Instagram Founder’s Girlfriend Learns How To Code For V-Day, Builds Lovestagram
Dear Everybody:
The most wonderful thing you can ever give somebody is your time.
No matter who you are, no matter how much money you make, most people have roughly the same amount of time. In this sense we're all equal.
So yes, some of us could off and spend enormous amounts of money on each other for gifts...but if I spend a week building something, and Bill Gates spends a week building something, the gift is the same temporal size.
It's like saying "Yes, I could do anything at all with this week of time, but I decided that that week of time would be best spent building something that will make you happy."
There's something that I find profoundly beautiful about that.
This is an absolutely fantastic gift. She should be really proud of herself for learning that quickly, and I'm sure he's over the moon about this as a gift.
According to the article, she started in December from basically scratch. She used Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way and learned enough Python to then figure out Django and deploy to Heroku herself.
More importantly, she learned enough to gain this insight:
“Learning to program isn’t the hard part. The biggest challenge is figuring out how all the moving parts of a web application fit together. There’s no book for that,” she said."
Kaitlyn spent the last 2-3 months learning Python just to build this, with no prior programming experience.
What's your excuse, Mr. Non-technical Person? :P
There seems to be this recurring theme in tech media that "gee, wiz! anybody can be 'coder'!". I call bullshit - this article smells like a PR gimmick. While I have no doubt that she picked up the rudiments of programming within this time, I think it's fairly clear that she had "spilled the beans" in order to take this project to the extent that it is available today.
I think the biggest part of this is the effort that she put in to have something in common with her partner. I think that it's a good reminder to everyone with a partner/spouse that putting in the effort to get your hands dirty in something they're interested is a great gift.
On one hand, awwwww. On the other hand, this makes me feel terrible. I've been learning to code for about a year, I have a job which involves plenty of coding, I have a PhD, and I'm pretty sure that I couldn't build and deploy a web app right now. Very well done to her!
As someone currently sitting in class being lectured on a strictly theoretical view of computer science, I cannot agree enough that actually working on something tangible and interesting is the best application and way to learn.
In my free time I'm currently developing an app, and whilst the theory is extremely useful for understanding, it only comes into its own when I'm working my way through the everyday problems that projects provide. Kudos to Kaitlyn, more people should dive in at the deep end!
This is cool, and a great advertising story for instagram (which is almost more of a present!)
I think my valentine gift will be "why didn't you make the reservation earlier?! Where are my roses???"
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Wow, we should all be so lucky.
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The URL slug says it all: awwwwwwwww
Man, this is so awesome. So soooooo awesome.
I ranted about abstractions below, but this woman shipped code. Dedicated to her boyfriend, no less! I'd be incredibly flattered if I were him, and kudos to her for launching something.
Love the URL for the story :)
Is this related? there's even a link to how to make a heart.. but I feel like it's too recent: http://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/phimd/lear...
Am I the only one who doesn't believe this? It's way too strange...
this was lovely, until you get the the last part, which just completely ruined the story.
Trigger suggests creating classes specifically for women who want to code as a possible solution to this particular digital divide, the trick is to not be intimidated ,“[Code] is something that nobody should be afraid of. “
This is news ?
>"The biggest challenge is figuring out how all the moving parts of a web application fit together. There’s no book for that"
As someone with a beginner's skill set, but who dabbles in the development world, I have to agree with this statement. My question is, where is the best place to learn how all the pieces fit together? There's a gap there.
I think this is such a cute gift! Here's a video of the Lovestagram story :)
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Please don't take this the wrong way, but does this really belong on the front page of Hacker News? This is like celebrity news for nerds. I care about what Angelina got Brad for Valentines as much as I care about this.