Learn to Code and Make the Software You Want
Nate Westheimer - Co-Founder, Picturelife Inc. (personal blog)
Vinicius Vacanti - CEO, Yipit.com (personal blog)
This session was lead by Vin and Nate, two self-described "business guys" who became technical founders of their own start-ups. They want you and I to become technical founders too, that why they put this session together. 100% inspiring.
- Have an idea you want to put into action? Don't look for a technical co-founder. Try and build it yourself.
- The only prerequisite is having an idea that you need to build. (Need to build, not want to build)
- According to Nate and Vin, its easier than you think.
- They both reported having a "sweat lodge experience" - where they took a 5 day chunk of time and did nothing but learn to code. This is all they did.
- At its core, building something involves a user on one end, a server, and your app. (Dont over-complicate it).
- In the beginning don't worry about security, scaling issues, beautiful code, or maintainability. None of those things matter if you're just learning.
- If you don't know something - its okay, there are plenty of resources to help you!
- Both consider UX the only thing that matters.
- If you have a question you cant answer, wait 24 hours before asking for help. This will force you to learn.
- Both had some great resources for just getting started:
- tech.yipit.com
- djangobook.com
- railstutorials.com
- codecademy
- Chrome inspector
- stackoverflow.com
- Forrst
- djangosites.com
- No matter how many notes I include in this post, it wont capture the essence of this session, listen to the entire session on the SXSW website - link below.
If you have ever wanted to build something and didn't know where to start - this session was for you (and it still is for you, you can listen to audio of this session on the SXSW website.) As a matter of fact, this session inspired my good friend Chris Knutson and I to take the free online class, Programming Methodology, from Stanford.
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