141–150 of 190 posts
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~"Don't make the mistake of defining yourself by your job, just know that your job makes you better than these other people with a different job"
Don't define yourself by your job, but recognize the unique skills it gave you and use them to your advantage.
"My name is Mohamed, and I am a jail guard!" G'day, Mohamed don't make the mistake of defining yourself by your job. You are much, much more than that. You work (and survive) in a Jail? That now makes you 10x better than most nerds on HN in understanding and handling people. Scan HN and the general press and you can see how badly Startups and their users are hurt by this and you'll realise this is a desirable skill.…
At the risk of making your point for you, as one of the "nerds on HN" I would just like to tell you to take your sweeping statements and fuck off. Or have you forgotten you're a member of this site as well, nerd.
Before you do this, consider the following question: would you rather spend your time learning to build the Uber app, or learning the skills to build Uber (the company)? Those are two truly different skill sets, and the latter is far more rare and valuable. The ability to raise money, build teams for a variety of functions, budget, and execute on an audacious vision is far outside the realm of most software engineers…
I agree about the different skill sets. I am working on getting a mentor who I can learn from when it comes to all of the latter stuff you've mentioned.
That timeline would be doable, but Spring 2019 wouldn't be bad to shoot for either. Here is an alternate 3.5 year plan: - Year 1: Learn to code full time. Later in the year, start applying for jobs as a developer. - Year 2: Get a job as a full stack dev. Devote nights and weekends to improving your development skills as much as possible. - Year 3: Get a cofounder, and work nights and weekends on your project. - Year…
MS Access - Learn it first! Why? The first few reasons that come to mind: 1) To quote a friend of mine, “If a 50 year old boilermaker can work it out, then anyone can.” 2) MS Access will more than likely be installed on your computer at work. 3) Almost all "startup" type programs will need databasing of some sort. 4) It has macros and modules (VBA - Visual Basic for Applications) 5) As you start to learn Visual Basic…
To the OP, don't do this. This is the equivalent of letting a White Van Man[1] teach you how to drive. Sure they can get you from A to B, and yeah they might even get paid for doing it. But you'll pick up so many bad habits that any other driver you have to work with will think you're an idiot and completely distrust you.
All the best. My advice to you would be to try and think how you can provide real value to people (which rules out 90% of "startups" in Silicon Valley) and make a positive change in their lives. This does not mean you have to solve world hunger, it can be as simple as having identified a loophole which allows for corruption in jails and you use technology to close that loophole.
Or fix that exploitative phone call system in jails.
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Or fix that exploitative phone call system in jails.
Also the canteen they order, way overpriced. There are numerous inefficiencies in the prison system, and Pigeonly seems like they picked one area, phones, to attack first.
Welcome Mohamed. "This place is overwhelmingly full of smart people, and I sometimes feel out of place!" Don't feel out of place. You may just be suffering from Dunning-Kruger effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect The smartest people for me are those who can drop all pretensions and learn as much as they can. You're well on your way.
I would advise against the bootcamp (unless it's free?), you don't need one as long as you have one or two buddies who code, who can advise you on what to learn and help you when you get stuck, the response to your post suggests that you will have a lot of people who would be willing to help! It might be a good idea to put an email in your HN profile, make it easier for folks to get in touch.
We started with python (udacity cs101), lisp/scheme using the free 'simply scheme' book ( https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/ss-toc2.html ) together with learning some of the tools like unix command-line/vim/git, then a course on web programming (udacity cs253), while she was doing college full-time, and I was working full-time.
We then started learning rails and working almost full-time on the startup around Oct 2014, and launched v1 of our web app in March 2015. Still working on getting more customers :). Don't be in too much of a rush to leave what you do now: I think it's definitely a good idea to have a 'day job' that pays the bills, while you work on little projects that are interesting to you and help you learn the various technologies, you may well find one of them turns into something a lot bigger.
We also applied to yc (unsuccessfully), which may have been good for us: I think the value of the advice they can give is high, but I now think it's kind of a waste of the opportunity if you're not raising money at the end. We are still figuring out 'what users want', and in hindsight, raising money would have been both difficult to resist, and a terrible idea for us at that time.
Most of the advice yc gives is 'open source', for example, paul graham's essays and books, jessica livingston's book, the yc startup school etc, so you don't need to get into yc to learn what they have to say.
I now think that the best time to go through yc would be after you've internalized what they teach, have made something users want, are growing, and now need funding so you can grow even faster. I think YC fulfilled a different role in the early days when it was so small, but is now so competitive, it's best to think of it a bit like hiring an investment bank when looking to IPO. In theory, they take a chunk of equity in exchange for good capital markets advice that will get you a much better valuation: as far as investment banks go, this is usually self-interested bullshit, but I think would be an accurate description of the value of yc.
Best of luck, and get in touch by email, it would be good to chat!
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I don't think the experience is necessary. He wants to found a company not be an excellent engineer. That means as long as he can get a prototype out, it doesn't matter if it's all spaghetti code. It's startup code and it will be shitty. He can then hopefully raise money and hire people with at least a few years experience to build things out properly (hopefully). I've seen successful startups started by people who c…
he worked in a prison you funny person ... what qualifies him to found tech company? right - nothing! and spaghetti code that turns useful requires even more experience to maintain.