

Ask HN: Novice developer looking for weekly LAMP dev lessons - eagerpupil

I'm a web designer and writer who started a site using open source, off-the-shelf stuff about 8 months ago that's starting to see a little uptake.  We're only getting around 3,000 visitors a day, but they're spending a decent amount of time on site (4 minutes/visit) and telling their friends to check us out.  The site was recently mentioned on a local broadcast after some news broke in one of our discussion areas.  I'm having fun and supporting myself off $3-4,000/month in ad sales to small businesses.  I think this can grow a lot bigger and make even larger waves but there's a big problem.<p>I have no #(*$ing clue what I'm doing on the tech side.  I've been sneaking by so far, but I don't see any real growth happening without changes to my approach.<p>For awhile, hosting was an issue until I found a local sysadmin who got me set up on his linode account and helps with some basic admin stuff in return for splitting his hosting costs.<p>But now my code itself is a problem.  I don't have the php literacy and know-how to make my site do the things my users want it to do.<p>Example: The system I went with says it has a reputation system that works a lot like the one on this site.  In reality it just doesn't do what it says it does. When someone recommends a story, the score of the person who wrote it doesn't budge.  A look at the issue queue for the component shows someone else noticed this as well.  Unfortunately, the module developer stopped responding to support requests 3 months ago.<p>I just spent 3 hours staring at the php code for this component.  Something is broken.  I don't know what, and I don't even now how to go about finding it.<p>I'm not making enough to hire a developer to work with me, but what about a coach?  Is there an experienced LAMP dev out there who could tutor me for an hour each week and help point me in the right direction when I get stumped like this?<p>If this sounds interesting, drop me an e-mail at rexfaraday@gmail.com.  I'm happy to answer questions below.  I really want to learn how to do a lot of this stuff myself, I just need a resource in my corner who can put me on the right path and hit me with some knowledge now and then.
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weaksauce
You are probably better off asking these "nuts and bolts" questions over at
stackoverflow than trying to get a mentor.

If you don't know enough php/programming/whatever to know how to ask the right
questions at that site then I would start by learning the basics of php via a
book or something similar until you have enough "programming literacy" to be
able to. It should not take too much to get up to speed on the simpler tasks
and php has a ton of tutorial and documentation to learn from. Cheers and good
luck.

~~~
aliem
I agree you first need to enlarge your basic knoledge of the language thru a
book (there are soo many about php).

btw as far as i can see it seems you mostly need to learn how to test and
debug your applications.

If the codebase is becoming unreadable and confusing consider a complete
rewrite on your own or by moving to a lightweight framework (I liked code
igniter and kohana in my php days) or even a different language (Ruby and
Python are nice languages)

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olliesaunders
Are you really interested in learning to program or do you just want to fix
the bugs on your site? Also, would you be prepared to pay your tutor an hourly
rate? I'm genuinely interested in your answers to these questions.

~~~
eagerpupil
For your first question, I want to learn how to do the things I need to do to
fix the bugs and issues I run into.

For the second, I definitely expect to pay for this.

~~~
olliesaunders
OK. This is me:
[http://forums.devnetwork.net/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile...](http://forums.devnetwork.net/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=15393)
PM me there or DM on Twitter if you're interested in pursuing this idea.

