Turning into a hacker aged 27

You should totally blog about it when you get the time!

I really like the idea of looking for someone to apprentice with. It's awesome that he found someone to take him in. "look to the master, follow the master, walk with the master, see through the master, become the master."

I started coding HTML/CSS/Javascript when I was 15. When I was 18 I was working on a $14M project doing HTML & jQuery. 19 and 20 rolled around and I thought I was hot shit and could get away without knowing much about object oriented programming and database design. Boy, did experience beat me with a heavy stick.

After blowing through a lot of money paying other people, and not being able to evaluate what they were doing, I started learning to program myself a little over a year ago (December 2009). It has been, by far, the best investment I've ever made.

You HAVE to have mentors, though, bookwork and experience alone don't cut it. Some of my mentors, didn't do anything but talk to me - and ingrain in me the importance of fundamentals - and some basic vocabulary. Some stuff that didn't make sense when I heard it, but produced those "Aha" moments later. Other stuff, like the importance of pre-planning, prototyping, code readability, and NEVER using code you don't fully understand, I was told from the beginning were very important.

Plus, mentors can be different types of people in different types of situations. One of my mentors was an experienced programmer who I lived with for a few months. Others were dudes on stackexchange and serverfault (Yes, that counts), and others were those I read.

The bottom line is, you need to see yourself as an apprentice, always looking for a master to learn from.

10,000 hours. From Outliers and others as the number of hours you have to do something to be proficient at it. The common thread for most hacker coder types is that they just really really liked the "power" associated with writing code that could do anything, and so they started spending all of their time writing code doing all sorts of things.

All night debug sessions? Check. Several complete rewrites from scratch? Check. Using a language feature considered "unsafe" because it was the only way to get done what one needed? Check. Figuring out what "unsafe" meant? Check.

Once people are writing all of this code many want to know exactly how their code gets translated into what the computer does and they go off into their 'compiler' stage (some stay there for ever :-). This is where folks write their own compilers, by first writing their own lexical analyzers, then needing to parse those, and then needing to take those parse trees and generate new code with them.

There is a lot of exploration to do in 10,000 hrs. That's coding 6 hrs a day (and by that I mean coding, not checking Facebook or reading HN :-) for 5 years. There aren't a lot of short cuts. Sure there are CS programs which will show you what other people learned in their 10K hrs and help distill the concepts down for you but, like playing Piano, its not "known" until its in your finger bones.

Mentors are great for helping you get unstuck (since being stuck means you aren't coding which means you're not clocking your 10K hrs) and they can sometimes give you a heads up on road your travelling down, but mostly I think they are best for just sharing your enthusiasm and adding energy.

I'm taking a wild guess here, but I suspect there are many people who need that entry level/internship opportunity to cement some concepts while working on a team.

The problem is, like the rest of America, junior positions seem to have vanished. At least on job boards and hiring pages.

Can anyone point us to a good resource to find junior positions or even internships in front-end coding or UX design?

I'm not asking for any company to completely teach me stuff. The ideal position would require a portfolio but maybe one that isn't completely cross-browser, production-quality code.

Well if my experience is of any use... Keep at it! I didn't graduate from a top tier college or have been creating game engines since 9 years old, so I had to start at the ground floor like most people. It was extremely difficult at the beginning. From what I noticed, cold emailing rarely works. I had the most feedback/interviews/responses from either recruiters, networking and actually moving to tech hubs like Silicon Valley.

From the code perspective, a lot of companies noticed my open source contributions. Granted they were mostly minor utility code, there's always that little spark of joy from their voices whenever we go over that topic.

So go join an open source project! I know it's reiterated over and over again, but a good project can act as proxy real-world experience in helping you discover what it takes to write production quality code.

I guess if there was a single tip I could give, just be highly visible in committed code, web presence (as a programmer, not as a party animal) in websites and social networks, and face-to-face networking. That would raise your chances of being noticed.