Ask HN: How to deal with being overwhelmed when starting out • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with being overwhelmed when starting out

#11

Post by canibanoglu » Mon, Mar 04, 2013, 2:30 PM UTC

jmathai wrote: post #8

Don't worry about the higher level topics like JavaScript, jQuery or Django. Determine a project you'd be passionate about building for yourself and go from there. You'll naturally start to need some of the higher level topics and you can learn them then. Don't bite them all off at the same time. For example, build an app that keeps track of your diet*. Do the frontend first, make it all static. Learn HTML, CSS, Java…

I've been thinking about doing something like this lately but I assumed that it would be better to learn Django right away instead of writing a script to generate the static files for me. Thanks a lot for the encouragement!

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with being overwhelmed when starting out

#12

Post by canibanoglu » Mon, Mar 04, 2013, 2:32 PM UTC

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #4

1. Everyone gets overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff we don't know. Look at it this way - when I started out I was seen as a bit of a JavaScript maven, and have just spent the last six months realising I was a decade out of date when I came back to it, and needed a lot of catching up 2. Mentors - I would ask on here for anyone who feels they can give a bit of time to keep you on track 3. What are your goals - st…

I would love to have a helpful dev who can dedicate a small amount of time on mentoring me but I have no idea how to ask people for "donating" their limited time to me. But I can see how immensely helpful that could be.

Building a business is not what I want to do at this stage, I simply want to solve simple problems that I encounter in my life in a simple yet beautiful way. Maybe the business part will come later.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with being overwhelmed when starting out

#13

Post by canibanoglu » Mon, Mar 04, 2013, 2:34 PM UTC

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #5

jaddison wrote: post #3

Spend a few days reading to discover what boils your passion in tech - congratulations, you've found a good starting point... now focus on it until you have a good grasp. eg. Like the idea of a framework for web dev? Then read up on Rails and Django, and be sure to examine the underlying languages. Which do you identify with more? Dig into that one more. Join their IRC channels to get into the community. (of course,…

Personal point here - really in python I would steer clear of the frameworks till wsgi is embedded in your head - read the pep 333 and webob and webtest docs - now get your own wsgi server running inside say gunicorn and just work out what's going on I am sure that sounds overwhelming but ...

It sounded overwhelming and after quick skims on some articles about the stuff you recommended, it felt very overwhelming! But that's good I guess, I just have to push through the initial barrier most likely.

Thanks a lot!

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with being overwhelmed when starting out

#14

Post by canibanoglu » Mon, Mar 04, 2013, 2:37 PM UTC

chamboo wrote: post #9

Hi there. Just wanted you to know that you shouldn't be embarrassed/ashamed about the stuff that you're putting out there. A lot of people don't want to admit their struggles or often won't post something for fear that someone will consider them stupid, not gifted/insightful, etc... These fears are illogical and usually stem from personal views/beliefs on intelligence. Especially if you were always ahead of the class…

I can't convey to you how good this post made me feel. It's extremely reassuring to me that there's someone out there who feel the same way I do about this stuff.

And the procrastination part made me smile. I keep trying to find better and more optimized ways of learning something and I keep getting stuck at certain points. Only after I've read your post have I realized that this was just another way of procrastination (and perhaps the most insidious form of it).

Thanks billions and billions of times (hat tip to Mr. Carl Sagan) for the very kind words and the motivation!

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with being overwhelmed when starting out

#15

Post by hoggle » Mon, Mar 04, 2013, 5:17 PM UTC

This is an opinion: Go get http://eloquentjavascript.net and build something useful in plain Javascript/HTML5 (no jQuery yet, it might harm your successful picking up of the language!).

The fun part is that you can get started immediately: http://jsfiddle.net

For HTML/Javascript references you can always prefix your google searches with "mdn" to access Mozilla's excellent documentation on all things web e.g. "mdn html5 canvas"

If you feel like you really need some server backend logic look no further and also stick to Javascript and checkout node.js (with express.js).

There will always be some new things on the horizon but don't get distracted by the newest go, erlang, ruby, etc. based web framework and no not even Meteor nor Derby even though they are Javascript based.

Plain Javascript (and node.js) are very much here to stay (and also fun!).

I guess my answer to your question is to really focus on a certain set of technologies in order to acquire some deeper knowledge by constantly applying it to something which actually gets used regularly.

In the end it's about helping/entertaining other people by shipping stuff.