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Show HN: I made 30 apps this year and I'm 15

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Re: Show HN: I made 30 apps this year and I'm 15

#81

Post by Sakes »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #57

One tip: Ignore everybody and keep creating. If I'd done that at 15, then I wouldn't have started to doubt myself and stop working on ideas that later turned out to be very prescient. The most important thing you should do is the thing that's most important to you. Be sure it's not defined by other people's opinions. There will always be people in life like the guy who replied "While it is impressive to see another 1…

Yes, the op has done fantastic. Perfection is unattainable but a great motivator. You can always get better and should.

This past year you have learned a very valuable skill, pump out product. Now you should reflect upon how well your apps performed in the store and determine if you want to continue with the same strategy, invest time in polishing your projects, or maybe simply review your quality standards.

Great job OP, any parent would be proud, any person should show respect. Keep it up, iterate on your ideas and yourself.

Re: Show HN: I made 30 apps this year and I'm 15

#82

Post by SyneRyder »

This is awesome. And while there's some valid criticism in this thread (regarding quality over quantity & originality), that criticism shouldn't detract from a few points:

* You're averaging a product a fortnight. Whoa.

* You've learned to leverage 3rd party tools to increase productivity / output.

* You've learned to actually -ship- product.

* You made the front page of Hacker News.

All of that is incredibly valuable. Who cares if it isn't written in Java or Objective-C or Haskell or Erlang, so long as your customers love what you're making? (And if they don't love it, at least you now know what to improve on next!)

If you do follow the advice of taking longer to make a higher quality product, don't fall into the trap of becoming a perfectionist and never shipping. It's better to ship something and keep improving it based on customer feedback, than to make something that never sees the light of day.

Did you join onegameamonth.com? If not, you definitely should.

Re: Show HN: I made 30 apps this year and I'm 15

#83

Post by antjanus »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #64
MJR wrote: post #43

This doesn't detract what the fact that you had the initiative and drive to complete 30 different games. But if I can offer some advice now, rather than when something real happens: Create your own characters rather than borrowing someone else's creations and building them into your games. Pac-Man, Mario, Minecraft, My Little Pony are all great characters, just unfortunately not yours to make a game with. Find a frie…

Create your own characters rather than borrowing someone else's creations and building them into your games. Pac-Man, Mario, Minecraft, My Little Pony are all great characters, just unfortunately not yours to make a game with. Speaking as a game developer, this is remarkably bad advice for a young gamedev to follow. It doesn't matter whether or not they're "his". It matters that he continues creating. That's the most…

As a non gamedev but a webdev, I completely agree. It doesn't matter, at this stage, if the characters are "original" or if they're borrowed.

Re: Show HN: I made 30 apps this year and I'm 15

#84

Post by [deleted] »

C1D wrote: post #70
joebo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree completely. I'm over twice your age and started programming when I was 12. My birthday present for my 14th birthday was a $99 retail copy of Microsoft Visual C++ 4.0. Back then I wrote a notepad clone, cab archiver (zip was a fad, really!), and various other utilities. I remember thinking how cool it was when I was 14 to have over 50,000 downloads. I've been a professional programmer (big corp, consulting,…

I'm definitely glad to see another 15 year old taking a interest in computing but I guess the reason i'm not overly impressed is that for me- and I don't mean to sound arrogant,- this would be an extremely easy task and the reason I'm not doing something like is because I prefer Software Programming more than Gaming and I hate Windows (I'm on Ubuntu).

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I made 30 apps this year and I'm 15

#85

Post by C1D »

Blahah wrote: post #76
C1D wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm definitely glad to see another 15 year old taking a interest in computing but I guess the reason i'm not overly impressed is that for me- and I don't mean to sound arrogant,- this would be an extremely easy task and the reason I'm not doing something like is because I prefer Software Programming more than Gaming and I hate Windows (I'm on Ubuntu).

For most 15 year olds it would not be an extremely easy task. What's impressive is that someone has gone down such a specialised skill-development route by that age. So both the OP, and you, are impressive.

I guess you are right, most 15 year olds at my school couldn't tell me how a bold tag looks like if their life depended on it! I didn't develop my skills over a fortnight. I have been programming since I was eight (I come from a family of engineers).

I still remember building my first VB Application (A browser), the moving on to HTML, PHP, then teaching a Python Class at my old school and now I'm proficient in Node.JS and know how to use most of the HTML5 API, so I guess it does take time to evolve your skills.

Re: Show HN: I made 30 apps this year and I'm 15

#86

Post by beatboxrevival »

When I was 15, I was also creating code. I met some "smart" older guy who worked as a product manager for britannica.com before wikipedia and the first bubble. I asked him for some advice on how to make a career out of it. He said, "you don't want to build shit, you want to manage people. Writing code is for the losers." As a young impressionable kid with no tech mentors, I listened. It took ten years to come back to writing code. Anyways, like the sillysaurus2 said, ignore the critics and keep doing what you love to do.

Re: Show HN: I made 30 apps this year and I'm 15

#88

Post by jebus989 »

It's worth noting that this isn't a cool github account someone's turned up of a surprisingly young programmer, it's a serial publicist [0-2] using primarily a game creation engine (which he doesn't acknowledge upfront) to build low-quality games and display them on an unsightly tumblr page. I think to heap praise on this because of their age alone is patronising. Encouragement absolutely, it's great to see young people interested in programming, but at what age would this has been flagged and removed quickly after posting, 17? 19?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6864667

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6800925

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799065

Re: Show HN: I made 30 apps this year and I'm 15

#89

Post by joelhooks »

MJR wrote: post #43

This doesn't detract what the fact that you had the initiative and drive to complete 30 different games. But if I can offer some advice now, rather than when something real happens: Create your own characters rather than borrowing someone else's creations and building them into your games. Pac-Man, Mario, Minecraft, My Little Pony are all great characters, just unfortunately not yours to make a game with. Find a frie…

You know what this leads to? Kids never getting anything accomplished. By keeping the scope simple and building with established assets, he was able to actually release something.

I encourage my kids to yoink assets for their projects. Once you've succeeded a bit, and feel comfortable with one piece of the puzzle, by all means, work on the next and make custom characters and graphics. It is non-trivial skill and experience, and come later.

Re: Show HN: I made 30 apps this year and I'm 15

#90

Post by jeremiep »

C1D wrote: post #50

EDIT: I apologize for coming off as arrogant. Criticism isn't really doing any good and I regret that post. To the creator, I'm glad to see a 15 year actually doing something in computing. I understand that this was a good experience for you and hopefully has further developed you skills. Sorry for the unnecessary criticism and blatant self promotion. My post was pointless, possibly narcissistic and I was doing what…

I strongly disagree with this.

When learning, quantity is often more important than quality. If you try to learn by building one big project to be as perfect as possible, you'll always be slowed down by the bad decisions you made early on. By building lots of smaller projects, you don't need to spend time refactoring and regression testing and whatnot, you just finish the current project and use your newly gained knowledge to better build the next.

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