003 : Building the ultimate roommate finder with Ajay Yadav

NNL Podcast What would you do if you came back to your apartment after a trip abroad to find out that your roommate had disappeared with the deposit, the locks had been changed, and your stuff was missing? I know my response would involve a large number of guttural screams and a healthy amount of crying.

Ajay, on the other hand, used it as inspiration to build Roomi, an app that helps people find ideal roommates. List or browse apartments, describe your lifestyle, and never get stuck with a nightmare roommate again.

After a ton of research, Ajay built Roomi from scratch — learning Objective-C in a few months using free online resources, hiring a designer, and creating a minimum viable product (MVP). He’s learned from past mistakes and really did it right this time.

If you’re still struggling to figure out your best next move, listen to this episode and follow in Ajay’s steps. You’ll come out with an awesome product.

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001 : It’s never too late to become a coder with Will Larche

NNL Podcast In this inaugural episode of the Novice No Longer Podcast, I’m joined by Will Larche, the Lead iOS Developer at LearnVest. This episode is a little different than the stuff I usually teach — I almost always tell my students to hire a developer rather than learn to code themselves. But sometimes learning to program is the right path, and Will proves that anyone can become a developer, regardless of previous experience. Continue reading →

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Quit wasting time searching for a technical cofounder

Finger wag

It’s no surprise to me that many of my students are searching for a technical cofounder.

If you have a good idea but not the ability to bring that product to life, it makes sense to try to find someone with a complimentary skill set: a coder without an idea.

But this thinking is based on flawed logic — these students are assuming that their idea alone is valuable. This is flat-out not true. It’s the execution of an idea, not the idea itself.

Even if you don’t know how to code, there are a ton of other things you can do that will actually help move your idea forward. Knowing how to code is not the be-all and end-all of building apps or other technical products. Continue reading →

Epiphanies I had while teaching myself to code

It’s been about a year since I decided to teach myself to code. At the time, I had a bachelor’s degree in English, a job in retail, and zero knowledge about programming. I’d had minute brushes with coding in the past but hadn’t even thought about math or coding since high school.

The impetus for learning to code came from my growing addiction to Hacker News. I, too, wanted to build cool things and understand how web apps and programs worked. I wanted to have an app in the App Store, dammit. I wanted to start a business.

But, for someone who couldn’t tell JavaScript from Common Lisp, I had no idea where to start. Continue reading →

Programming, Rubik’s Cubes, and unconscious incompetence

The “conscious competence” learning model describes four stages of competence. The first stage is “unconscious incompetence,” which is the state of not even knowing what you don’t know. Not even Google can help because you don’t even know what to type into the search bar. Last year, when I made the decision to learn how to code, this is how I felt. I was an English major in college and had used it to rack up retail experience. My knowledge of computers, while passionate, came strictly from recreational experience. Continue reading →