Ask HN: How did you get from learning to code to making your first dollar?

I learnt to code sometime in middle school(grade 6 summer). The dot com boom was taking place during then and my parents figured that the Web would be the next big thing and pushed me into learning web development. I never really explored beyond making a couple of funny sites for my personal kicks until grade 12 when I had to figure out how to pay for university. I did a couple of small gigs here and there that helped me pay part of my way through.

I was enrolled in a co-op program, so you study for 4 months and then work in a real job for 4 months and that repeats until you graduate. This was probably the most helpful thing that helped me learn more and earn more while doing so. By third year, I became competent enough to be able to easily build full stack real world apps. I have to mention though, getting here meant working for multiple startups during my coop term. Hence, taking a cut in pay compared to my peers for the chance to do more and learn more.

June last year, I met Brian who is a data nerd and has a mind full of cool ideas and together we co-founded MetricWire, which we are running to this day.

Self taught; no unpaid work; 4 yrs+? ; Elance

That's fine, to each his own. But I would say Pat's site and model are much more than what you say they are at face value. Sure, there is that 'learn the business model' message - but then again, almost all marketing sites you go to have something similar to say and if you can look past the up front message, a lot of time you can find value and expand your horizons.

The podcasts are really good. I don't think they describe anything shady or (if I recall correctly) have a bunch of ads - in fact, I don't think they have any ads at all. I don't feel like anything he says is shady. Just look at his income reports to see exactly where his money is coming in. He's pretty transparent and up front about anything. I bet you if you emailed him directly with your concerns, he'd answer you back.

In regards to writing or selling an ebook, yup, not for everyone. But one of the reasons an ebook is so big on his list is because that was his first big win and he pulled in a lot of money monthly by sharing his LEED experience and helped a lot of people pass their exams. Ebooks might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I'd love to have one out there that brings me in a couple of grand every month.

Now, if you feel like coding is what you want to do and marketing or passive income is shady or bs, that's fine. I used to think like that too and to each his own. But for me, I feel like I've done it all and it's time to try other things. I'm at a point now where I can charge a lot to do contract work, but I'd rather have my money work for me so I can do other things. Like I said before, time is your most precious resource and you can never make it up or get it back. And since there's only so many waking hours in the day, it just seems silly to spend them trading my time for money when I can make things that can keep the money rolling in at all times. And then I can code for fun or to scratch an itch whenever I want.

I taught myself. I spent a ton of time building software/apps for myself to show my skills before I could bring that portfolio to anyone and have them be willing to pay me. I took my first project at way under market rate. It took me 2 years from no coding knowledge at all to getting paid. I had other jobs in between so that will not be accurate for others. I was able to generate revenue pretty shortly after I put my mind to it. My first gig was building an HTML5 iPad interactive for a museum.

I started college in 1995, the same fall that Netscape came out. A friend of mine showed me how to create a piece of HTML code, FTP it into the public_html folder of my unix account, and then I had a "home page". The unix accounts were set up by the college... anybody else remember reading e-mail with Pine? I would never have figured out hosting and configuring a web server on my own.

We learned how to code web pages as the features were being added one-by-one: tables, frames, animated GIFs, java applets (embedding them, not coding them). I was not a CS or programming major, this was just my hobby.

In the summer after sophomore year, I started making money at it by building static web pages for businesses in my home town. It's a small town and I can honestly say I was the first web developer there. I don't remember how I advertised myself... maybe people just contacted me because they knew my parents or something. The biggest source of business I found was the real estate agents, who wanted a different page for each house they were listing, and frequently updated them. For me it was pretty simple to copy the template and update the navigation (remember, all hard-coded, even the "prev" and "next" buttons), and I would charge $50 or so for each new listing.

In my senior year I did an internship which became a paying job, still doing HTML "integration" as they called it. In my second job, a year later, I learned about dynamic pages, CGI, databases, and ASP. I had a great boss who was an entrepreneur with lots of ideas, and he hired me to sit in the office next to his and try to find out which ones were feasible.

In particular I remember trying to solve the problem of building an online "shopping cart". First I did it with Javascript and used a hidden frame to hold the data in the browser as the user navigated from page to page. Then I learned Perl so I could code it as a CGI script that stored the data in some kind of a flat file. Then I learned databases (including how to set up and administer a SQL Server database) because I had a hunch that a scripting language like ASP would be the answer. Every time I told the boss I wanted to go to the bookstore and get another O'Reilly title, he would fund it. Fantastic experience, but I left (why else?) because somebody else offered me more money to do HTML tweaking and Photoshop image-slicing drudgery 40 hours a week.

It took me thirteen years to get another great job like that.