Business guy still looking for that elusive code monkey? Read this first.
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Business guy still looking for that elusive code monkey? Read this first.
1–10 of 17 posts
Re: Business guy still looking for that elusive code monkey? Read this first.
#2Great key takeaways for us n00bs looking to get our feet wet!
Re: Business guy still looking for that elusive code monkey? Read this first.
#3Can't agree more with this advice. Everybody's talking about MOOCs, CodeAcademy etc and while I used those platforms for sure, looking back it was the experience that really helped me. The hours and hours of not knowing why your code is not compiling and learning the hard way is invaluable - but schools and classes can't emulate that well enough.
Re: Business guy still looking for that elusive code monkey? Read this first.
#4It seems a lot of people misinterpret "don't reinvent the wheel" as "if they exist, use lots of pre-written libraries". End result is I see projects with ridiculous numbers of dependencies.
Reinventing the wheel is very useful as a learning experience and to take a peek at how things work behind the scenes. Often you may only need a portion of what a certain library does, and it is perfectly feasible and correct to implement it yourself.
Especially horrible is the message encouraging use of Bootstrap to style web pages. The last thing web design needs is more generic and blatantly obvious Bootstrap layouts. It can be a useful tool, but most people use it wrong and it very often leaves a bad taste.
Rather, the idiom one should follow is "Don't reinvent the wheel, but feel free to refine or re-implement it, as long as you don't end up reinventing the flat tire."
Re: Business guy still looking for that elusive code monkey? Read this first.
#5It seems a lot of people misinterpret "don't reinvent the wheel" as "if they exist, use lots of pre-written libraries". End result is I see projects with ridiculous numbers of dependencies. Reinventing the wheel is very useful as a learning experience and to take a peek at how things work behind the scenes. Often you may only need a portion of what a certain library does, and it is perfectly feasible and correct to i…
So are you saying that novice developers (i dont think the author would even call himself that) should not use bootstrap and instead waste extra time learning how to structure their pages? Its not hard to insert a 'pre-written' bootstrap css stylesheet and completely change how a bootstrap page looks while still taking advantage of the grid system etc.
Re: Business guy still looking for that elusive code monkey? Read this first.
#6It seems a lot of people misinterpret "don't reinvent the wheel" as "if they exist, use lots of pre-written libraries". End result is I see projects with ridiculous numbers of dependencies. Reinventing the wheel is very useful as a learning experience and to take a peek at how things work behind the scenes. Often you may only need a portion of what a certain library does, and it is perfectly feasible and correct to i…
What is the "wrong way" to use bootstrap?
Re: Business guy still looking for that elusive code monkey? Read this first.
#7I have to say, as a "business guy" cofounder who is finally pushing out his first apps, that starting with Codecademy is probably the worst way to go about things. I don't know how many times I started different Codecademy courses and ended up saying, "OK, I can create a loop... now what?" That is decidedly not the first step in learning how to program.
The first step is learning how to use the command line, getting a text editor, linking those two, and figuring out how to push something live. You can code loops all day long, but until you have any practical implementation of that (i.e. building even the simplest of apps and pushing it live), coding will feel abstract and unreachable.
If I were to start over (I'm learning Ruby/Rails) I would start with a tutorial (Michael Hartl's rails tutorial, Treehouse or One Month Rails), but really I would use them all at the same time, because their emphases are different and each picks up on parts that the other leaves out. Only once I had "finished" a couple of apps following the tutorials (which cover everything from getting a text editor to using github, pushing to Heroku and connecting Heroku with a DNS) would I go back to Codecademy and learn Ruby. The context of knowing what you can actually do with those snippets of code is incredibly important.
And yes, as others have pointed out, building a simple rails app and putting bootstrap on it is not the goal of programming, but knocking that process is like saying "You shouldn't learn to count on your fingers because really you need to multiply."
Re: Business guy still looking for that elusive code monkey? Read this first.
#8It seems a lot of people misinterpret "don't reinvent the wheel" as "if they exist, use lots of pre-written libraries". End result is I see projects with ridiculous numbers of dependencies. Reinventing the wheel is very useful as a learning experience and to take a peek at how things work behind the scenes. Often you may only need a portion of what a certain library does, and it is perfectly feasible and correct to i…
I disagree with your negative views on Bootstrap. Most people don't need, nor can they afford a custom webpage, and bootstrap is perfect for that.
Developing a webpage for $500 is going to get you Bootstrapped the fuck out, nothing more, nothing less.
Re: Business guy still looking for that elusive code monkey? Read this first.
#9> "Get help setting up your development and production environments. In English, this means set up where you write your code and where you see the results of it. Setting this up is the biggest pain for us non-technical people. In fact, I think that it is the single most difficult thing in learning to code."
As a lifelong hacker, this is something its easy to lose sight of until you try to help someone else get started.
Last time I needed to help a newbie get running, we tried https://www.nitrous.io/ and it was helpful. It defers dealing with all the environment / sysadmin stuff until later, so the learner can get positive feedback sooner.
Re: Business guy still looking for that elusive code monkey? Read this first.
#10It seems a lot of people misinterpret "don't reinvent the wheel" as "if they exist, use lots of pre-written libraries". End result is I see projects with ridiculous numbers of dependencies. Reinventing the wheel is very useful as a learning experience and to take a peek at how things work behind the scenes. Often you may only need a portion of what a certain library does, and it is perfectly feasible and correct to i…
So are you saying that novice developers (i dont think the author would even call himself that) should not use bootstrap and instead waste extra time learning how to structure their pages? Its not hard to insert a 'pre-written' bootstrap css stylesheet and completely change how a bootstrap page looks while still taking advantage of the grid system etc.
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