I taught myself and once I had a good grasp of what I could and more importantly, what I almost could do I started looking on Freelancer.com for jobs. I was probably 3 months in when I got my first paid job.
Just simple jobs that would take someone at full speed less then a day to finish. And then I'd say that I'd deliver in 5 - 7 days so I knew I could bang my head against something silly for a night without getting into trouble with timely delivery. I was always on the lookout for stuff that would make me learn something new yet at the same time I knew I could nail so to keep my feedback very positive.
Never looked at the hourly wage as it's more a bit of beer money to learn something that you also would've learned for free. Under promise, over deliver.
Best feeling was one client that was so happy with my work and needed something done fast (I was a bit further in the game then and very comfortable with my estimation of the work that needed doing and me being able to do it) that he hired me for 1,5 weeks and paid $4200,-. Felt like a sort of rite of passage. Especially since he was really happy with the work and thought it was worth every penny :)
Good thing about sites like Freelancer.com is that although the money is shitty you learn a lot about dealing with customers without tainting your local market. I add nothing from Freelancer to my portfolio I use locally and I don't add anything from my local portfolio to my Freelancer one as I don't want anyone to connect the dots and try to get me cheapass.
Getting the first job is very hard without any reputation and reviews on the site but it gets surprisingly easy once you have a couple happy customers who've said nice things about you.
What a great idea that I'll never ever use as it will just kill all productivity :)
Imagine working on a project, need to Google something and suddenly it's 1,5 hours later and you're reading up on some random framework you've never used and certainly don't need for your current project because this cool startup that popped up in your new tab gave you another great idea and and and...
He's really slow in the video. I use Swift key (not swiping, just typing) and I'm many times faster than that. Can't see how an expert would be faster either, the gestures simply take longer than simply hitting the right spot.
Also Swiftkey is pretty forgiving once you use it more and the predictions become a real time saver.
Played through the first levels and I really like the idea. I've been thinking about how I could get my kids started and this seems like a great way.
I also see possiblities for some really cool stuff for more experienced coders, especially in multiplayer.
Mentioned earlier: make it completely playable through keyboard. When I got the first alert that I had to use "enter" to continue I was thinking how great it was it was just keyboard and then it started mixing up.
I understand the server being hammered so errors pop up that shouldn't be there. But if I didn't have the knowledge level I have (simply being sure that the error was wrong and the code was right I might have bailed out in the first couple of lessons by not being sure what to do. So I think you should also put some thought in helping people new to coding navigate the errors also when they are not due to server error.
I will play it through as I'm curious how you'll make it more difficult, or better put, make it so that the player needs to program more instead of just putting the right commands in the right order. I can see it getting out of hand rather quickly on the development side :) But things like different classes that you can execute based on stuff happening on the screen would be great.
Attentive and interested dog owner <--> I pay a dog walker to exercise my dog
You don't need a device, you need to walk your own dog and bond with him/her.
This is like having kids, hiring a full time nanny and then saying you're a great parent because you have a camera on her to make sure she's nice to them whilst she's raising your children.
I fully agree. This is just a toy you can spend money on so you can buy of your feeling of guilt of not spending enough time with your dog and observing how they are doing.
Or you can do next to nothing with them for a month and then feel really good by doing just a bit more every week for 4 weeks and seeing a nice line going up and get some badges or whatnot for it.
I think a case can be made that if you seriously think about buying one of these, you probably already know you should spend more time and attention on your dog.
40 years old and still buckle under the slightest peer pressure.
Showed it to a friend of mine and he was instantly enthousiastic and said "let's both do it and have a monthly nerd session!"
So you go two subscriptions from Amsterdam the Netherlands half an hour ago :)