nRike

Have you tried Codecombat.com? I think this is a great way to get started, have fun and at the same time learn the basic concepts of computer programming.

Once he understands this, you should encourage to hack into Minecraft hacks.

Later you can ask him about start their own projects and help him when he got stuck.

Programming should be fun and using a language only a tool for their mind, so help him become passionate about build things for himself.

Mexican here too. Please send me an email at kike@devf.mx, I'd love to connect you with a friend, he did exactly the same steps you're trying to achieve few years ago.

>> As my Google friends say, it's like already half retired.

This is very interesting. Few employees I know at Google are very busy and working in several things at the same time.

>> I just did not want to do that in my late 20s.

I'm 26 and I think the same too. I have the need to build something where every line of code matters, making people's life easier instead of working in a big company.

I think recruiters get paid by the number of positions they can fill, even if they get a "bad performance" for having few candidates.

I think this recruiter just was doing follow up after few months and trying to re-connect. Last year happened to me the same with a Pebble recruiter who later went to Greylock.

Without real experience in Javascript nor the framework, I created a Google Hangout face tracking app in five days. You can still try it here: http://cocacola-hangout.appspot.com/

Why Mexico City does not have BattleHack? I was lucky to organize AngelHack last year and our winners also won the finals in San Francisco. Overall, we have plenty of talented hackers down the Bravo river, so I think it would be a great choice.

I'm at SXSW and realized they're only serving trips when you're in downtown, so yes, Uber already works here now.

That makes sense. In a personal note, I think doing monkey-patching code is okay in a discovery mode, but now we have a small revenue stream, we should focus on make the platform more reliable, and probably taking our users as the proxy to understand where the product lacks quality.

I like this approach, data cannot be argued.

I completely agree. I recently started looking for this topic because the feeling I get is that everything is messy and its becoming a nightmare just to think about it. In my case, I'm taking more responsabilities and I think we need to start implementing best practices with our engineering team. Does that makes sense to you?

I agree with that. In the more general sense, do you think is a good approach doing monkey-patching, for a startup whose already made their first sales? Lets say we just raised money from an accelerator and no taking outside investment than that.

My main doubt about that is, do you think is a good approach to keep doing crappy code even if we're already doing money with this? And if not, when would be a good moment to start refactoring?

Indeed. There are plenty from a lot of countries, even to places where there are not Google offices there.

>> I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet, especially for the HN crowd, but it's relatively easy for any developer to write a bot to auto-register them-self. One could even use Selenium.

Well, I'm not completely sure if it is that easy. Last year they had a first queue to get a ticket which did reset every time you opened a tab in your browser or entering via another device. After that, you had another queue to access your personal data, and finally you needed to use Checkout for buying the ticket. Not sure if they're going to do the same, but I'd love to hear some kind of programming challenges to get yours.

>> Conversely, not pounding F5 until I get a ticket makes me feel powerless.

Actually, last year they implemented some kind of IP-based persistence for each potential attendee: you could try to get on queue for a ticket on your smartphone or laptop and every time you access the timer did a reset.

> Don't you think it'd be just a 'founders conference' in that case?

That's right, but its seems YC is looking to find an open space for aspiring female founders and, at the same time, still remain open for male atendees. What I said was because in the application form you can say if you are male or female.

> Cool I am going to host the "Male Founders Conference" And no girls are allowed.

You can apply if you are male.

> Why can't I go to this event and learn from female founders do they have nothing of value to convey to me as a male ?

I think the conference goal is pretty clear: help aspiring female founders start more startups, the same way Startup School does.

> a new engineer, we'll call them Jerry, joined the startup I work at in a critical position.

No matter if he's the CEO, he should not be an asshole with their team.

> recently incredibly high demands and time constraints were imposed, and combined with failure for the company to meet revenue goals, have created a very stressful place to work.

So stress comes from not being able to make money. If you are just doing what your boss says, Jerry should not make it personal.

> My boss already knows how Jerry acts and hasn't done anything.

He's responsible of solve this issues, if he's doing nothing, you should leave ASAP.

Please, drop me a line at my personal email (look at my profile), I'd love to help you find a new job.

I cannot say I have a "successful life", because my definition of successful could be different than yours.

I dropped out on my last semesters of CS BEng, and in retrospective, I think I made a great decision: After dropping out school I launched a community of Android Developers in Mexico, which a year later helped me close a 1 year contract with Motorola advocating about Android SDK. During the same year I did consulting gigs for Google here in Mexico also, which led to became the youngest ever Android SDK contractor in LATAM, at age 24.

This could sound great for you, but being totally honest, the main reason I dropped out was because I didn't feel passionate about the stuff I was doing there. On the other side, I fell in love with Android because I saw an opportunity of doing code and make a living, in a year where no one knew about that technology.

I think CodeCombat.com would do the trick, they just got accepted into YC w'12.

I heard from trusted sources RubyMotion for Android is on the pipeline. Using JRuby as their core dependency cannot be good.

I'd love to see RubyMotion for Android soon.

The relation cost-benefit seems pretty good. You are going to spend 500 USD per day to charge 150 USD per hour. Also, the quality of the instructors is something worth it.

Cheers for NoticiasHacker Dfectuoso!

