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

> Did you learn to program in school or teach yourself?

Self-taught. This stuff advances so quickly it's tough to distill what you need to know into classes without getting REALLY deep into it. The pace of the industry is set by the speed at which the self-taught craftsmen research and develop new skills. It's hard to find competitive pay if you don't have competitive skills and in the long-term, only those skilled at self-teaching have any kind of longevity in the field IMO. I'm still young but I see so many ahead of me lose that edge and not be able to find work simply because they spend too much time doing and not enough time thinking.

> Did you do unpaid work to establish yourself?

Absolutely, but I have a strict policy of only working pro bono for myself or charities I would donate money to. I'm a big fan of open source code, so I try to donate as much as I can to posterity once a project is complete at well.

> Roughly how long did it take you from day 1 of learning to day 1 of being paid?

I have been tinkering for years while in school so that's not a fair question, but more recently I have gone from not knowing JavaScript to getting paid to write bits of it here and there in one year while also doing other web development. It should take less than five years to go from nothing to competitive if you're keen to do it, and you shouldn't need to spend a dime to do it. There is enough material, software, and even full operating systems you can use for free so he only costs are a computer, electricity, and internet access. If you have those three already, buckle up and get ready for a wild ride, but put that wallet away!

> What Was Your First Gig?

My first job out of college was as an in-house web developer for an online tutoring company. They tutored adults to help them get professional certifications they would need to get a job. I ended up getting caught in a layoff within the first year unrelated to performance, but I still cherish the opportunity they were ready and trying to give to me even though it never bloomed to the full potential. I got a site built for them and they have been able to maintain it since then but I fear they are doing very well financially even still.

My advice to you is this: if you want to learn web languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, DONT look for tools that make it 'easy'. At the end of the day you're writing a page of text, so the most simple, easy, and straightforward way to arrive at that is by simply typing the characters. Any pre-processors, plugins, or frameworks that reduce what you have to write reduce what you are able to learn. I suggest starting with a 'clean-room' approach and creating blank files and literally typing each and every character you want in those files manually, every. Single. Time.

When I start a new website, the first thing I type is: , I don't even start with a 'empty template'. That's the fastest, easiest way to 'get into' a languages syntax and get your head around what it does.

Good luck!

> Did you learn to program in school or teach yourself?

I dabbled in computer science in college (1999 - 2001), taking 3 programming courses that covered C++ and Java. There was a saying in the CS department that if you took one programming class you could get a programming job. I didn't believe it at the time, but I'll come back to this point.

-Did you do unpaid work to establish yourself?

Out of school I knew I wanted to get a web design job. I found a small graphic design company that was starting a web department. They had a designer and a programmer and I was the guy that could talk to them both (I had an art background and knew how to "speak programmer"). The company was working in PHP and I remember thinking how crazy it was that I hadn't been taught programming in the context of the web. For what it's worth, the CS program now teaches Python in its programming courses.

So while I had a background in programming, I had to teach myself PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JS, server management, etc. But I can't stress enough how much the fundamentals from school helped me. I still run into people who have taught themselves jQuery, but they don't understand the fundamentals of loops, or arrays, or conditionals...

-Roughly how long did it take you from day 1 of learning to day 1 of being paid?

The web department did not last long in the graphic design company – the leadership just didn't understand the opportunity. Within 6 months I could see the ship was going down, so I took me newly learned skills and started my own web consulting company. Technically I was being paid for programming right out of college -- 2.5 years after first learning how to code. But it was when I received my first check for my own company, 6 months later, that I felt like I was being paid for my coding.

-What was your first gig?

My first gig was a website for a contractor remodeling my parent's house. It was a lucky first client because after a basic portfolio site, the owner asked if I could build a portal for all of his clients and that changed my focus from portfolio sites to web applications.

I studied CS in university. I suppose my first paying gig was as an undergrad research assistant, working for the princely sum of $12.50 an hour. It was a direct outgrowth of a self-directed study project that I had done with the same professor. I was shockingly naive at the time -- "Wait, you can just give me money for something that I already was doing for free? And you're offering $12.50?! That's 25% more than I've ever earned!"

This would have been in the summer of my senior year, though I had not particularly tried to get programming work earlier. That's probably for the best. At the time I would have had ~10 years of programming experience if you count very liberally of which 4 years was fairly intensive (university), though only ~1 year of it was in the language we used at the lab. (gawk, by the way.)

My first "real" post-university job was as a technology translator at a Japanese prefectural incubator. I didn't do much programming in the first 12 months or so, but eventually convinced my boss "Look, we have 5 translators here to do 1 translator worth of work. I'm technically assigned to the R&D group and actually can program. I also am totally willing to do any scutwork you give me and stay out of your hair while doing it. How about it?" This lead to me getting very out of my depth in image processing code in C++ followed by, after protesting that it was just impossible, heading up some distributed computing and anti-spam research projects. I was still in laughably over my head but the unique contours of my employment (and the politics of local Japanese government) meant that expectations were so shockingly low that picking a goal and trying for it was enough to be praiseworthy even though my deliverables were terrible.

