OP here - FYI - I was a software engineer at Novell over 20 years ago, then went to the business side. Last January for some crazy reason I decided to build a website. I couldn't write HTML last January, and though this is a pretty tame site by HN standards, I'm pretty proud of it. I've had to learn HTML, CSS, Javascript, Jquery, Angular, D3, Require, Node, Apache, Bootstrap, noSQL DB (Cloudant/Couch), linux system management - the works. It's been fun.
Interestingly the python experience has been incredibly different from 20 years ago. Back then I was hunting memory leaks in C. In python I program at a much higher and more efficient level. The Web side, however,is much more like the old days. Instead of memory leaks I hunt obtuse bugs in angular that make me want to pull my hair out. The biggest positive change is stack overflow, which is really so amazing. And the whole open source community - creating all these great frameworks, and even responding to the occasional plea for help.
Cool site! I wonder how it will look after another decade of climate change. (And ... I don't know Seattle except by reputation, but SF has at least a couple of very distinct microclimates; the charts for the Mission and the Marina are surely very different.)
I'm in the same programming boat as you. (In my case, 18 years.) From your experience, what are the top three programming/learning tips you'd give the year-ago you?
1. Start small - I was way too ambitious on the first part of the project.
2. Start with python- my back end data work is all python and it is SO much easier and more learning-efficient than the Web stack.
3. I'm torn on this one. I PROBABLY should have learned more rigorously before jumping in- with angular especially- but I personally find it much more motivating to learn with a specific problem in mind. Though my goal this year is to go back and learn comprehensively what I spot learned in process.
Well for your case you might as well have done your backend in Node since you didn't know Python and you had to learn JavaScript for the frontend anyway.
Pretty cool to see you using CouchDB for this. I've always wondered how building analytics with CouchDB would be. Do you have any thoughts on that experience?
