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

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

#11

Post by blklane »

May 2013: Graduated from college with marketing degree and started to learn to code. (Blog post here: https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/being-over-your-head-2c187f3e1f31)

September 2013: First paid gig after completing 2 personal projects

From my first project to my current ones I increased my rate at $5 a month for any new projects that I signed. It has gotten me to a livable wage from coding within a year. As of now I charge $120 an hour and even if I don't have 40 billable hours a week I can still get along. The key is be around people building things. They will inspire you and help get you projects. Luckily a few of my friends started projects in college so my first 6 months of client work was easier to adapt to. After that referrals started coming in and the business started to grow at a much more serious pace.

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

#12

Post by kirillzubovsky »

nickporter wrote: post #6

I have been coding since early high school. I wasn't thinking about making money or anything.. it was just something to do for fun. First it was dreamweaver, then photoshop slices, then text editor and php. A couple of years later, my uncle got me a summer job where he worked. That was right after my first year of comspci. I would write bash scripts to automate manual business processes. That's when I first got paid,…

Dreamweaver! Yeah! Those were the days...

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

#13

Post by vishaldpatel »

I learned how to write code in high school. By the end of high school I knew enough to pursue most current jobs. So, three years of one class per semester. That said, it can and has been done a lot faster. I know someone who went from zero to hero in under a year on her own.

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

#14

Post by MortenK »

I think it is important to understand for new programmers that being self-taught is often tough, since your paper credentials are non-existent. So you got to expect a couple of years of low-paid, mostly ungrateful work, and you have to be really persistent in chasing up assignments.

A specific tip is to always try to get a reference / testimonial from the customer. And always document your projects with screenshots etc. My paper credentials when I started out were really shitty, so the "portfolio" of screenshots and testimonials were all I could give to prove that I had at least some experience.

My story:

I started mucking around with VB 4.0 because I wanted to make games. Got a copy of "Peter Norton's guide to Visual Basic" on a recommendation from an IRC chat room and started reading and doing the examples. From there I did small utils for my own use, small games etc.

At the time I worked in a games / software shop and one day some guy came through the door looking for something that could format a huge data file. There wasn't really any shrinkwrap software that could do it, so I offered to make him one. That was the first gig and I charged like 400 bucks. Felt huge at the time :-) By then I had been "hobby programming" for 1 or 2 years.

The first assignment really lighted the fire though and I started trawling any channel I could find for assignments, programming competitions, charity projects and the like. Anything that paid money or could be used in a portfolio.

The channel was mainly Usenet, whereas today it would be sites like oDesk and the like. Eventually got a part-time job with a young entrepreneur, where I learned some HTML, spent days getting a mouse to work on Linux and cleaned and sliced carrots for lunch (which I thought was waaay below me, but it had to be done :-).

Read a whole lot of different stuff, and applied to a lot of companies. After 6 months to a year I ended up in a more professional company doing web "programming" part time (HTML and a bit of JS basically). A years time later I got full-time and into more serious programming.

After ~5 years I shifted into management and ultimately consultancy, but still program quite often for my own purposes.

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

#15

Post by jlees »

I think you may get stories like mine which are almost two decades old -- and not so relevant any more -- but hey.

I've been programming most of my life (thanks to the 80s UK/BBC home computer revolution), but during high school the web was becoming A Thing. When I was about 14/15 I taught myself HTML and Javascript from online tutorials and trial & error. I volunteered to build my school's website mostly because nobody else was interested, and in the process started learning server side programming (ASP, I think).

I saw a job ad for a summer intern in a magazine and replied to it, ended up learning VBscript and writing a couple of reasonably high-profile websites over the summer for real money. I also started up a few side projects, none of which made money -- or were designed to! -- apart from an e-commerce project with some school friends.

From learning HTML to my first paycheque, probably about 1.5 years? In my spare time alongside school.

What would I change if I were learning from scratch today? Not much, in terms of learning as much as possible and working on interesting projects. Volunteer to build websites/webapps/mobile apps or help out with those which are creaking along. I wouldn't expect to make money overnight but if you can solve people's problems with code then you might be able to align interests despite not being an experienced programmer :)

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

#16

Post by FLUX-YOU »

- Taught self from Python in 2012 to Front/Back end Web Dev to general C#/.Net. Have cracked a dozen specific books but haven't finished a single one from cover-to-cover yet. Started with LPTHW from start to finish.

- Yes, but there was no ship date. "When it's done"

- Nearly 2 years, however I received an offer to do entry level front-end web development 8 months from starting that I declined because I had received another (non-programming) job offer that paid a bit more. I was not in a rush at the time.

- This is my first gig. I started two weeks ago and do support/patch issues for large medical records and clinical management software. It is overwhelming to say the least with a very large line count in the repo and a lot of moving parts and the threat of patient data compromise looming.

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

#19

Post by fma »

I guess I went the more traditional route? I've always had a knack for computers since middle school where I learned QBasic on my own writing silly programs (it came with DOS). My high school offered a class programming class in BASIC where I learned more advanced concepts (file IO, sorts, etc).

Went to college, majored in Computer Engineering. In my sophomore year, I got introduced to web applications. Then I came up with an idea, bought a few books on PHP and MySql and implemented the idea in about 5 months in my junior year. So technically, my first buck is from ad revenue and affiliate sales from that.

Didn't make the big bucks till after graduation...went through the whole career fair, interview, etc.

Since you're the one creating the timeline, I'll let you decide what you want to consider as my day 1, and day 1 of being paid. Not sure if people nowadays have the patience to go through an engineering curriculum if they just want to learn web development.

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

#20

Post by Moto7451 »

I went to school but also taught myself as I needed to solve a particular problem (build a GUI driven desktop app) and my school work wasn't moving fast enough. The curriculum was C++, lots of algorithms, and data structures. Good stuff, just not very applicable to my problem at the time so I picked up a few books on C++ and C# and by the time I worked through them I pretty much never had trouble with classwork again.

It took about a year before I landed my first gig which I found through craigslist.

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