LACHINOUS

Ok, so this morning I posted on how I have to earn my place and prove my worth to the guys at The Startup Bus (via improving my code skills); afterwards, I went on with my day. At one point, the class I was in got particularly boring, so I decided to go check my other blog’s stats… I accidentally ended up in this one’s… Whoa.

It had exploded.

I’m sure  this blog had never seen that much traffic (over 300 views in a couple of hours). I got some tweets, comments and even a couple of emails regarding my last post. Turns out, part 2 of this saga made it up to Hacker News… so that explains the hordes that came my way (which incidentally motivated me even more).

The comments posted directly on HN were pretty cool (shared below). I liked them because they praise Mexico (which is where my heart and home is), and because they speak a very clear truth: I’ve made it this far only because I’m a part of a vibrant community that is paving the way for generations to come. Ortega y Gasset said it best “I am me plus my circumstance; if I don’t save the later, I don’t save myself”.

The HN Comments:

It’s great to finally see people, taking initiatives to learn and evolve in the digital age. I’m of the opinion that everyone should learn how to program, so seeing people all over the global, actually do it from scratch is great.

Also, don’t use w3schools… http://w3fools.com/

This is really motivating all the efforts you are making to be prepared for the bus. Im really proud that Mexico is on the map of the start up world and this kind of initiative are arriving.

Interesting. As a Mexican entrepreneur now I see a proper growing ecosystem. Efforts like these will produce results for the years -and entrepreneurs- to come. The start-up scene is organizing better, but we have to keep the push and support.

Also, Eoin stumbled across this blog as well. We had been messaging back and forth all day, on Startup Bus business, in one of those messages he casually added, “I read your blog post. If it’s too easy, maybe we should set the bar higher?” Evidently, with all that traffic and travel-planning rush: I was up for it, so the bet right now is as follows: not only should I be able to prototype, I should also try as hard as I may to get my head around Git and be able to work in a code base; hence, making me twice as useful as a non-coder.

I have gotten more help already. I got a new tutorial to get my HTML and CSS down (and at a great discount price too!). Finally, I got a couple of suggestions to check out the Bootstrap, from Twitter, which is supposed to be a cool way to smash out design fast.

All in all, this was one fine day to be a non-hacking blogger

Tags: code, JavaScript, programming

I’m social sciences major and an anthropologist at heart. I posses very limited math abilities, and I’m learning to code with a method that can only be described as self-taught, community learning. I decided to write a series of blog posts documenting my experience, in case I can amuse some; and, most importantly, in case some other maverick finds it useful.

My approach to learning to code, was the same approach I take with research: reading, and roaming around it before actually heading to the field. I therefore, needed something I could read and write notes on.  After some research in Amazon, blogs and forums, I came across How to Count (Programming for mere mortals), a fantastic and brief book by Steven Frank, that explains  how code (regardless of the language) communicates with a computer, and how a computer, well, computes. If you’re not familiar with binaries, hexadecimals and systems language, this book is for you, since it breaks it down in the simplest of ways; also, Steven is a very approachable guy, who answers emails and tweets.

I first thought I would learn Python, probably because that was the language I got most termed dropped at Super Happy Dev House and Startup Weekend; that, and the fact that the name sounds badass, had me hooked… The point being, I wanted to learn to code, and the language didn’t worry me much (the maths did). Anyways, when I was about to order my first books on Python, David Weekly tweeted about Codecademy (not to be confused with Code Academy), and a little after that the “Code Year” challenge came by. So that’s how I started learning JavaScript.

The program is pretty straight-forward: you get a weekly lesson with some exercises and one or two projects. Every time you complete one, you get a badge; so you can keep tabs on your friends and monitor your own progress. I have to say, I haven’t followed the Codecademy program strictly; I’ve done it at my own pace, covering weeks of work in a couple of days, or doing nothing for weeks on end. It’s given me an edge, since the review material is filled with doubts someone else already put forward. Also, I’ve had loads of help (going out with a hacker is a BIG advantage) and I’ve slowly learned to post in forums, chat rooms and twitter even.

I have not programmed anything outside Codecademy this far, but I promised a friend (who is also doing Code Year) that we would on the next SHDH. I still have no idea what my first project will be, since this far I’ve only done a FizzBuzz, a dice game, and a taxi fare project; and I also have no idea how to do front end. I guess I’ll post whenever I get the ball rolling on ideas or whenever the next SHDH happens.

This far, I’ve had everything; blonde moments, divine revelations, frustration, happy dances… But other than with loops, I haven’t gotten any major headaches, which I hope means I’m not as underqualified as I first thought I was. Anyways, I’ll do objects in Java Script this week, which means it’s all about to get even more interesting.

Tags: code, JavaScript, programming