Thanks a ton for your thoughts and i'm really happy the tool helped you find an opening! To your points:
-I just added a mobile filter (includes all mobile dev) so take a look! hope this helps.
-highlighting filtered words is an awesome idea and it's now on my list.
-Obviously there are still some bugs in the geo-locating and scroll stuff - where are you located?
-I'd love to hear more about what kind of jobs you're looking for and why the opening you found was useful so I can understand how to make the tool better. If you have a second to respond here I'd really appreciate it, or you can tweet/email me @orrenkt/orrenkt at gmail
I just read 'The Innovator's Dilemma' by Clayton Christensen and it's awesome.
There's all this talk of "disrupting" everything in the tech world right now and a lot of it is really bullshit. This guy is the one who coined the term disruptive technology, and when you dig into it it's a really interesting concept that he actually backs up with great research on the disk drive industry.
The core of the idea is that 'disruptive' technologies are underdog technologies that actually have worse performance than the leading technologies of their time, but also some other attributes (smaller, lighter, etc) that make them valuable to customers in niche, less profitable markets the big guys aren't interested in. Since technology progresses much faster than our demand for it, those cheaper, crappier technologies improve over time and end up killing the big, expensive players who originally dominated the market.
-I wouldn't worry about the GV question, but I would worry about understanding your target audience. If I were you I'd call up @mikeknoop's parents and show them the site to get feedback, since those are the kind of ppl who will use it. Ask them if any of their friends would use this too and talk to them.
-$10/month sounds like a lot and I wonder where you came up with it. I'd guess something closer to $20/year, but again, ask ppl who would want to use this.
-related to that, I don't understand what "$10 / month for the first 100 minutes, then $0.08 / minute after that" means. Are you gonna charge people by minute they talk for forwarding their calls? I wouldn't do that. If you want this to seem like a no-brainer, don't make people try to figure out how much they'll end up paying you. Just stick a nice pricetag on it and be done.
-your page has too many bullets, in too many fonts, colors and sizes. This is a really straightforward idea so make it simple for people - explain it in 3 lines at most, make them big, consistent and clear, and leave out the powerpoint bulletpoints.
I started learning to code more seriously about 6mo ago, so I know what your shoes feel like :)
There is simply a ton of stuff out there, and following a 3 year plan to cover 15 different languages and frameworks just seems intimidating as hell. Though I agree that it's all important.
My advice it to come up with a simple project idea and go and implement it - it doesn't even have to be a 'product' per se, just something fun that will function as a goal for you to work towards. As an example, my first project was making a simple twitter-like feed where you can make posts on a page, they go to a database, and then come back out on the front end dynamically. This might take a great hacker 20min to make, but I think it's a great first project because it lets you see and really visualize how the database<->server<->browser loop works. And I think getting the concepts driving things is really the key.
Another great idea is to pick some web service you love that has an API and try to build something fun with it - start with just figuring out how to make a GET request, parse the response, etc, and then build up from there.
CodeAcademy is fun and great to start with, but I think because the problems are all structured for you, it shelters you from having to do the most important thing - figure out what you need to know to solve your problem, and how to learn it. If you pick a small project and spend a lot of time on google and stackoverflow trying to find out how to get each step to work, you'll learn a ton, but you'll also learn how to become really resourceful when you're trying to solve a problem. And as for what languages to learn, I think the cool thing is your project will end up driving what you have to (and want to) learn.
I'd also add, as an aside: you're 16, so stop worrying about jobs!! Just do stuff that's fun and keep learning, and it'll all work out.
-I just added a mobile filter (includes all mobile dev) so take a look! hope this helps.
-highlighting filtered words is an awesome idea and it's now on my list.
-Obviously there are still some bugs in the geo-locating and scroll stuff - where are you located?
-I'd love to hear more about what kind of jobs you're looking for and why the opening you found was useful so I can understand how to make the tool better. If you have a second to respond here I'd really appreciate it, or you can tweet/email me @orrenkt/orrenkt at gmail