It took me about a third of a year to really saddle up to acquire the tools I need to lay pipe for a project I’ve set out to do since September 2011.

Trying to find technical co-founders for a startup being the “ideas guy” absolutely sucks. Nobody takes you seriously because everybody is an “ideas guy.” It would be difficult convincing somebody how thoroughly I’ve thought through the things that I’ve thought about and understanding a lot of startup methodology. The proper idiom to use given the circumstance that I faced was, “If you want something done, you gotta do it yourself.” I convinced myself after reading up on several stories about how people became dangerous and how fulfilling it was to learn to program and build things on their own. I mean, shoot, how hard could it be? What I’m trying to build is web-based and I already know HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript…

I was really hit with a sledge hammer. There’s no real how-to guide on how to become a self-taught programmer. People’s stories tend to leave out a lot of things. But I want to keep this post brief so I’ll list, in brief, what my background was and how I have been saddling up to begin building this web project I’ve wanted to build and test for a long time.

Before I began programming I was pretty well-versed in:

Windows (I’m a keyboard shortcut animal), and I had never used any distribution of Linux. Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, HTML CSS, JavaScript, and a delved into PHP for what would amount to, maybe, a day-2 education from a book. ASP.net, T-SQL, and a little bit of MySQL.

This is what I forced myself to learn all at the same time in the last 5 months:

1. Setting up a Linux-box (a computer with a distribution of Linux) for a much more development-suited environment. I chose Ubuntu 11.10.

2. Learning to use the Terminal on an operating system such as Linux took a lot of Googling and finding neat commands on StackOverflow (a Q&A site for hackers/programmers/etc). This was important because almost everything starts here when it comes to development — starting servers, copying files, issuing commands and flags for commands that do various things. I hardly ever use the dash (Ubuntu’s equivalent of a Windows taskbar)

3. VIM (vi Improved): The most powerful text editor I have ever encountered (I’m speaking for myself here). It is available on virtually every single Unix system. I’ve heard older guys that have programmed for over a decade always talk about it. I’ve seen it in action from a handful of people and could never understand why somebody would EVER EVER use something so complex… until now. I started with a neat tutorial I found on Hacker News that taught me a few basic commands that I forced myself to master and gradually added to my arsenal by way of Google. Why is VIM and vi so powerful? Those who come from using Notepad++ or some basic text editor without ever using an IDE to edit text and/or code will not yet understand. The simple explanation? It’s difficult to hack when you don’t have a mouse on a laptop. If you love keyboard shortcuts like I do, that’s really all VIM is. I can grab text or strings in between brackets, quotes, etc (on a mouse you’d have to click the beginning of the string and drag it to the end and then hit ctrl + c). Those days are not long gone for me, but I don’t do that on my laptop at all. There are such powerful sequence of commands for programmers. One of my favorites? I can comment/uncomment an entire block of code with several key strokes. It’s amazing!

4. Python. I started with Learn Python the Hard Way, a free book found online by Zed A. Shaw. This got my feet wet. It’s a beautiful language and it’s strict enforcement of indentation automatically makes code readability and maintainability a priority. I hated trying to understand somebody’s HTML, so getting into something a bit more difficult, like programming, made Python an easy choice. After LPTHW, I decided to sign up for a course on Python at the City College of San Francisco, where a different version of Python was being taught, but helped me learn about what was to come. This course challenged me with real world problems and a funny professor who wasn’t always the most helpful, but really introduced me to what was possible with just a solid knowledge of Python. I purchased a book titled “Core Python Applications,” I found on Amazon that had great reviews for its previous edition. This book has been a great reference book so far and explained things in a way that I could understand, being that I did not come from a computer science background.

5. Django. Read up on a lot of material saying how great the documentation was and how easy it was to pick up. I was sold. I was ready to go and build a website over a weekend. Hah! I don’t know, but maybe I’m stupid. It didn’t work that way. I felt confident with my knowledge of Python that would make learning it quite easy. The official Django documentation only had a short tutorial on building a Poll application. I got confused really fast. I did the app twice! Other resources I came across came from Quora and StackOverflow. Many of these were fare too terse for me to pick up. I e-mailed others who I thought could provide assistance. I faced dead-end after dead-end. People weren’t really open to helping somebody they didn’t know. I knew there had to be another way. I felt like the only way I could learn Django was from somebody who would walk me through every step and tell me about why things were done a certain way. I wanted tutorials that showed me step by step on how to build popular projects that people did on the web with web frameworks such as Django. They were either dated or terse. I tried  a couple of Youtube videos, too. I finally ended up purchasing an older version of a popular Django book found on Amazon. The currently release of Django is 1.4. I’m working with a GREAT 1.0 book right now. And this is where day one begins.

