This is very inspiring and makes believe I can do it now. Thank you for sharing and thank you even more for the discipline it took you to do this.
After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder
141–150 of 383 posts
Re: After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't call male coders "boy", let's not call female ones "girl" unless they're a fourteen year old or something.
"girl" is used in place of "guy" because "guy" has a masculine connotation. I'd be happy to see "gal" but it's a little anachronistic.
Girl has an "immature, not yet an adult" connotation. "Guy" wasn't the only option here. It could easily have read "This woman not only became a competent front end developer..."
Re: After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of those places have prohibitively high cost of living to make saving six months of salary very much not trivial. It's possible, but it isn't anywhere close to trivial.
Prohibitively high if you want to live in walking distance to your job . I work in SF, have a 15 minute commute, and pay a tiny amount for rent because I live in Oakland. Pretty easy to save.
I live walking distance to my job and live in the heart of San Francisco right next to BART. I pay very little money in rent. Patience on Craigslist pays off.
Re: After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming a promotion is known as "shifting the goal-post" too. You are essentially saying you are correct as long as you make more money than the original amount specified. Okay, you said it's trivial for an entry-level engineer to save six months living expenses. That's $12k for housing and ~$4k for food and transportation. That's the majority of the leftover money after rent, taxes, transportation, and food for a y…
No, it is not, because I am not assuming a promotion to prove my point re: whether you can save money in SF as a single engineer. You can. That's it.
No offense, but I'm strongly inclined to believe that you are not making it by on 80k a year in SF, and if you made that little money at one point, it was not for an extended enough period of time for you to properly understand what it afforded you. Your estimates seem to be nothing more than back of the napkin calculations missing major components like half of the taxes. Your numbers fit to someone making 100k+.
Edit: Also, you didn't even address the direct counter-point to your argument that the savings is "trivial".
Re: After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, if you live by yourself in SF, you are not making any realistic effort to save money, because you have not attempted to optimize your largest expense. OK, I'm done talking about this shifted scenario from what we started talking about. When you want to talk about how hard it is to save money in SF if you actually make any serious effort, I'm happy to resume.
Read your own message. You said you said the following: >I thought we were talking about someone who is making the bare minimum effort to save money Do you know what the bare minimum effort means? You are the one suggesting bare minimum effort now.
Living on your own is making zero effort. "Minimum effort" as a mathematical expression could even be negative (i.e. actively trying to rid yourself of money), but as a colloquialism typically means "appreciable," "reasonable," or "realistic." If you're not a native speaker, I can see how that might have confused you. If you are, then you're just being difficult.
Re: After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder
#146I don't know why she has never mentioned someone she worked with at all. I commented about this about her 70 days ago. --- So let's see her repository ( https://github.com/jendewalt/jennifer_dewalt ). This girl not only became a competent front end developer in 100 days, but looking at the Gemfile, she knows how to use capistrano, redis, capistrano, paperclip, omniauth and devise? She knows the best practices for Rai…
I don't think you can determine knowledge of things like Paperclip like this by looking at a repo. I used Paperclip once. Just follow a tutorial. Boom. Done. Looking at my repo you'd assume I just knew it too. Like others have brought up as well, women are even more likely to get help from others than guys who think they have to do everything themselves for better or worse, so there can be live tutors involved as well.
Re: After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder
#147This is fantastic. Especially inspiring to me, more than the fact that she learned how to code, is the fact that she dove into something that she had no background in, and after 180 days she came out with a solid understanding of the basics of programming; enough to do stuff on her own (and, combined with her graphic design/illustration skills, probably enough to do freelance webdev or get a junior level position in…
There are two type of people in life.
The first type graduates from college and their learning stops for the most part. They say to themselves, "well, I studied for four years and got a job, now it's finally time to sit back and relax." So they put in their regular 9-5 and then come home and waste their lives away by watching TV shows and playing video games and going out and getting drunk on weekends. Essentially, they "settle" into a middle-class lifestyle, where they earn enough money to get by and may be save a little too. They may be content, but they are also always stressed about the prospect of losing their jobs, because at their level of skill and ambition, they are almost always employees, rather than employers. Eventually, that's exactly what happens as the work they do is automated and they find themselves unemployed with little savings and no other skill that they can contribute to the economy.
The second type has a perpetual hunger for knowledge. They see college as the "launch pad" for a lifetime of learning. So they graduate and get jobs, but on the side they continue to read, discuss, listen and apply. They hang out with smart and successful people who also read, discuss, listen and apply. They look for problems and opportunities, and figure out what they need to learn to be able to work on them. These are the Jennifer Dewalt types whose ambition and discipline set them up for a continuously upward trajectory. They are the ones who refuse to settle, and therefore end up as leaders in organizations that innovate and change humanity.
It's funny because over the years I have developed what I think to be a very reliable method for predicting someone's future success. The method involves asking the person what they do in their spare time. Based on their answer, I can picture where they will end up in five to ten years.
Re: After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder
#148Okay now build an e-commerce web site that can handle thousands of transactions on a daily basis and can talk to internal systems like CRM, warehousing, and manufacturing. I'll be honest here. Coding was fun when I was young, but now I code for the money. So stay young Ms. Dewalt - don't become a cynical bastard like me (us?).
Evidence of why I tend to lurk on HackerNews. Some of you lot are insufferable sometimes.
Agreed. This tendency has been really noticeable lately. No constructive criticism, no insight or analysis. Just pure negativity.
I really think that what OP did is great and very few people could have done something similar.
Re: After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder
#149"The project certainly hasn’t given me a comprehensive understanding of software development, but it has laid a broad foundation for me to jump off of" No it has not, and no it has not. Don't get me wrong A+ for the effort... but it is a very small niche oriented effort. Comprehensive? Watch Rich Hickey talks ( http://www.infoq.com/author/Rich-Hickey ), try reading and exercising data structures (b-tree, rb-tree, bit…
I am going to answer here so I address everyone from one single place (some sort of DRY for answers) Web development has not become the equivalent of software development. There are multiple other areas, Web development is currently a good entry point for self tough people, but not the only either. I know a lot of people that start with VBA macros in Excel. Let me put it this way: I learned how to change the brake pa…
> It is important, it requires some serious skills, skills that for that matter I don't have
> But she is thirsty for more, challenge her to more!!!... unless you don't know where that more is because the belief that web development is all there is to it
Here's a thought exercise: what if you don't know were she should go because of your belief that her goals should align with yours?
Re: After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder
#150This is fantastic. Especially inspiring to me, more than the fact that she learned how to code, is the fact that she dove into something that she had no background in, and after 180 days she came out with a solid understanding of the basics of programming; enough to do stuff on her own (and, combined with her graphic design/illustration skills, probably enough to do freelance webdev or get a junior level position in…
Bravo! Very inspiring. It seems like the OP learned a lot about more than just programming: project management, developer psychology, the importance of shipping.... One thing did stand out to me: Having to produce something everyday forced me not to get hung up on understanding all the details of how something worked. This is actually one downside of this method. In the end you don't really learn anything deeply. In…
I'm definitely not done learning. Next up for me is tackling some bigger projects and spending some time figuring out how all the pieces fit together.