I have some thoughts. Its good to see there are a tool for Spanish-spoken hackers because you can meet some cool people near you place and build a community, which i believe the REASON HN exists. When i've discovered HN, i thought this was really awesome and came to be addicted to all this cool stuff. The biggest problem about this, is that much of the spanish-spoken HN users doesnt know each other. I can count with at much 10 hackers that i know in person and know they visit HN.

Communities are organized as cell. When you born you belong to the first cell called family. When you show some interests like Basketball or Videogames, you know people, get accepted and now belong now another cell. I can see Noticias Hacker would be some cell that will be grouping all the best hacks and news about LatinAmerican stuff, and eventually help to know about key players in the ecosystem. Amazing when you need to catch up some attention from SV Angels and Press coverage.

And as Android Developer, i don't believe you need to forget English(if you want to develop stuff you need to learn English and build it. in English), but both languages aren't both exclusive mutually. And in some way, know two languages makes you more smart.

Well, i still was in the university but i've had chance to play with a few ones:

LCDS, WebORB specifically and Flex 3 RoR Lift Web Framework

And in the Q4 of the year i used all my time to learn Android and a lot of cool API's:

Overlay-Manager to recognize gestures in Android AndEngine Geocoding and reverse geocoding Notifications by vibrating SMSManager

I really enjoyed developing Android stuff, and i'm keeping up with these for a while.

A student friend of mine was contacted to work in summer for Facebook, and she declined the offer for Microsoft internship program instead. I've asked why and she told me that Microsoft was their exact company where she wanted to work. She also worked in last summer in Redmond so she really enjoyed developing there.

Also i've heard from the same girl that Google sucks hiring cool people, like a friend of she applied for Google and they contacted him 6 months later that he moved to SF to work for another company, from a 1 year of interviews. 4 years they called him again just to give feedback of the process.

Well, im experimenting with the smartest crowd ive met in my life, and i want to bear out my theory about entrepreneurs are more aware of their existence in this world compared with "normal people"

I dont believe in what modern religion says, im saying "God" as all the energy that comes from i dont know where, energy we do not know who created it and that goes all over sign of life as a breath, a apple from a tree, a though from our brains, a whale in the sea...

In buddhism and ancient oriental religions people believe in what we called soul, which is basically the real esence of a human, a finding of ourselves in a real manner, not what we think, nor what we look. Talking with my uncle he said that 2 children of the same social context(same parents, maybe even twins, with the same time of life) are totally different each other. He said was genetically stuff, and i argued the reason was the soul they have. An alcoholic father is a good experience for their life for the more conscious, and a tragedy for the less conscious.

Its seems you understand what im trying to say, thank you very much for this advice. I'll change it right now

We cannot blame the teachers, nor the children. I think it's a big trouble for all humanity. All these things i've lived in varsity was so terrible, i remember something from the career chief of on of the best schools here in Mexico(http://ipn.mx). At the final exam, those one for get the degree, we told him that we wanted to do a online startup to begin creating jobs in our country, learn great things and be proactives, we argued if Mark Zuckerberg did, why we didn't?. He answered "Place yourself in your context, this is Mexico and there are nobody who has done something like this, please be realistics."

I honestly can understand his thoughs, because he's a person who finished his Master Degree in the same school he studied his career, he never got a job in the industry and by the same, he didn't know anything about what's going on this daily-changing world called internet.

I have several things to share here, and also i have my own answer about why the schools aren't working anymore. Why humans created schools? universities and specialized courses of some science? Because they noted if you start giving "education" to people they will be useful for industries and they will generate wealth, and that was true 70 years ago, -ie i've studied as part of Computer Engineer career a subject called "logical circuits" where we built some circuits with some logic gates, and using a protoboard. I really hated these stuff, but if i imagine myself studying these topic 70 years ago, I would be surely fascinated.

Today is another history, a history where driven-knowledge is to a few clicks, and where you can learn as fast as you want, a history where knowledge six months ago is no longer profitable,a history where you cannot wait to get information from another guy who calls himself a professor but it really does not love their job, but by money. You cannot depend of what are you learning using such a valuable resource like time from a stranger who doesn't care about what you love to do. We need to start creating yesterday, and the future is today.

I think schools need to change the way educate people, because just give knowledge with non sense of application kind of useless(some psychologists says the knowledge is better developed by practicing not just reading or listening), and i personally consider a waste of time these behavior, because we forget knowledge pretty much everything if we don't use it, and also we didn't really own knowledge at all, sometimes it's just an act of imitating your teacher trying to get a high note.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, and repeating some old stuff doesn't solve nothing but high average in school.

From the other hand, i think internet is such a great tool to start building real knowledge of almost anything, we can search from how to find the g point to build a molotov bomb in a few clicks away. Internet is such an amazing way of share experiential knowledge and give value to other people like HackerNews, somo other tools like Quora, StackOverflow and more to come. We can connect people with the same ideology or same musical preferences. I find my first paid work using Internet, i met my actual girlfriend from internet, i know almost all i do from here, the internet, i'm sharing what i'm learning in a blog post, i've built a community for Mexican and Latin American Android Developers. There aren't barriers here, and those mental barriers you can defeat at a pair of clicks.