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Ask HN: Technical skills helpful for building a startup today

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Re: Ask HN: Technical skills helpful for building a startup today

#11

Post by gregjor »

mannymanman wrote: post #6
gregjor wrote: post #4

Satire or serious? I can’t tell.

Serious. Out of curiosity, what made this seem like satire? Don't want to give off that vibe in the future for serious posts

The buzzwords. And the apparent assumption that you can just “pick up” programming. Going from 0 (or CS50 online) to producing useful code will take several years at least. And as another person commented, idea, market, people, and execution make or break a startup, not programming languages or buzzwords such as blockchain.

Maybe find a technical co-founder who already has the technical expertise.

Re: Ask HN: Technical skills helpful for building a startup today

#12

Post by ghufran_syed »

mannymanman wrote: post #5
angryredblock wrote: post #3

If you want to be a solo/technical founder, I'd consider learning to build web apps a great first step - it's accessible, cross-platform, and flexible. There's also no shortage of resources online. On the frontend, React is commonly used and generally a safe choice. On the backend, some nodejs with heroku or docker should give you a gentle introduction (with the added advantage that you'll be learning the same langua…

Thanks! Do you have any suggested tutorials that are particularly easy to follow?

I really liked Andrew mead's javascript course, and his react course. They are both on o'reilly learning, so you might have access to that through a local library etc

Re: Ask HN: Technical skills helpful for building a startup today

#13

Post by AlchemistCamp »

I would strongly encourage you not to dive into learning React or AWS. Both are very good to learn about if your goal is to become an employee at a tech company, but not so much for a solo founder.

React itself is fine and relatively straight-forward, but its ecosystem is massive and there are many competing options for several accompanying libraries. AWS includes a powerful array of services, but it's considerably more time-consuming to learn than other hosting options such as Render.com.

I'd say your best bet is to just use an MVC-ish back-end framework and sprinkles of JavaScript. Once you've done well enough to hire a few engineers, then maybe start thinking about React, AWS, more complex devops, etc.

At the beginning, the most important thing is speed.

Re: Ask HN: Technical skills helpful for building a startup today

#14

Post by jitl »

If you actually want generalist web dev skills applicable to almost any web startup, learn Rails. There are tons of resources, and the Rails 1st party docs are a good starting point. Rails will set you up to learn SQL modeling, MVC pattern, CRUD basics, api design, etc without putting you into library selection paralysis which happens quite a bit in the JavaScript ecosystem, and you can replicate the architecture easily in Express/Node if you need to later. So, it’s a “paved road” towards familiarity / mastery of web development where there’s always a clear next step and obvious choices to accomplish your goals. Ruby isn’t too “hot” any more these days but it will massively simplify your decision tree. The JS ecosystem still has nothing to match the productivity of Rails.

AWS/GCP are tools to achieve some goal. It’s hard to suggest learning those until you have some kind of app that has needs served by a cloud provider.

Blockchain is something of a meme. No startup has succeeded in the “blockchain” space other than in “selling shovels in the goldrush” sense.

(Native) mobile app development is somewhat involved, plus there’s 2x as much to learn because there’s two different mobile platforms. I wouldn’t suggest investing time there as your first area. I found it quite impenetrable until I had a chance to learn it in a work context.

Re: Ask HN: Technical skills helpful for building a startup today

#17

Post by ramraj07 »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #13

I would strongly encourage you not to dive into learning React or AWS. Both are very good to learn about if your goal is to become an employee at a tech company, but not so much for a solo founder. React itself is fine and relatively straight-forward, but its ecosystem is massive and there are many competing options for several accompanying libraries. AWS includes a powerful array of services, but it's considerably m…

Disagree on AWS. It's not that hard, and if you're gonna spend any amount of time figuring some vendor locked cloud system (which they all are), AWS is the best bet. And you obviously need to be careful with using every service that company throws at you, but barring that they provide the most solid reliable suite of services you can hope for so you spend more time on logic and business after some initial time investment.

Re: Ask HN: Technical skills helpful for building a startup today

#19

Post by OzzyB »

You have thrown out quite the list there (Blockchain/AWS/etc), which I guess is more of an indictment of where we're at an industry today regarding tools, than any criticism on your part.

If you are truly starting out fresh/green, I would ignore all the buzzwords, and simply focus on how to make a solid, good 'ol fashioned web app.

For this I would suggest learning/reading up on the Django Framework. The docs are excellent, kind to newcomers, and will walk you through all the main architectural considerations and components needed to make a robust fully featured app - databases/orm, controllers, templating etc.etc.

Once you've built a (few) webapps like this then you can worry about spending time refactoring parts of it with the new hotness. They will reveal themselves to you once you get some experience and grow your app/business, and you'll have the knowledge to make better decisions on whether or not they're worth it.

For now just stick with a framework that will guide you; ofc it doesn't have to be Django, there is Ruby on Rails and many others, and remember even the first iteration of Instagram was a Django app!

Re: Ask HN: Technical skills helpful for building a startup today

#20

Post by simonkafan »

The question is: What do you want to build? What problem do you want to solve?

If you don't know yet, then figure this out first. It is useless* to spend your time reading about how blockchain solutions on AWS work when you don't have a plan what to do next with this knowledge.

*) except if this interests you personally

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