

Hobbyst programmer – please help me to choose the right, time-proof tools - dorfuss

Dear HN,<p>I am just a hobbyst programmer (recently worked as a senior BPMS analyst for one of the &quot;big four&quot; consulting companies), still learning to code, but software engineering will rather not be something I do professionally for a living. I&#x27;m 29.<p>There are a couple of things I would like to build (scholar notes manager, complex Hebrew typesetting software with an extensive critical apparatus support, a space flight simulator education game for teaching math) but I cannot decide what tools should I use for that purpose. Again - I am not doing this for money, nor as a business, and my main focus right now is academic and completely outside of IT.<p>I have a strong self-thaught foundation in JAVA, MySQL, PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and a little bit of C++ and Python (I have not build anything useful yet, just bits and pieces for fun, at most 200 lines of code). I know nothing about algorithms except for a couple of cooking recepies and nothing about design patterns except that they exist.<p>It&#x27;s high time to start these 3 projects I mentioned above. But when I did the first version of the scholar notes manager in PHP, I was ridiculed by my brother and some other friends when I shared this idea, because PHP, as they argued, is an embarrasingly outdated technology of the previous decade. So I swiched to JAVA, hoping that it will be a more universal, portable, enerprise backed (and therefore long lasting?) tool, that would also be a better ornament to my CV than just PHP and HTML. So I&#x27;ve spent the last 5 months going through an old Head First book, learning SWING, which also appeared to be obsolete.<p>Please help me decide - should I abandon these languages and swich to Python+Qt? I don&#x27;t mind that (I love to learn), but it again means postponing the actual production by at least 6 months. I am also afraid that other languages would not have enough extensive, well written and freely available documentation and tutorials.<p><i>continued in the first comment</i>
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dorfuss
_continued_

I know that this issue has been discussed here on HN in extenso, but again: my
situation is different, because I am not a professional counting on the bigs
bucks to come. The reason I am so much concerned is that I want to share my
work as an open source, free project, not only for my private satisfaction,
but primarily so that others would be able to use them or possibly continue to
build them if I come across some hard problems I can't technically overcome -
without needing to completely refacture/re-write the code.

Any suggestions?

Would anyone take me under his mentorship (maybe a skype once every two-
months?) to help me make the right architectural decisions?

And finally - I am a bit scepticall about using GitHub. Isn't it a bit of an
overkill for a one man project? Is it really the only right way to get noticed
these days?

Best regards,

