Don't waste time with religion, drugs, or alcohol. They all consume too much time and lead to useless guilt.
Exercise more. Don't let yourself get fat.
Stick with the guitar or piano or whatever instrument you play.
Put off marriage as long as possible. At some point you will have an urge to reproduce. Until then, enjoy life. Once you have kids your priorities dramatically change and by the time you can get back to what _you_ want to do, you'll be too old and broken down to do it.
Don't get into debt. Better still, live below your means and save like crazy. When you do spend money, spend it on experiences (like travel) rather than things (like a car). The memories of your experiences will stay with you for the rest of your life, while the things you buy will get put aside as soon as you have kids.
Spend quality time with your parents. When you're older and they're dead you'll wish you had.
Wow. This sort of underhanded advocacy really undermines the efforts of the Scala community. The half-truths and just-plain-wrong-headedness of this article defy description.
I respect that you have an opinion, but your reasoning is disingenuous at best and idiotic at worst.
Granny-to-Guru in 12 weeks is clearly unrealistic.
What about a mid-career move from infrastructure/operations with significant experience with Perl / Shell / etc. programming? Or a COBOL / C++ / Java developer that's been stuck in corporate-land for the past 20 years? Or a business analyst that's been pushing excel sheets and access databases around for years, maybe with some BI tools sprinkled in for fun. There are a ton of relatively experienced "computer people" facing uncertain times as cloud environments close down corporate data centers, and outsourcing eliminates developer jobs.
The current dev environment is bewildering to say the least -- you don't just learn Javascript -- to be effective you need to learn a ton of other things -- HTML, CSS, Jquery, test-driven-development, grunt, git, various frameworks, jasmine, node and/or ruby on rails (or equivalent), pair programming, etc. Each of those leads down its own rabbit-hole of complexity and extra tools to know.
It seems like these bootcamps, done well and with the right sort of student, would give a massive 'level-up' into the current dev world. For mid-career types where there is a need to minimize time away from a paycheck, a 12-16 week program is a good fit.
There are few realistic alternatives:
Go back to school for a CS degree, working on it nights, maybe with tuition re-imbursement from work. -- This is insane -- schools don't teach the above, they teach algorithms and specialize in toy projects, not the real world. Doing it part time while at your day job just adds years to the process putting you even further behind.
Start or contribute to open source projects. This is easier said than done as it pre-supposes a knowledge of and familiarity with using the above stack of tools or their equivalents. For the dedicated self-starter with a lot of determination and energy to stay up at night doing this it could work. People with kids and other commitments would find it very tough.
I don't think the bootcamps are going to turn a fine-art major with no prior computer experience into a $100,000+ web developer in 12 weeks. I _do_ think that it could turn a $90,000+ corporate programmer or infrastructure person into a $90,000+ web developer, now with a foothold in the world of the "cool kids" and an escape hatch from the stifling corporate world.
Wordpress has some downsides:
* The hosted version doesn't let you put ads in.
* If you host yourself it is a lot of maintenance to keep wordpress patched, spam cleared, etc.
* It is dynamic, so each page needs to be built based on a query to the mysql database. For a handful of users this is no big deal. If you hit the HN front page your site will be overloaded.
On the other hand, Wordpress is good if you blog on the go and want to use the ipad app or whatever to post/maintain your blog. It might also be good if you have multiple contributors, or update your blog so frequently (minutes) that rebuilding the site to deploy it is an impediment.
Octopress / Jekyll is a good alternative:
* Content is pre-formatted HTML files, no database to get in the way or slow things down.
* Tons of people use it, so it is well known.
* Lots of publishing options -- github, heroku, s3 + cloudfront, etc.
* "Features" like discussion forums can be linked in from disqus or other purpose-built services.
* Publishing is easy via running a script, although that means lugging your laptop around or using an ssh client on your tablet.
* With static HTML the attack surface is substantially less compared to a PHP site with a back-end database, so security should be significantly better and easier to deal with.
Exercise more. Don't let yourself get fat.
Stick with the guitar or piano or whatever instrument you play.
Put off marriage as long as possible. At some point you will have an urge to reproduce. Until then, enjoy life. Once you have kids your priorities dramatically change and by the time you can get back to what _you_ want to do, you'll be too old and broken down to do it.
Don't get into debt. Better still, live below your means and save like crazy. When you do spend money, spend it on experiences (like travel) rather than things (like a car). The memories of your experiences will stay with you for the rest of your life, while the things you buy will get put aside as soon as you have kids.
Spend quality time with your parents. When you're older and they're dead you'll wish you had.
Keep a journal.