Ask HN: how to become technical in 2-3 years?

Re:Ask HN: how to become technical in 2-3 years? by lincolnq on Thursday April 21, 2011 @07:18PM (#2472750)

Learning to hack is not too hard. PG says 6 months to a year. (http://www.paulgraham.com/raq.html) I tend to agree.

A friend is working through "How to Think like a Computer Scientist" -- http://openbookproject.net/thinkCSpy/ -- which happens to teach Python, and then he will learn Django (http://www.djangoproject.com/) and build Web applications and be most of the way to the level of technical skill it takes to build a prototype Web app and attempt to get funding.

In addition, I would suggest that it's a good idea to get your feet wet in actually building stuff quickly, rather than reading and designing all the time. Your designs are probably going out the window rather quickly once you start showing people a working prototype.

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Re:Ask HN: how to become technical in 2-3 years? by Sabrosa on Thursday April 21, 2011 @07:43PM (#2472812)

Hmm. Perhaps I was not as over-optimistic as I initially thought.

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Re:Ask HN: how to become technical in 2-3 years? by civilian on Thursday April 21, 2011 @08:05PM (#2472846)

You weren't :)

I took two night classes- the first was 10-week course on an introduction to python (which used exactly that book) and the second 10-week course was on internet programming. We learned other stuff in that class (REST, CherryPy, HTML protocol) but I spent most of the time going through the django tutorials & docs. djangobook.com provides a good alternative source for django documentation. And then after 5 months of study, I was hired as a python/django web dev. But I got lucky and I was serious during that time.

If you want any more tips or hit any roadblocks, feel free to hit me up: civilianjones gmail com

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Re:Ask HN: how to become technical in 2-3 years? by Sabrosa on Thursday April 21, 2011 @08:19PM (#2472880)

Wow, a developer job? Impressive. What was your background before then?

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Re:Ask HN: how to become technical in 2-3 years? by civilian on Thursday April 21, 2011 @08:28PM (#2472896)

I was doing data-entry vomit and I had a degree in biochemistry. I had taken two years of programming in high school (like 6-7 years ago) which helped give me a basic understanding/foundation.

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Re:Ask HN: how to become technical in 2-3 years? by tumes on Thursday April 21, 2011 @08:41PM (#2472921)

Ha, as someone with a degree is chem with a similar programming background who has been studying rails for 6 months, you give me hope and make me feel like a total slacker! Seriously though, that's awesome!

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