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2) What resources (e.g. mentors, websites, coding classes or bootcamps, youtube videos, books, co-workers) did you find MOST helpful in accelerating your learning?
For example, if it was a combination of factors that led you to have the skills you have today, what could you have not done without?
2) Co-Founders were my mentors
2) No resources in particular stand out to me, though I think books were way more useful early on than blog posts or tutorials. I think it's the linear nature of books that really helped me.
My advice would be to pick one medium (web, iOS, Android, whatever) and one language (for me that was Ruby) and stick to that language only for at least a year.
Other advice would be to always be inquisitive. Though I didn't get a degree, I eventually went on to learn about operating systems, sockets, basic algorithms and data structures.
However, in my opinion getting a CS degree would be frustrating if I were to do it all over again. Learning all that implementation detail and a lot of schools not even pushing or requiring you to build things would really frustrate me.
Anyway, I remember the hardest part for me was wrapping my mind around Ruby blocks. It sounds kind of dumb but honestly I couldn't understand them for weeks. The first programs I wrote were those text-based adventure games, like, "You're on a path in a forest. What do you do? > Go left". I did those because you didn't need to ever use blocks for them, it was all just conditional logic.
Once I grokked Ruby blocks I feel like it has all been downhill from there, at least until I stated looking at Haskell...
As far as resources: Really depends on the topic.
You can watch lectures for an entire CS degree for free online via places like UC Berkeley. There are also paid video stuff at places like Pluralsight (coding), CBTNuggets (server management), and as you said even YouTube has the good video now and again.
I just google whatever I need as I need it. It isn't a very formal way of learning but it is an effective one. The only trick is not to skip doing things because you don't already know how to do them.
1) I found it most frustrating to try and choose between learning what's the most popular new technology and what would help me advance my career. It turns out, focusing on mastering the basics of HTML, CSS, and Javascript have gotten me much further than trying to jump on every new bandwagon that rolls by.
2) Honestly, the single greatest resource has been my side projects. All of the tutorials, training and learning from Google have been far surpassed by the amount of knowledge I've gained from sitting down and hacking on ideas. I seriously have had 1million side projects in my 5 years and each of them has been a challenge and an amazing learning experience.
Hope that helps
2) Some of the more helpful things for me were the Head First series of books from O'Reilly (Java and C# in particular), and having a few experienced programmers in real life to talk to. The one thing I seriously could not have done without, no question, is Google.
* Setting up environments and auxiliary tools: Should I use rvm or rbenv? What's bundler? Why do I need a rake? Where's my Gemfile? Ooops, I meant my Gemfile.lock.
* Understanding the sysadmin/architecture things: So I need an HTTP server and an app server? Wait, but some app servers are HTTP servers? But you need a proxy for static content? And a load balancer? (To be fair, in the modern world these tasks are vastly simplified by services like Heroku)
* Databases: Choosing a DB, choosing a library to connect to the DB, do you use an ORM or write SQL? Nowadays, I follow the "Always use Postgres unless you have a damn good reason" rule.
* Testing. Writing unit tests is incredibly tedious. Learning how to mock/stub/fake out critical libraries is a giant pain that I still commonly goof up today. Writing good tests easily takes 2-3X the amount of time it takes me to write working code.
* Deploying. Ugh.
I had much more success learning XCode and C/Obj-C. I read some lessons on C, then switched to Objective-C by following the Stanford video course on iTunes which showed you programming + hooking up XCode interface objects to run your methods (I realize I could have done that with Visual Basic originally, but at the time I couldn't think of anything I wanted to build in VB). Then I followed tutorials on raywenderlich.com and continued from there.
If I needed help, I Googled, posted on StackOverflow or asked my one programming friend.
No CS degree here, currently working as Senior Front-end developer after 5+ years in the field. 1) I found it most frustrating to try and choose between learning what's the most popular new technology and what would help me advance my career. It turns out, focusing on mastering the basics of HTML, CSS, and Javascript have gotten me much further than trying to jump on every new bandwagon that rolls by. 2) Honestly, th…