On: Ask HN: Had an original idea for a start-up...but

[jnovek]

"Usually I spend it reading all sorts of ebooks and papers and trying to learn new skills."

I suggest you switch gears and spend your free-time coding :-).

Pick some technology you think you want (you can change your mind later) and start doing side projects in it. Do up your personal home page. Make a google maps mashup. Some stuff to familiarize yourself with the technology.

There have already been lots of good suggestions on which technologies to use. Try a couple different ones.

[jwecker → jnovek]

Absolutely. More specifically, start your startup. Create a folder for your product and open a text editor. Immediately you'll be in the uncomfortable situation of not knowing exactly what to code first. Code a mockup page first. Don't worry- you can throw it away- just get a page that you can show to a trusted friend and say "this is how it will work". Then add in some javascript, you know, just for demonstration purposes. Then hook in some backend stuff, you know, for better demonstrations. Learn from books and tutorials only exactly what you need to push your project forward.

In a few months of this you'll learn 100x what you could learn by trying to learn generically. It's frustrating and difficult, which is exactly why you're brain will be primed to learn what you really need to learn.

At some point you'll know so much that you'll look at all your "demo" code and think- "man, this is crufty. I know enough now to do it right." That's when you build your first product (using pylons or something awesome that you've discovered out of necessity) that will be used by hundreds of thousands of people and will bring you glory and riches.

Best of luck. Did you create the folder yet? Is your text editor open with the beginning and ending html tags yet? Is your browser open to a reference to those silly thing that you feel you should know but just can't remember yet? GET TO WORK! Oh, and you're grounded from RSS feeds for 1 month until you can prove you're learning. ;)

[tsally → jnovek]

I made this mistake for about a year. Ordered/downloaded tons of books, read published papers, etc. I learned a fair bit, but honestly you don't really learn until you start doing. Your return per hour spent coding is on average far higher than your return from books and papers. You shouldn't stop reading, it just has to be limited.

[jnovek → tsally]

My learning process usually works like this:

1) Learn the syntax/guts of a tool by going through a book, tutorial and trying trivial examples.

2) Work until I run into a problem. (How do I make merb-auth work with a flash uploader?)

3) Find examples/read a book/look at API docs until I figure it out. (Ohhh, you write a Rake middleware to handle it!)

4) Goto 2.

So reading materials are important, but I usually use them to solve real problems. There's no part of this process that doesn't involve writing code.

[MicahWedemeyer → jnovek]

Glad to see I'm not the only one that thinks like this. I sometimes feel like a fraud because I haven't read the latest-greatest book on X. Sure, I use X every day, but I don't understand every last teeny aspect about it.

[bkorte → jnovek]

Yeah, I don't think I've read a development book cover-to-cover, I always have something in mind that I want to build, so I stop the book half way and code.

I always skim the rest looking for an answer, but the point is that I will almost always get the best results just by diving in head first.