tweiss

Great to see that there is (almost) always a great open source alternative to expensive proprietary IP products! Splunk can become very expensive very quickly if you have a lot of data, so this is great news. Wish they would have shorter release cycles though...

Great overview, but do you think it's possible to compare package managers between different programming languages? I mean they all work quite differently when it comes to dependencies, build process etc. I'm a Python coder & pretty happy with PIP and PYPI...

Another business guy turned programmer here. It's good to see that there are more of us out there and that I'm not the only crazy one. Some advice I would give to anybody who wants to learn to code from scratch:

- Focus. Don't do it on the side, it would take too long. Treat learning to code as if it was your regular job(I tried to do 40-60hrs per week, I did about 2000hrs of coding in my first year)

- Don't hurry. Don't obsess about efficiency and how you use your time. You will waste tons of time on stupid bugs and knowledge you don't really need, that's just part of the learning process. Focus on putting in those hours week after week and you will see results.

- Work on a project. The only way to truely understand how things work is to actually use them. Don't hide yourself behind books, try to apply everything you learn asap.

- Give yourself permission to suck. This is really hard if you're older (I was 30 when I started to code). If you already have a career, you're not accustomed to be utterly clueless anymore. I had already forgotten how slow and painful it is to learn something from scratch. So give yourself a break and judge yourself the same way you would judge a stranger. Don't expect to become stellar in a matter of months just because you're smart. Hint: so is everybody else who is coding for a living.

It's amazing to see how little has changed over the last five years - the blog post is from 2008. I mean you would obviously pick Python or Ruby now, and use websites like Codecademy or Udacity. But the core message still applies: it's hard to learn to program and you will have to spend a lot of time on it. There are still no free rides. Makes be feel better about the long hours I've spent to learn to code.

While I really applaud his tenacity, I don't think that this is what Paul had in mind when he said "relentlessly resourceful". I borders on stalking. It's one thing to have a product and try to get YC's attention, it's a completely different thing to just promote the fact that you are applying. The time and money would have been better spent on his prototype. I don't like it.

Thanks! I think it's a great resource and have actually included some of it in the course.

no offense taken ;) it's a free course that I created to help others with their applications and to showcase the prototype of crowdcademy. There will be paid courses eventually, but on much more complicated and lengthy topics such as learning Photoshop or a specific programming language.

If anybody knows of great resources that I've overlooked, please leave a coment and I will add them asap. Thanks a lot!

This. I can't even imagine how founders with families and kids deal with the stress that goes hand in hand with being broke. Being scrapy and hungry is a good thing. But not knowing how to pay rent or having to freelance a couple of days a week is a huge distraction.

That sounds pretty sweet. Does the network of advisors only cover the traditional education space, or also e-learning/self-teaching? Because for the latter it's a whole different ball game when it comes to marketing and customer acquisition.

His LinkedIn states that he graduated last year and worked for a startup for a grand total of 3 months... nothing against the author, but he seems to be too young and inexperienced to fully understand the big picture of something as complex as boom & bust cycles in the startup ecosystem. I certainly don't understand them. Too bad that his startup-experience seems to have been a bad one. For some(most?) people a big company is just a better fit. Life is too short to be wasting it on something you're not passionate about.

The latter. I know a lot of great coders, and most of them set the bar for "decent" very high. By decent I mean that you could actually write code to solve most problems you come across. Is the code going to be less than optimal? Of course. Most of the time it's even going to be pretty ugly code (you should see my backend code for a case in point). I'm not being presumptuous, I just have lower standards than most of you guys :)