Is it too late to learn to code?

Erin Parker, founder Spitfire athlete, IOS Engineer

9k upvotes by Francis Chen, Gaurav Baheti, yue-wing Yau, Maria Guryanova, (more)

It ' s never too late. So much can happen in a year, it can amaze you.

I majored in Economics. When I am about randomly, I-decided to go-to-a Railsbridge Meetup, where you learn what do a basic ruby on Rails a PP in a day. I made a basic rails app and very much enjoyed it. A seed was planted.

Months later, I had an idea for a website i ' ve always wanted to build. Although my idea is vague, in this website, I imagined it would inspire women to be kickass go-getters. I thought it would either is a career type of website, or one in the health and fitness space. And I definitely wanted to call it Spitfire. I strongly felt such a product is sorely needed and I felt like I had a pretty good perspective and vision to create it.< /c1>

although I hadn ' t committed to learning programming just yet, I would sketch off mocks like this:

I would email these mocks to my friends and get their feedback.

at the time, I was getting pretty hardcore to lifting weights and seeing a lot of results. I was also have a frustrating time finding high quality, trustworthy resources for women who lift weights and had this C Ontinuous nagging feeling that maybe I should actually Dosomething about it.

Finally, I decided to do it. Friends were asking me how I am getting in shape, what to lift weights, how to eat healthy. I decided to commits to learning Ruby on rails and just building this out.

I figured, if I learn to program, even if I fail, I would has at least failed building something the can help scale What I ' ve learned to potentially millions of people. And that in itself, is a worthy pursuit.

at the same time however, I decided failure is no longer an option. I wasn ' t going to let myself stop until I ' ve built what I envision in my head Spitfire can truly be. I knew that if I just persisted through the pain (like a athlete), that the end result was going to being well worth the temp Orary pain.

I started teaching myself ruby on rails by voraciously consuming every free resource I could, like learn Ruby the hard The, Try Ruby, Codecademy, Michael Hartl ' s book, Why's poignant guide to Ruby, the Rails Guides, and my absolute favorite , Railscasts.

I was relentless. If I didn ' t get something the first time, I didn ' t care. I would go through it again and again until it started to make sense. I would look for different explanations of the concept. I would ask my friends. When in coffee shops, if I is coding, and if the person sitting in front of me looked like they were a engineer based on The stickers on their laptop, I would kindly ask them if they could help (I had made so many friends this, a few of Them is still my really really good friends).

I would go to lots of developer meet-ups, and particularly liked women who Code because of their "teach a new tutorial At each meetup "format and all of the Ruby Group meet-ups because it is easy to get help and unstuck.

I stuck with it for months and little by little ' banged out ' the ideas in my head. You can still see many of my early projects here:

http://spitfiredarkstar.herokuap ...
Http://spitfiredauntless.herokua ...
Http://spitfirehellcat.herokuapp ... 
Https://spitfireocelot.herokuapp ...

I worked the most in this one:
Http://spitfireathlete.herokuapp ...

The site was quite feature-rich. It is pretty, had nice UX, and is a culmination of the great Ruby on Rails stuff I had learned. Unfortunately though, no one was using it!

It is exhilarating and discouraging at the same time. I felt like I had this great skill set...but that I was building stuff...that nobody wanted.

When I asked my friends why they weren ' t using it, I learned so what they really wanted is for me "just tell the M how to work out ". And they wanted something that looked nice on their mobile phones, so they can train at the gym.

so I decided to the change directions completely, learn JQuery Mobile, and I built this:

Http://spitfirewarrior.herokuapp ...

What absolutely fascinated me about this is despite the fact that it was ugly and utterly simple-peopleactuallyused It! And they wanted more. And they wanted it as, gasp, a native IOS app.

As a datapoint-it had been about 6 months since I started learning rails.

I tried resisting the nagging realization that I might has to pick up IOS development if I wanted to take this furthe R. I really tried getting jQuery Mobile to work but very quickly realized it's only great for prototyping (or very simple Apps).

It was around April 2013. And I decided, what do you know? I ' M hell, I ' m going to become an IOS developer. So what if I don't have a CS major? I have the more drive and determination than most people. They may outsmart me, but I just never give up. I ' ve already gone so far. Why stop now? #turtle

So I did the same thing. I voraciously went through every IOS resource I could find. I did all the exercises, the challenge exercises, and finished every book I could get my hands on from start to finish. I was very thankful to friends who would send me free PDF copies of Nice O ' Reilly books that were "expensive".

I frequently attended the women who Code IOS Meet-ups and benefited from the Big Nerd Ranch books on Obj-c and iOS, Ra Y Wenderlich ' s tutorials, and Apple ' s documentation.

I built tons of tiny little apps (that's how you learn)! I also made a promise to myself the I ' m not going to ever think of any technology as "hard", because I think that's like A self-imposed ceiling on your learning. So I, quite fearlessly, ended up learning a bunch the stuff that scares away most iOS developers, that although I don ' t use It today, I realize it made me a much stronger developer, even though I had many long nights of "much stuckness".

Here's a photo of me giving a tech talk at a meet-up on what to do a custom Rails API and then send this data to you R iPhone app using Afnetworking.

That is, age 24. I made myself give this talk...even though I had only *just* learned how to actually does what I am talking about. I felt very much like an "IOS imposter" and like I had just begun to get over the feeling of being a "rails imposter".

Here is a screens shot of learning tableviews and transferring the concept of the Spitfire App to IOS, even though I ended Up building everything again from scratch. I made this after 2 weeks of learning obj-c.

Months went by. Little by Little I got better. Also, IOS is a very interface-heavy system and if you don't learn design, all your apps would look ugly. It ' s almost impossible to separate yourself from the front-end when in XCode. So I decided I should also probably learn design and Photoshop via the Hack design curriculum.

Photoshop is a lot easier to learn than programming, so eventually I made these really pretty mocks:

And eventually, around October, I turned these mocks into the "Spitfire athlete Pre-Alpha" app. Shot of the actual app running on my device:

A couple months of struggling with Core Data and many passionate test-flight users asking for more features, I decided It is time to turn the crazy passion of mine into a start-up and I recruited an incredible co-founder,Nidhi Kulkarni, a razor sharp MIT CS grad, like me, is also an athlete (she competed in D1 rowing while at MIT).

with II technical, Highly-driven ladies at the helm of Spitfire, I felt our productivity 10x. We started together around November, I was nearing the end of age (LOL), and knew I were on the verge of something Pretty exciting.

We participated in the Code Path of iOS Mobile bootcamp together, a free bootcamp for professional-level iOS developers. We finished Spitfire athlete Alpha and at Demo day (which is judged by VPs of Engineering from top mobile companies in Si Licon Valley) We won "Best IOS Apps" and "Best Overall app". That is pretty cool, because I was definitely the only Non-cs major in the entire class!

I turned in January of 2014. In April of our launched to the App Store and were featured on the home page in best New apps, and all over the health and Fitness category. We now have tens of thousands of users and with gotten so much love mail, it makes me truly believe the journey so far has been worth it.

You can download the app from the app Store here:Spitfire athlete

I decided to write the answer tonight because I recently had to renew my IOS Developer subscription. I thought, "Have it been a year?" No. Time goes by so fast. " And then I remembered what it felt like, when I first started.

I hope this answer inspires you and those the WHO read it to learn how to program and make what are you ' re passionate on be Come a reality, because the rewarding feeling of have built something that tens of thousands of people love IS...INDESCR Ibable.

Translation Address: http://blog.jobbole.com/78803/Mutual encouragement

Is it too late to learn to code?