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How 5 years of reading HN enabled me to build the website for my business

czstrong.com

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Re: How 5 years of reading HN enabled me to build the website for my business

#21

Post by true_religion »

IsaacL wrote: post #16

I do think Wordpress, big hairy pile of PHP that it is, is actually a much better way to learn to code than CodeAcademy or equivalent. In fact, it's because working with WP involves so much hacking and kludges that it's such a good way to learn. CodeAcademy seems to follow the Dijkstra school of CS teaching... start people off with the fundamental principles. Sounds like the logical way to learn, but maybe it's not t…

The first money I made in programming was hacking at hairy piece of PHP called the Coppermine gallery back in '06.

Later, reading software design books made sense. I knew why you shouldn't do X or Y, because if you neglected using those techniques you'd end up being Coppermine---powerful, well loved by some, but barely maintainable and extendible only through immense effort and careful reading.

I like to think that I worked my way up the open source software ladder, learning techniques from each piece of software till I was able to make my own from scratch.

Re: How 5 years of reading HN enabled me to build the website for my business

#22

Post by tg3 »

polshaw wrote: post #7

The site looks very good, but $122 monthly costs for getting your site to 'a few hundred' visitors (mostly friends) is crazy. Of course, the site works and looks good (all that really matters to the end users), if you are getting a large income (and you got to that point quicker because of this outlay) then it may not be worth it to care, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Personally I'm more interested in how you…

The tech consultant position is more of a "business technology" consultant, which really means consulting on the business side of giant enterprise software installs, like Oracle. Deep technical skills are helpful, but not really necessary.

Not to mention the technical skills needed to get a website up and running are totally different than those required to build an enterprise software solution.

Re: How 5 years of reading HN enabled me to build the website for my business

#24

Post by dinkumthinkum »

IsaacL wrote: post #16

I do think Wordpress, big hairy pile of PHP that it is, is actually a much better way to learn to code than CodeAcademy or equivalent. In fact, it's because working with WP involves so much hacking and kludges that it's such a good way to learn. CodeAcademy seems to follow the Dijkstra school of CS teaching... start people off with the fundamental principles. Sounds like the logical way to learn, but maybe it's not t…

I don't personally think this is a great way to learn programming at all. Sure you might eventual play around with a little Javascript and some PHP but it's at such a surface and it's a long slog. Figuring out how to signup for an FTP account is actually much simpler than learn fundamental programming concepts and languages. I mean I guess it depends on what your goals are but it's just a such strange way to me, I'd have a hard time calling this programming, to just be honest about it.

Re: How 5 years of reading HN enabled me to build the website for my business

#25

Post by dinkumthinkum »

gregwong410 wrote: post #8

Compelling read to get beginners to actually take action. I'm in somewhat of the same situation and found it highly relatable. Agreed on the previous comment, cpuStorage makes me think of a processor.

I recommend reading old school text files than this method though. :)
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