After that I got an engineering job with a Japanese megacorp and finally learned professional engineering discipline like e.g. source control, testing ("You mean you run programs before demoing them to the boss?"), databases ("You mean all data doesn't go in flat files?"), and the like. This would have been approximately 3.25 years after graduating university.

Bingo Card Creator (a side project which ended up changing my professional career) happened about 3 years after graduating university while still working at the incubator as (titularly) a translator.

My path:

Had computer and internet access at a young age. Learned DOS in elementary school playing 'Oregon Trail' on 5.25" floppies. Exposed to Lotus 123 in DOS. Played mahjong on OS/2. My first experience with copy protection was the "enter the X word on Y line on Z page" a la Commander Keen. First touched the internet when 14.4kbps was a big deal. Played with File Manager on windows 3.11 like it was a toy. Fix errors in "MegaRace" install. In middle school, discover IRC and fileservers. Get involved in Anime fansub scene, host fileserver around the same time that Cable Modems were first hitting the US east coast. Learn about video compression, encoding, fansubbing. Learn IRC script and create chatroom bots that respond to users. Learn FTP and FXP. Infect friends' PCs with Subseven like a true script kiddie. Get C&D letters from parents' ISP due to port scanning. In high school, get CompTIA Network+ cert, A+ cert, MS Sysadmin Cert. Interstate 76 comes out for PC, learn what hexadecimal is. Around the same time, joined a guild on MPlayer for playing Mechwarrior 2. Learn HTML and CSS while creating a website on geocities/enchantedforest/cottage for the guild, learn what is. Create free website on angelfire for a friends. Learn how to embed a MIDI file. Learn what PHP include means. Learn JASC Paint Shop Pro. Learn how to Pirate JASC paint shop pro. Go to college as CS major. Learn OOP in java. Touch SunOS and Emacs. (ed: i stand by my claim that emacs is not meant for humans). Enjoy programming, hate math. Halfway through college, switch to business major because I have a D in Calc 3 and dont want to blow up my GPA. While finishing college, work as a Jr. Sysadmin consultant for a major ISP. Learn windows administration, learn core concepts of availability and scalability. Learn about backups. Active Directory, Exchange, IP telephony, DNS etc. Learn about corporate process and bureaucracy. Learn how to CYA. Get job as IT manager for 5-person financial startup. Get fired after 3 days. Get job at Panera Bread bussing tables. Get call from major ISP, quit panera after 2 days. Get job for IT consulting company in a major metro area. Visit residential and corporate clients to act as IT department, doing break/fix, data recovery and small scale org planning. Appreciate the value of true IT knowledge in the marketplace. Get job as Sysadmin at a media company. Use previous experience to deliver superior service to internal users. Build goodwill. Around the same time, iPhone 4 is released, with retina display. Become enamored with iPhone, recognize potential of the platform. Learn iOS dev with help from Stanford classes on iTunes U. Spend 2 months learning iOS, get comfortable working with it. Decide to quit sysadmin job to study iOS full time. Upon quitting, get offered the opportunity to transition to developer role at same company. Accept opportunity, attend excellent iOS training course, begin transition to full-time dev role. Work on popular newsreader app. Gain experience and knowledge from dev mentor. After 1.5 yrs, move on to smaller startup-y org for massive $ increase. First "real" programming gig since making transition from sysadmin. Overcome jitters, rewrite major application with great success. Read about electrical engineering, and Haskell. Consider what to do next...

Well, I don't want to sound too ancient, but I learned how to program on 8-bit machines, as a kid, in the 80's. Commodore, Apple's, IBM Pc's (all pre-MS Windows).

We (my friend and I) did everything in Basic. We had our first programming job at 14 & 13. And that was building mailing list apps for people (this was superseded by the database).

My main driving force has always been get 'enough' knowledge and dive in. I still do that today and now there are a gazillion more resources on the web to help. I grew up in the model-T days of computers.

Today if I was to advise someone on building a desktop or server app, I would probably say do it in Ruby or Python. And of those two, probably Ruby - it's just a little easier to get into.

iOS and Android are definitely huge, but I would probably suggest to someone to learn Swift and go for iOS if they wanna go the mobile route. iOS pays more and Swift is enough like Javascript to where you could transition a little easier than Java. Nothing wrong with Java, of course, but it's way bigger - like you getting dropped in a jungle and trying to find a way out.

However. I am a late comer to seo and _making money on the web_ via 'passive income'. My biggest recommendation to a kid might be to not program at all, but learn how to setup content sites and go for affiliate marketing, google adwords, etc. This is the complete opposite of coding for a living. Why would I recommend this?! Because you can make money this way while you sleep (see Tim Ferris & 4 hour work week). If you code for a living and trade time for money, you will never be able to do this. I've read many books from rich people and they say this is the worst form of earning you can do because you can never get time back, so time is the most valuable thing you have.

I feel like I've done a lot of models on the web - startup, my own products, code for cash, code for equity - and the one I feel strongest about is the passive income approach. It's not guaranteed, but if you can make it work, you'll be way ahead of the guy - in terms of making money - that trades his time for programming. Check out http://www.smartpassiveincome.com and prepare to depressed and happy.