I have a friend who has a Master's in Entertainment Arts & Engineering (with and emphasis on the arts) and is going back to get a bachelor's in computer science for this very reason. Maybe it's overkill, but he's definitely tired of depending on other people to build his stuff for him.
As another anecdote, despite having two technical co-founders for my first startup, I taught myself how to code. I consider it the best move I've made in the last 5 years.
Now on my 2nd startup, my highly technical co-founder recently left. If I hadn't learned how to code, I'd be in full panic mode right now. Going from "the business guy" a couple years ago to being able to build an MVP is huge.
> unwilling to learn how to do the things they want to do
Translating what you just said: they just don't really want to learn it! (yeah, they feel good when they say they want to lean it, but they don't really want that - they want just some of the benefits of knowing a certain thing - like coding - but they are not willing to invest the required effort to reap those benefits)
This could not be more true. Forever, i said the same shit. I have amazing ideas but I know nothing about programming. I started learning html and css and love it. Cant wait to master it before moving on to another language. It truly is rewarding and I certainly look at websites differently.
I have no issue with HTML/CSS and a bit of Javascript. But still find it surprisingly hard to get my head around native development languages (C, Obj-C, Python etc)
As someone who is also learning to program, I think the most difficult things are not the actual languages and using the right syntax etc. It's the meta information and terms that are used, as well as a lot of tutorials making assumptions ie. I had to find out what a 'gem' was.
Recently starting to look at Ruby, I had to work out the different between a live environment like irb and just having code written into a text editor such as Sublime.
I have a feeling that these kinds of things throw people off, and I'm yet to find a great resource that really explains these things clearly all in one place.
Ruby is a good language to learn. There are a massive amount of resources out there for people trying to learn. Check out codecademy or codeschool for their tutorials. They can really help you learn the basics.
Another tip is try to actually build some basic programs. You can learn so much more from building something than reading about it.
I couldn't get my head around ruby, when I tried. Python stuck.
So in my opinion, it is something, that has to fit to oneself. So my recommendation would be to try some things on codeacademy (or anything like this) and see what fits.
And no, I will not wander into the "this language is better territory" ;-)
I was in the same boat nearly a year ago. I had knowledge of HTML and CSS and not much else. Since then, I've learned Ruby, Rails, and a little of Objective-C. I feel so much better now that I have the confidence to build anything I want.
I definitely recommend anyone that wants to learn programming to go all in and pick up a few languages.
While I personally like the DIY ethic I would be somewhat hesitant to recommend a novice starts developing production web apps.
For example , someone has a great idea for a site, picks up a basic PHP book, reads all of the "advice" on PHP.net and hacks it all together with a few copy and pastes from various coding forums.
Let's say they get some traction and pick up a few hundred users who start putting personal info in there , reusing their bank password and linking it to all of their social media accounts.
Problem is that the app is a mess of md5 or plaintext passwords and unsanitised input and when that thing gets owned by some hacker it can have real consequences to those users who trusted it.
This might be slightly hypocritical though, since this is basically how I learned to code in my early days but now people have so much of their life online that the stakes are a little higher.
...not to be mean, but if you reuse passwords without at least having 2 of them (one for secure, money related stuff and another for everything else), you deserve having your account cleaned and identity stolen.
Considering the world we leave in, I think that "basic personal informational security", like not reusing passwords, not executing email attachments and not falling for basic social engineering scams should be mandatory thought in schools starting from 10 year olds, and have something like "medium personal information security" (with knowledge of what a secued connection - green browser bar is, what a digital signature and key based authentication or multi-factor auth are) mandatory for all people handling other's personal information, even for the lowest public functionaries. These things should be drilled down into peoples' heads not matter they want to learn it or not, just as you don't ask your 7 year old whether he wants to learn to read and write, you just tell him he has to. It shouldn't matter whether you're a literature major or maybe you haven't even graduated high school, but if you have anything to do with handling others information - and 90% of people do have - you should know basic infosec just as you need to know to read and write! It's ugly, but we're living in an ugly world and in the middle of a war, even if it's invisible, and we should adapt to it!
Even people who follow a sensible password policy could fall victim if a site that they trust is compromised and their personal information is used against them in part of a bigger scam.
The problem with providing Infosec education is that the threats change faster than we could reasonably hope to keep people up to date with them and even programmers struggle to truly understand it all.
>For example , someone has a great idea for a site, picks up a basic PHP book, reads all of the "advice" on PHP.net and hacks it all together with a few copy and pastes from various coding forums.
You mean exactly what happened with CDBaby, the site the author of TFA created, which became a highly successful business?
Is that a bad thing?
As for the lax security thing, we have seen this too many times in supposedly big and respected web services to be particularly fearful of a newcomer. (Not to mention that the same risks to users that happen by accident by some newb programmer, can also happen by intent, by malicious companies putting up fake businesses and such. People should be vigilant in any case).
