How many people reading Hacker News do not have any programming skills?
This includes being able to make pretty much any sort of computer or internet program or app, basic html not included. I ask because, though I do not code, I find HN great and wonder if others feel the same way.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadAs for my progress so far in web programming, I'm starting from the front-end basics of HTML, CSS and Javascript first. The past two weeks were spent on relearning HTML and CSS (I picked them up back in middle school but forgot over the years) and will hopefully start on basic javascript in about a week. By my personal metric of success, I'm pretty satisfied with my daily progress and can at least build basic websites that meets established web standards.
I meet lots of people who want to build things that require programming but don't program for whatever reason, and I've always wondered what the root cause there is.
Also, happy new years ;)
For the first few years, our web development studio couldn't afford to hire anyone. On of my business partners was the sole developer. My other business partner was in charge of administering web hosting and domains. I did all the selling, marketing and project management myself.
We were outsourcing web design work to freelancers and students, because the three of us had no web design skills whatsoever. Then we changed the way we market our business and made our business website really sell. Business took off, we hired two designers and our first developer. After that, we hired new people in support and project management. I convinced one of my developers to accept a job in the sales department and that was one of the best decisions the both of us ever made; It enabled the company to hire more (sales)people and gave more freedom to me personally, so I could concentrate on running the business. A few months ago we outsourced one part of our business to a specialized web hosting and domains company, because they are doing it much better than we ever could. We hired a senior developer who took over software development from my partner, became our lead developer and is currently in charge of software research and in-house software products. He's not writing any code for our clients, our junior developer is.
Tomorrow is our company's 9th birthday. Today, we are focusing on building a powerful sales force and creating software products we could launch internationally.
I guess we could afford to hire the 10th guy in the same way we could afford to hire the 1st guy: Our business itself had to make enough money to pay for all their salaries (and our own - and we were three partners in the company). The key moment was when we put enough thought into sales+marketing and gathered enough courage to hire a complete stranger to come work for us.
I do work closely with programmers, though, and I consider our relationship a symbiotic one.
I am curious, what kind of schooling / experience do you have?
That led me to the web in '95, where I learned HTML by working right on the server, using vi as my text editor. We had a tiny shop, so everyone did everything. Graphic design, front end coding, content - the only thing I couldn't do was back-end stuff.
Eventually we were bought by Razorfish, and they decided some people would be called "information architects," so in 1997 I took the title of IA, and went from there.
I've studied with various mentors, but my best education has come from Nielsen Norman Group's usability weeks, and constantly pestering people in emails, on message boards, listservs, conferences, you name it. The UX community is pretty tight-knit, and people really help each other out.
In the years that I've done IA and UX, I've worked for IBM, Disney, and several large agencies. I started as a usability freak, but have expanded my horizons to realize that there's a whole spectrum of things that are important to a good experience.
The best wakeup calls I had were when Don Norman published "Emotional Design," and when Peter Morville made his UX honeycomb ( http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000029.php)
I'm now executive director for a large NY agency with offices worldwide, and I have a very diverse group of UX people in the different offices.
One thing I look for in a UX practitioner is a diversity of experience and background. Someone who studied IA in college and has only been on one path often has trouble empathizing with real world users.
I have hired people with degrees in library sciences, human computer interaction, design, computer science, psychology, human factors, even theater. It's all about how a person solves problems to me, not the degree they pursued.
I'd encourage your friend to spend more time on listservs like IXDA or SIGIA, going to conferences like Adaptive Path's UX Week and N/Ng's usability week, and making that his new education. It's incredibly rewarding.
At work there is plenty of other stuff to do so it's not a priority to improve my programming skill. I sit next to a dozen devs who handle all the programming for the sites.
In my spare time I'm working on a couple of other things so it's not a big priority either.
Despite the people here who say that they went for no-programming to having a huge internet facing webapp in 3 months:
(a) That was 3 months of 60+ hour weeks (b) I don't think that being a "good" programmer is that easy. The junior programmers at work have been doing it for 5 years full time. I don't think I can get to a reasonable standard in just a few months (even of 60 hour weeks).
I'd love to say that the reason I haven't been programming is due to my company's policy strict intellectual property agreement (wherein I'm forbidden from working on open source projects, or publishing any code); but I stopped coding before that was even an issue.
The past few months I've rekindled some of my interest, I have some things I'd like to work on, and I've rediscovered an interest in math that has lead me to start to fill in some of the gaps of my experience. I'm hoping that interest doesn't fizzle out (as it usually does), and I actually make some headway on some of my projects.