6. Other things I had to pick up worth mentioning: VirtualEnv (isolated Python development environments). Venv is crucial for me, because I don’t want to mix this older version of Django and all its dependencies with my system files and installs.

I’ll clean up this post another time. This post was longer than I thought, but WOW, I’ve come a long way…

We’ve been taught to set goals since we were kids. What’s funny is that, I’ve come to realize that teachers often didn’t practice what they preached.

Cool. Set goals. “You can’t get to where you want to be if you don’t know where you’re going.” So, what’s the problem? The problem, where most have identified it to be, is that they’re not reasonable, attainable, goals. Is this true? It sure is, except this doesn’t identify the problem and propose an immediate solution for tackling it now.

First, the reason I, and many of you, never start is because we fear creating less than spectacular work. We feel that there’s a time and place when we are most optimal. And when that time that we’ve set aside for ourselves to begin work approaches, our mind wanders off to somewhere else, and the task before us grows to one that is daunting. Under this circumstance we then make up excuses and sometimes reschedule (at least some of us do).

It took me a while to figure out how to get things done consistently. I had to trick myself; trick my mind — hack my life. We all know that the reality of putting things off is that work becomes rushed and poorly produced, because it was done during the very same circumstance we tried to avoid in the first place. It’s not enough of a deterrent or motivator though.

So, here’s my simple way for getting things done, and it’s really nothing new. I tell myself, “Dude, just start. I don’t care whether or not you finish it now, but just start.” By starting, I actually mean: read the first line of my assignment; write one function in my program; write the first sentence of my letter. More often than not, the reality is getting myself into the context for which I need to work. Once that happens, the work will flow from there. Once in context, I’ll find that doing other things don’t require significantly more effort. I keep telling myself to put everything that’s on my mind down into my work now, and to correct errors later.

The lesson here is, as Nike would say, “Just do it!” I broke my task down into the most minuscule goal possible, and that’s to “just start.” Getting something down is more important than never starting at all. At least when I get something down, I can come back to it and take a look at what I started and jump right back into context even more easily the next time around.

That’s it! Read those instructions/documentation; write that one line of code; drill that first hole — just do it before doing anything else.

According to numerous reports, Pinterest has a predominantly female user base to the tune of about 90% — astounding!

I first heard about Pinterest when TechCrunch covered it for, what I believe to be, the second time. I created an account using my Twitter handle to see what all the hype was about. I was almost immediately hooked. Seeing pins and the ease at which I could curate things was an absolutely ‘smooth’ experience. It helped replace the action of having to save photos that I loved to my computer, and easily made what I thought was visually appealing available to all my friends. The kicker really is that it’s easier than ever to follow all your friends’ specific interests rather than having them bombard you with things in your newsfeed you have little to no interesting in seeing or hearing about. The signal to noise ratio heavily favors the noise on Facebook, and Pinterest is different in that regard.

The latest update that improved the look of the profile did nothing to really improve the experience. It was definitely visually more appealing, but there is nothing new added to really enhance the user’s experience — nothing to write home about. I was searching for something that made Pinterest more social. I really wanted something that showed me what was trending, boards I might like, people I may want to follow. I’m sure some of these things are in the pipe already and it’s important for them to add features slowly so it doesn’t complicate things or bombard new users with things they don’t know what to do with that may stifle adoption.

I’m a heavy Pinterest user. I pin incessentally and I enjoy discovering new things from my friends, but here are some things that I would improve upon (not new features) if I had a chance to work with Pinterest:

1. Be notified when a friend of mine has created a new board and added at least one item to it rather than offer “follow all” right out of the gates. I find this to be the biggest deterrent for adoption among men because all they see are things related to home decor and weddings from their female friends that are of little or absolutely no interest to them. Greeting new users with top Pinners may be better. But, another idea is to greet a new user with top pins in the already established categories for them to choose rather than provide a list of text and having them follow some things they’ll regret following later.

2. Better notification system — one that notifies me when somebody has commented and/or replied to a post. I frequently find ‘likes’ and ‘repins’ that bury ‘X has commented on your pin.’ Many of my comments and questions are left unanswered when left on a friend’s pin.

3. Random versus most recent pins on a board. The particularly reason for this is we normally don’t get to see the true breadth of somebody’s board when viewing the latest pins. Compare the viewing of a friend’s board to viewing search engine results — how often does one make it past the first page? How often does one like to scroll? The answer is simply, “not often.” Scramble ‘em!

4. Pinning to multiple boards. I frequently find myself in the situation of having something fall in between two categories or two boards. I heavily dislike having to choose because I’m just too lazy to double-pin where such a thing also introduces two of the same images into my feed and somebody else’s feed. This would work well in the future if or when private boards ever get introduced.