. I can do this! Thanks to Ruby-on-Rails, Stack Overflow, a ton of great web blogs and Hacker News here I am a few years later able to get paid for programming for other people while I build my own MVP and first iteration of product for my own startup. Am I as good as the folks I'll end up bringing on board if it takes off - hell no, a great programmer is light years ahead of me.
However, if a muppet like me can do it, you can to.
Great article!
- joonix 14y agoIf there was one course/tutorial you could recommend for learning ruby on rails, what would it be? How about the new wave of schools and real life courses, are they worth anything? can anyone chime in?
- richardjordan 14y agoSo it might not be the quick answer you want, but I get asked this a lot by friends so I have a package of recommendations put together in an email with links and setup instructions etc., I usually copy and paste - if you're asking for yourself I'd be happy to forward it to you if you put an email in your profile or something temporarily so I can find you. In short though I used Hartl's Railstutorial, an old Sitepoint introduction to Ruby and Rails, everything Railscasts... then I started coming up with projects and building (or often half-building) them. Stackoverflow helped me with answers. Google was my friend because so often people had blogged answers I was looking for. Learning to read other people's code was the biggest step forward. But after the basic tutorials, it was mostly building things. Finding problems. Reading answers. Experimenting.
- yourcontact 14y agoCould you make your list publicly available on a blog or something similar so everybody can see it, please? (So those who'd like to see your package of recommendations won't spam this thread for requests.) If that's okay with you. Thanks!
- notahacker 14y agoMichael Hartl's book, which you can read for free online, is an excellent walkthrough of how to build an app. http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book