I wonder if the knowledge transfers to bare-metal programming.
How a blacksmith learned to code
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Re: How a blacksmith learned to code
#22I love this story (and have read his book), but this sure isn't happening in the Valley or San Francisco.
As someone who's a similar skill level to Josh and applied to tons of jobs here in the Valley, I've found that this is an isolated story on the other coast. In SV/SF you have 5/6 developer bootcamps cranking out developers each month applying for a handful of junior jobs. I'm sure the blogging helped, but I doubt any companies would have offered the same salary here (60-80k) when they could have had their pick of developers that just worked 80 hours a week for 12 weeks.
Re: How a blacksmith learned to code
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, small bite-sized goals is so important for keeping going in long-term discouraging projects - as let's face it, programming can be infuriating and tedious! lukeprog calls the focus on small bite-sized goal "success spirals" http://lesswrong.com/lw/58m/build_small_skills_in_the_right_... and I think it's definitely important.
I just noticed your username, and I have to say thank you for your detailed articles and specially for your melatonin study. It personally helped me in improving my sleeping habits when I was having a lot of stress-induced sleeping issues. Thanks again!
You're welcome. I think the melatonin suggestion is particularly valuable for HNers as we all tend to spend so many hours staring at bright white/blue lightbulbs called screens...
(I think my recently finished Redshift self-experiment will show this effect dramatically.)
Re: How a blacksmith learned to code
#24everybody is learning howto code but when will people learn how to solve hard problems. I would rather see people learning complex math and physics before learning how to code. creating various crud applications is not really that hard.
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Re: How a blacksmith learned to code
#25everybody is learning howto code but when will people learn how to solve hard problems. I would rather see people learning complex math and physics before learning how to code. creating various crud applications is not really that hard.
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Re: How a blacksmith learned to code
#26Re: How a blacksmith learned to code
#27Frankly, I'd be more interested in "How a developer learned to forge metal."
It's still far too early for me to write much about it, but maybe I'll have more to say in the future. So far, I've taken a single-session introductory class at a smithy a couple towns over and gone back a few times since then for some self-directed practice. My range of techniques is very limited, and even without straying too far from what I know, I am still frequently surprised by what turns out to be easy and what turns out to be hard. I don't remember going through such a stage with coding. I was not exposed to the notion of algorithms or programming techniques or commonly-encountered sub-problems until long after I started, so I couldn't really think about difficulty in those terms.
Re: How a blacksmith learned to code
#28everybody is learning howto code but when will people learn how to solve hard problems. I would rather see people learning complex math and physics before learning how to code. creating various crud applications is not really that hard.
I don't want to downplay learning complex math and physics, but there are other "hard problems" that programmers (and hence products) aren't solving that don't invoke math or physics. One of the things I harp on in product development is "if we only solve the easy problems, what's to keep someone else from coming along and solving the easy problems better than we do?"
Just a different perspective on the same topic ;)
Re: How a blacksmith learned to code
#29Fantastic show Joshua. Very useful post and I passed it along to some friends, who wanted to get into coding. To state an obvious and pervasive point, on why I would want to hire someone like Josh, is his persistence and hard work, which will be as important an asset as his coding skills (even more so, at current point where his coding skills are accretive).
A point to note - The one-month rails course is now 99$, as opposed to $49 you had paid.
Re: How a blacksmith learned to code
#30everybody is learning howto code but when will people learn how to solve hard problems. I would rather see people learning complex math and physics before learning how to code. creating various crud applications is not really that hard.
It's harder than it looks. To make an average CRUD app the current state of the art, you need to know a very large number of tools, each of which has its own ecosystem of alternatives, each of which has a different philosophy. This makes it all but impossible to offer a course on the subject that meets any standard of exhaustiveness. So the would-be web developer has to wade through a morass of conflicting ideas on best-practices and will inevitably screw something important up, like authorization.
Then you have the constantly-shifting nature of the field, forcing you to continuously study to stay on top. It's much more difficult than it looks to an insider who already put in the hours learning.