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Comment by bradddd | Hacker News Reader

Great insight. Every time someone says, "I want to learn to code." They should have a project/task in mind and just go. The stack that Suneel lays out is a good foundation for web dev, but as he admits, he like many others invested more time than was necessary in books/documentation/tutorials.

More people need to just jump in. If you get to a point that you want a feature from jQuery, look it up and implement it, but don't feel like you need to wrap your mind around every feature before you can begin. Great work and keep at it.

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>Every time someone says, "I want to learn to code." They should have a project/task in mind and just go.

If there was a list of software projects somewhere, ordered by difficulty, with tips on how to get started and how to extend it later, I would be very interested.

I can code (somewhat), but I find that any time I have an itch to scratch, it's much easier to google it and solve it through existing software and configuration changes. Every time I've had a project in mind, I'm quickly in over my head. I'd like to move beyond scripting and actually build self contained software I can post on Github and give to my friends, but I guess I don't know where is a reasonable place to start.

http://mindprod.com/project/projects.html

That's a nice list to help people when brainstorming. I wasn't necessarily implying that the project had to be something new or different, or even specific to the user. A lot of people learn rails or django by making some microblogging twitter clone. On a recent relevant topic, sometimes the best ideas come from emulation and slight modification, so maybe you just challenge yourself to replicate a site or web app you use.

What do you wish existed and build that?

Oh, it's too big?

Build a piece of it.

Oh, that's too big?

Build a piece of it.

The problem you're probably having is that you're saying, "I want THIS" and THIS is too big for you to imagine. So, just write a small subset, maybe 3% of that. Then you'll realize you can easily build this next little bit over here or over here and eventually get there.

That point reminds me of Kathy Sierra's distinction between just-in-time learning and just-in-case learning: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/0...

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