There are a couple of answers I can give here:
1) When the company grows large enough, it will hire people and fix this. If it's small, it cannot do damage to many people anyway.
2) The most important services (credit cards and such) are in most cases delegated to third parties anyway (Paypal, Stripe, etc).
An example that comes to mind is when I was at university a fellow student built something that was effectively a speed dating type website for students.
He put out the code on the university FTP server so I got a chance to look at it. Plenty of stuff in there that could easily have been exploited, luckily the site didn't really take off and I was able to help him fix the vulnerabilities (at least the ones that I could identify).
If someone malicious had got into that , they would have been able to read a whole bunch of information including private messages sent between users, that could have been something that could certainly have had some bad effects on some people's lives.
I didn't give up on BASIC in the 1980s. Nothing wrong with BASIC per se. Back then I wrote an assembler in BASIC for this processor http://www.cpushack.com/tag/8x305/ We were imbedding an 8X305 in a communications adapter and needed to extend it with some special instructions.
20 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 55.7 ms ] threadNow on my 2nd startup, my highly technical co-founder recently left. If I hadn't learned how to code, I'd be in full panic mode right now. Going from "the business guy" a couple years ago to being able to build an MVP is huge.
Translating what you just said: they just don't really want to learn it! (yeah, they feel good when they say they want to lean it, but they don't really want that - they want just some of the benefits of knowing a certain thing - like coding - but they are not willing to invest the required effort to reap those benefits)
As someone who is also learning to program, I think the most difficult things are not the actual languages and using the right syntax etc. It's the meta information and terms that are used, as well as a lot of tutorials making assumptions ie. I had to find out what a 'gem' was.
Recently starting to look at Ruby, I had to work out the different between a live environment like irb and just having code written into a text editor such as Sublime.
I have a feeling that these kinds of things throw people off, and I'm yet to find a great resource that really explains these things clearly all in one place.
Another tip is try to actually build some basic programs. You can learn so much more from building something than reading about it.
So in my opinion, it is something, that has to fit to oneself. So my recommendation would be to try some things on codeacademy (or anything like this) and see what fits.
And no, I will not wander into the "this language is better territory" ;-)
I definitely recommend anyone that wants to learn programming to go all in and pick up a few languages.
For example , someone has a great idea for a site, picks up a basic PHP book, reads all of the "advice" on PHP.net and hacks it all together with a few copy and pastes from various coding forums.
Let's say they get some traction and pick up a few hundred users who start putting personal info in there , reusing their bank password and linking it to all of their social media accounts.
Problem is that the app is a mess of md5 or plaintext passwords and unsanitised input and when that thing gets owned by some hacker it can have real consequences to those users who trusted it.
This might be slightly hypocritical though, since this is basically how I learned to code in my early days but now people have so much of their life online that the stakes are a little higher.
Considering the world we leave in, I think that "basic personal informational security", like not reusing passwords, not executing email attachments and not falling for basic social engineering scams should be mandatory thought in schools starting from 10 year olds, and have something like "medium personal information security" (with knowledge of what a secued connection - green browser bar is, what a digital signature and key based authentication or multi-factor auth are) mandatory for all people handling other's personal information, even for the lowest public functionaries. These things should be drilled down into peoples' heads not matter they want to learn it or not, just as you don't ask your 7 year old whether he wants to learn to read and write, you just tell him he has to. It shouldn't matter whether you're a literature major or maybe you haven't even graduated high school, but if you have anything to do with handling others information - and 90% of people do have - you should know basic infosec just as you need to know to read and write! It's ugly, but we're living in an ugly world and in the middle of a war, even if it's invisible, and we should adapt to it!
The problem with providing Infosec education is that the threats change faster than we could reasonably hope to keep people up to date with them and even programmers struggle to truly understand it all.
You mean exactly what happened with CDBaby, the site the author of TFA created, which became a highly successful business?
Is that a bad thing?
As for the lax security thing, we have seen this too many times in supposedly big and respected web services to be particularly fearful of a newcomer. (Not to mention that the same risks to users that happen by accident by some newb programmer, can also happen by intent, by malicious companies putting up fake businesses and such. People should be vigilant in any case).
There are a couple of answers I can give here:
1) When the company grows large enough, it will hire people and fix this. If it's small, it cannot do damage to many people anyway.
2) The most important services (credit cards and such) are in most cases delegated to third parties anyway (Paypal, Stripe, etc).
He put out the code on the university FTP server so I got a chance to look at it. Plenty of stuff in there that could easily have been exploited, luckily the site didn't really take off and I was able to help him fix the vulnerabilities (at least the ones that I could identify).
If someone malicious had got into that , they would have been able to read a whole bunch of information including private messages sent between users, that could have been something that could certainly have had some bad effects on some people's lives.
I gave up on BASIC in the 1980s. Maybe something cool has happened and I'm missing out?