

Help me become a web developer, 10,000 ft. in the air - flys2much

I graduated with an electrical engineering degree and am familiar with programming (C/C++, VHDL, Assembly, etc). But now, I want to start developing web apps.<p>I am a Management Consultant and spend 15 to 20 hours a week on a plane. So as a personal challenge, if I spend 60 hours a month for 6 months learning and implementing, I should be able to have my ideas turn into funcitoning apps.<p>Since I don't have an internet connetion, online resources and communities to help me learn are impossible to leverage until I make it to a hotel. At this point, I don't know where to begin in terms of both language and resources.<p>I've come here to Hacker News to request your advice in helping me complete my personal challenge. I'd love to have a web app up and running this year.
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revorad
The key thing that I've found drives me and makes me finish coding projects is
if I'm building something that I use a lot, preferably everyday.

Don't waste another minute on choosing the tools - just pick one of Ruby on
Rails or Python+Django based on whatever you've heard about them already. The
docs are downloadable so you can use them offline.

Could you build something that you would use for your work? You probably use
Excel a lot. Is there some manual copy-pasting you spend a lot of time doing
in Excel? You could probably automate that.

Edit: As soon as you start working on it, put it on here - <http://swym.me>. I
will make sure you get it done.

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flys2much
Thanks for the suggestion! I'm not entirely sure about the learning curve of
either but I will definitely look into both sometime this week and pick a
language to stick with.

Great advice on picking a project. I had a few in mind but you reminded me of
some Excel macros I'd like to make.

"I will make sure you get it done" - And this is why I love this
community.I'll make a list and definitely check out swym.me when I've made a
decision on what I want to start with.

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poulsbohemian
Doing is the best learning - why not join a project like mine that needs a web
developer? You learn and get to share in our project, and in 6 months if you
want to go off to do your own thing you will have gotten real world experience
out of the deal. I spend a lot of time on planes as well, and actually the
lack of distractions makes it a fantastic place to work. Ping me if you are
interested - jeff -at- notifika.com.

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flys2much
Thank you for the offer. I completely agree that "doing is the best learning".
At this point I can't commit or take on responsibility on someone else's
project. If you have a web developer already and that has the patience to work
with me, I might just change my mind. But at this point, I'm looking for more
flexibility to work on my own ideas.

