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Comment by guynamedloren | Hacker News Reader

When I graduated college (with a non cs degree and no programming knowledge), I basically locked myself in my bedroom for 5 months with one mission: to learn rails and hone my frontend skills. I cut off almost all social interaction. I had 3 roommates and our paths crossed maybe once a day - usually when they were leaving for class in the morning and I was still up from the night before. I neglected 'normal' sleep cycles and followed my internal clock. Depending on how focused I was, I was often awake for days at a time. It was crazy, and it was the most productive period of my life. Ideas in my head were coming to life before my very eyes. I was building a powerful skillset that would allow me to control my future. And I did it without anything except my own drive and the internet.

So yes, you absolutely can code and learn on your own. Some people can't.

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One thing about working while in touch with others who are either already experienced, or learning the ropes with you- sometimes you can save yourself hours, days, or even weeks worth of wasted time trying to understand something you could understand in five minutes with anothers' input.

Particularly when you've been up for 3 days straight.

> sometimes you can save yourself hours, days, or even weeks worth of wasted time trying to understand

There's no such thing as wasted time when you're learning. In fact, I can't think of a better way to spend my time.

There is a such thing as opportunity costs. Learning faster is better. (Assuming the same quality of understanding derived from time spent.)

There are definitely varying rates of efficiency in learning. I personally find that working with others tends to make me more efficient, for the exact reasons that sliverstorm cites.

I'm sorry to tickle your confirmation bias, but that's absolute nonsense. You can waste a lot of time learning the wrong things or learning the wrong way.

I remember learning assembly, Basic, Pascal, Modula, C... in the late 80s and early 90s, from childhood to college, and how many stupid long hours I wasted just for not having the right resource available anywhere, and having nobody to ask (before Uni). Spending days, weeks clueless simply because a certain book wasn't available or, later, because I couldn't get internet access to look stuff up at will.

One gets the wrong assumption that since Google and Wikipedia times everything is easily searchable and personal expert advice is obsolete. It's not. There's an excess of worthless content, even wrong/misleading content, and there are also many questions that Google cannot effectively answer.

Wasting time hitting dead ends is VERY costly. It takes away time and energy, might end up with you having wrong or worse-than-otherwise conclusions.

The problem with the manic loner method of learning to code is that it can lead to burnout really quickly. I taught myself to code in a similar way. It was my senior year in college, I was getting a degree in creative writing, and my only programming knowledge was whatever was still rattling around my head from an introductory course in high school. I had an idea for something that I wanted to build, so I bought an HTML for Dummies book and started working my way down the stack. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, jQuery, cron, VPS hosting, web APIs, and on and on.

After three months of manic reading and coding, I had a working product and enough programming knowledge to get a job with a local startup. I was also a wreck. It got to the point where opening up a text editor made me nauseous. The main reason I applied for the job at the startup was to work with other coders, to alleviate my stress and isolation, but it was a marketing startup at its core, and all the other developers worked remotely. The people I worked with were great, and they had nothing but good things to say about my work, but I was the only on-site developer. It made me feel even more isolated.

Honestly, I felt like a fraud. I spent most of my time at work teaching myself new tools. I felt like these were things that I should just know, and I couldn't convince myself that I was doing a good job, because there was no developer community around me. In retrospect, I know that my stress was irrational. Textbook impostor syndrome. Every time I fixed a bug for a customer, which I did a few times every day, I was protecting a revenue stream worth several times my hourly wage. But because the community wasn't there, and because I had burnt myself out over months of manic self-education, I couldn't internalize this at the time. I brought up my issues with the CEO - who was in the room next to me, since it was a small shop - but no matter how many times he assured me that I was doing a great job, it didn't cut through the burnout and the stress. When I graduated, I left the job behind. I also left coding behind, for about eight months. I made a few static HTML/CSS pages for various projects, but that was it.

I'm back to coding again now. Everything is fresh and fun again. I'm working on an ambitious project, and I'm still a team of one. But I'm going to start visiting meetups and getting involved in the community, because I've felt the stress of being completely on my own.

Your mental makeup may be different. You may be able to continue learning and coding on your own indefinitely and never succumb to burnout, paranoia, panic, or isolation. If so, that's great! I'm a little worried about your note at the end, though. Most people can't do this on their own, and it's not a knock on their aptitude. The emotional toll of isolation is what brings people down, and it's perfectly normal.

Thanks for sharing. Yeah, this is the second half of the story that I deliberately excluded. My story mirrors much of your own, actually. Once I felt my skills were up to par, I sought companionship with like minded folks. Not because I wanted to learn from them necessarily, but just because I wanted to be around people like myself (whom I couldn't seem to find locally for the life of me, despite attending a university with one of the most prestigious cs programs in the world). So I packed up my life in the dreary midwest and now work for a startup in sunny Los Angeles with great people. Just barely avoided the burnout phase and couldn't be happier.

Our stories are even closer than you think. I looked for people like me in my college town, but it was a small city with few tech businesses (mostly state government contractors), so I didn't find much. Now that I've returned to coding, I decided to move out to San Francisco so that I could be a part of a larger community. I've been out here for just over a week now and I've already been to a conference and have an interview with a startup tomorrow. (Not as a developer, but still!) There are tons of meetups and interesting events out here, so I'm really optimistic about the future.

I'm working for a healthcare startup now and I feel like I'm starting to get burned out with the constant change and long hours. I think what stresses me out the most is that I'm employee #1, so I'm being paid, but we haven't raised money yet. So I've been working for exactly a year now on this project, we've had 1 team investor meeting in NYC, and I've been working long days to keep up with the constant changes. Like you guys I've also been looking to meetup with others who share my same situation, in my town theres a meetup but it's mostly freelancers who are mostly involved strictly in web design or graphic design, rather than the programming end of web development, which is what I'm really looking for. To be honest since graduating highschool I've wanted to move out west to work with others on a startup, just haven't made it there yet, but maybe soon. I have 2 friends that I graduated highschool with who got jobs at Microsoft, I don't think I fall into that category of wanting a stable corporate job, but I do want to work on something new and cool that adds value to peoples lives.

As I read your comment I felt a tinge of concern for you in your current situation.

It seems that you could be manipulated into working crazy hours because a "big payout" is "right around the corner", if only you do what they say and work your tail off.

Just be careful.

I did something similar during a 3 week break in HS . It was with python and the first ed of this free book: http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/

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