code

Keep in mind getting attention doesn't necessarily equate to success (nor does equal failing either). I guess it was worth the split test.

That said, I have nothing personal against PHP and have been a PHP developer for years. It does get the job done and is forgiving as you have said but make no mistake, there are better alternatives. There are things that, for example, Python and Ruby is able to do that PHP can't since PHP is purely a web base language and Python and Ruby are not. At the end of the day, it's really what the developer is most comfortable with.

Horrible statement. You want your cofounder to be very entrepreneurial regardless of whether he's the business cofounder or the technical cofounder. Otherwise what you're really looking for is a coding monkey disguised as a cofounder to avoid having to pay because you don't have the means to.

> I need someone with a greater or equal knowledge of programming and (more importantly) a drive to actually use that knowledge.

Having a drive is important. Either you or your cofounder needs to be good enough on the technical side. But it sounds like you're discrediting someone who knows his business and marketing chops. Its definitely hard to find someone that knows it in high school but I would be careful about disregarding this in favor of technical talent if you are already a developer. A lot of startups fail not because they aren't able to build their product, it's because they're unable to get it out to the market.

> I know a few people in startups and plenty of people who work in some part of Silicon Valley, but most of those people are considerably older than me (40+) and/or not someone who I would want to work with.

Age shouldn't be a determining factor albeit I can see where you're coming from. However there are plenty of people in their 20s in the valley and the startup scene.

> You might be wondering how being in high school is related to finding a co-founder, or if not a co-founder someone to work on a particular project with, and it's because based on what I've read/heard, people find co-founders in college/university. I don't have that advantage of being grouped with people of similar interest.

No, we're not wondering that. College just is the norm. You need to get a better idea of what you actually need in a cofounder rather than just what you assume you need. And you can find ways to network and meet people of similar interest, even in the East Bay.

Hope that helps.

For example, among my friends, it seems common that most of the really good hackers tend to code and be avid runners. I'm sure there's no real correlation on that.

There are lots of companies that are built in Python big and small. Some examples are Dropbox, Slide, Youtube, Quora, Yelp, etc... It's definitely a scalable language and something I'd highly recommend.

As a disclaimer, I don't have any knowledge in Ruby/Rails but I'd definitely still recommend Python. You'll come across between choosing 2 and 3 if this is the path you're heading down, stick with 2 and move onto 3 later. This will make much more senes once you look into Python.

From there, everything else is a building block. Think of it like math. You'd take transitional math before pre-algebra, pre-algebra before algebra, etc... Same thing.

HTML, CSS, Javascript, XML, Ajax, Python, MySQL

If you're adventureous, try HTML5 and CSS3 afterwards. Also look into jQuery and Django afterwards.

Like a few on here, I never learned the proper way to type although I use all 10 digits. My typing were from countless hours coding or chatting.

Having said that, more details would actually help people here give better feedback. How early is early, aka employee number 1, 10, 20? Has the company raise funding? Profitable? How long has the company been around? What position. These factors and others, can influence a lot.

Generally speaking, depending on what stage of funding and how early a startup employee you are, it can vary between 0.5 pt to 5 pts. Of course there are ranges outside of this as well. Salary can vary a lot too. I've seen engineers do as low as $24k/yr to at least $50k/yr.

Second, in a startup culture early on, in my personal experience, we've had guys jam out all day and night, weekends, etc to push a product out when timing was critical. I can't honestly say I believe the same deadlines can be met with a remote team.

Finally, to be a great coder, beyond godlike programming abilities, you must have certain quality traits (too many to list here).

But per your request, here's a technical challenge we've done in the past. Find an insanely hard captcha, figure a machine learning algorithm for it to be able to read the captcha without relying on human eyes. As the mahine continues to view more and more captcha, it learns to decipher it. I will say you shouldn't do it for the purpose of breaking captchas and in some cases this is illegal but the technical problem to solve it is really good in terms of coding capabilities.

Given your low reserves and being unable to join another startup because of that, I don't see an issue with joining a company that can payroll you till you're able to pursue another startup idea down the road. You should be able to work on something on the side. I actually don't share the sentiment that working at a big company is bad (or as you say, not held in high regard). Definitions of startups are skewed. Technically Facebook is a startup, yet I look at them like they're a big company. It really depends. I think there's value in being at a big company as well. Some of my best business lessons were from regular jobs working at some bigCo prior to building a startup.

In regards to your career credit... you should have been vested for stocks on a typical four year vesting schedule where if you've been there for three years, you should have vested 3/4th of your stocks already. If you were an employee, and had stock options, that's different. You would need to check.

As a developer, assuming you're good, the market is wide open.

PS As a side note, if you're ever interested in joining another startup, I am looking for a cofounder (made a post on here earlier).