In some ways I feel like we're in a golden age of programming; if nothing else I'm more excited about the state of things then I've been anytime in the past fifteen years.
Of those who don't go further with it, most don't for sheer lack of interest. Of the infinite ways we can spend our time, they have other things that interest them more.
Of the others, the main block is the arbitrariness of programming. They usually have the same problem with math. Most math beyond addition, subtraction, multiplication and division strikes them as divorced from reality. They question whether statistics are real, or just a fluke. They'll wonder what the practical significance of solving a quadratic equation is. They are put off by the notation, and especially the wholly arbitrary and historically structured use of certain letters for equations, such as x, y and z for unknowns, a and b and c for coefficients. They will ask why? They are not happy to be told that these conventions were adopted for convenience. They will ask "Whose convenience?"
Jeff Atwood has written about this here:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/separating-programm...
That page has this good quote:
"It has taken us some time to dare to believe in our own results. It now seems to us, although we are aware that at this point we do not have sufficient data, and so it must remain a speculation, that what distinguishes the three groups in the first test is their different attitudes to meaninglessness. Formal logical proofs, and therefore programs – formal logical proofs that particular computations are possible, expressed in a formal system called a programming language – are utterly meaningless. To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it."
I've been reading about how no tech people will partner with someone just because they have an idea and frankly I'd like to give the middle finger to those authors, however they are most likely right as I cannot seem to find anyone to help me out.
I just wish there was a place to find good programmers with free time who want to take an idea and turn it into reality.
Any tips?
It's hard to hire a good x, when you can't do x your self. You don't know what to look for.
Succeed, then recruit. Without a track record it's going to be hard to convince someone to be your technical co-founder. If you want to pursue your ideas, and lack the skill set to build them yourself, you need a more convincing pitch.
What would convince me that I might want to work with you? (Were I not knee deep in my own company)
1) Past success. Join a tech heavy team and do all the non-tech work that they are not giving 100% on and help the team succeed. Recruiting with a successful history will be a lot easier.
2) Sell the product first. This obviously depends on what your ideas are, but if you pitched me to be your co-founder and do the tech work, it would be a lot more convincing if you had a pile of customers already lined up and waiting to pay. (As long as the deadlines were reasonable and it wasn't going to be a complete death march)
The key is that a founding developer knows that they are going to be bringing huge concrete value to the venture by actually creating the product. You have to convince them that you are going to be bringing an equal amount of value, and that they won't be the only one busting their ass to make it happen.
If you want others to help you, you better start by helping your self. Take the time and learn the stuff you need to learn. Just because there are so many technologies on the web it doesn't mean you need to know them all. All you really need is HTML and CSS and a decent editor. Instead of just talking about your ideas create something that others can see.
I've dabbled in VB (back in 1991), used Prolog for a law school AI assignment, made great use of WordBasic (Office 95) to save a company thousands of dollars a year by autogenerating indices...
More recently I played with Android App Inventor and created a basic "English Nanny" (shake the baby) app, which took a couple of hours. C++, C#, Java etc. just seem too difficult to learn.
Any advice would be appreciated, of course :)
In a lot of respects, they are -- there's a lot of ceremony and boilerplate around getting started that's there to please the compiler (and programmer job security) rather than the programmer. If you want to learn to code, I'd try something like Python, Ruby, or JavaScript first -- you say you're a "linear, spaghetti-code thinker," but that pretty much describes everyone who's starting out. Something in the Python/Ruby/JS mold would make it easier for you to see relationships between different parts of your code and make the leap from linear thinking to something more organized, without the noise that languages like C#/C++/Java impose on you.
Good luck!
OO doesn't harmonize with my brain. I find it much easier to get into a flow with functional languages.
I have the feeling that there is a lot of potential good that an epidemiology-oriented hacker could do.
Problem is, I have no direct external pressure to motivate learning, and no direction on what to learn. Reading Hacker News is a way of gaining both motivation and direction.
I haven't really programmed since my freshmen year, when I switched to anthropology. Had an interesting year, post graduation, doing archaeology for CRM firms. Then I decided I kinda liked getting paid, and now I'm doing instructional design for a retailer. I am slightly less broke.
I am also going, "Hm, all my engineering co-horts are not broke. And jeez, why do I read HN all the time? Maybe I should start playing around, again..."
But, no, at the moment, no skillz.
If you've recently learned programming but haven't been in front of one of our supported surveillance platforms lately you may still be counted in this number - please feel free to update it!
I've got 3 or 4 books from the Pragmatic Bookshelf open on my iPad at all times, and I toy with online tutorials, but learning Farsi was much easier :)
YMMV, and probably will.