I'm a self-taught programmer. Last year I dropped out of design school and decided to teach myself how to code. 5 days ago my startup went into beta. AMA!

What’s your product exactly?

When hitting your link via mobile, the splash that comes up tells nothing about your product. A disclaimer appears, stating the site doesn’t work on mobile. You should replace that page with another that promotes the actual product.

It's a bunch of bullshit and buzzwords. He's just trying to get his name out there. It's basically impossible to start a new chat network without multiple millions. It'll die soon and he'll pad his resume with it.

The actual software is a bit of a mess as well, I responded to him with a few points that will never work if this ever got big, it is all easy mistakes new programmers make:

• Packets for updates are being sent every single frame! When they should only be sent at around 10 times a second or even less, and then positions should be interpolated between them.
• Packets contain all of the data for every player every time(including the chat that the player already has!) and its completely unnecessary.
• My client is sending updates every single frame(including the same chat every frame!), when it could only be sending changes.

I make shitty web games(https://antwar.io/) but I mean I at least knew not to do this, it is only a matter of time before the server falls over.

You are right about updates. We are moving over to event-based updates in the near future. This is our first version and it has been in beta for 5 days, so there are a bunch of things like that that we will do to increase efficiency. Also, it does send and receives updates 10 times per second then the client smooths out the other frames in-between, so not sure about why you are getting every frame. Really appreciate your feedback on this. If you have any more suggestions, I would love to hear. Have bookmarked your game and will check it out later!

Yes. We currently don't support mobile but an app is in the works!

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Chat Circles is an online space where you can meet people, hang out and explore. A couple of unique things about it:

• It ditches the typical social data feed for a new spatial, synchronous interface. Just like you would go up to and talk to someone at a party you can go up to and chat with someone in a circle.

• Messages self-destruct. When a message disappears from your screen, seconds later it is purged from our servers as well.

• When you join a circle it expands a little. The more people inside, the bigger it will get!

• You can create an account or choose to chat anonymously.

• Encourages more authentic interactions rather than gamifying with likes and followers.

• Notifications will always be opt-out by default.

• It’s free forever and will never serve a single ad.

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I know that not supporting mobile is an inconvenience for a lot of people right now. I encourage you to check it out when you have access to a computer and then let me know what you think! Thanks for your feedback :)

When you began this AMA, did you realize it was going to be this much of a shitshow? Did you intend on answering any questions? Are you new to Reddit?

Not new to reddit. Honestly, my thinking was that I could I could do an AMA and answer some questions related to how are I learned to program, and also get some feedback on my site. Had no idea that this many people would end up seeing this AMA. I'm a newer programmer and know that I have so so much to learn. I clearly came across as sounding like I had it all figured out (which of course I don't). I'm going to delete this now as my intention was never to mislead anybody.

It hit the front page so a lot of people saw it. I hate that you deleted it. I don’t think you misled people, just weren’t prepared.

I'm still going to go through and answer a bunch of the questions from people who were interested in learning to code, and hopefully help a couple of people out. Crazy that it hit the front page. Didn't realize that!

Is it possible to get in the field by just being low-level, I hate platforms/libs/languages that age faster than time itself. Or do i need to accept change in the field?

I can't speak to this too much as I have only been doing this since last year, but u/FatherStorm is right. The landscape is constantly in a state of change. Just last year when I was picking a front-end library, Angular was going out of style a bit and React was becoming more trendy. Now Vue.js is the hottest framework. At the end of the day they will all get the job done though so don't feel too much pressure to always know the latest library. Just keep a learning mindset and always be tinkering and experimenting with new tools and platforms.

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Edit: correct username

Do you have any straightforward dos or donts to an 18 year old preparing for an online programming course?

I'm looking to do a software/web development course to build a portfolio and get into working as a developer, but there are a lot of options which makes it daunting to someone who's only beginning to learn.

Yes, it seems very daunting at first. If you are very new I would recommend codecademy as a great place to start. After 20 or so hours on there, I would start branching out and giving yourself little challenges. For example, I learned react by saying hey, I'm just going to do whatever it takes to get a 200x400px red box in the middle of my screen. Once I got that, I upped the difficulty a bit and challenged myself to make an exact replica of a tweet from Twitter's web UI. Then from there I just made progressively more difficult challenges until now I have built a working social web app. So start small and incrementally increase the difficulty. Even the biggest challenges can be broken down into hundreds or in some cases thousands or even millions of very actionable steps.

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As far a do:

- Do build up a portfolio and GitHub (this can be anything that you would enjoy working on. Make it fun!)

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donts:

- Don't get too comfortable asking others for help without spending some time trying to solve a problem yourself. Even though it's a harder skill to measure, critical thinking and problem-solving are huge aspects of programming, and the only way to get better at them is practice.

- Try not to build too many bad habits. As someone who has only had to work with myself, I'm particularly guilty of this. So trying to keep code legible, organized, commented etc. so that others can read it later on (and so you can too! Code I wrote 6 months ago looks like a foreign language to me without comments).

I definately back the choice of javascript. A great and flexible language. What stack are you using?

Client is React/Redux and D3.js. Back-end is Node, Express, Mongo, Websockets (uws library).

How did you convince companies to take a chance on you with no practical experience? Somebody in my family got laid off and is having trouble getting back into the field because nobody will give her the benefit of the doubt, even though she has real world field experience since the 80's.

From my experience network + portfolio. I got my first contract work through a friend and my second by building a crypto tracking app and then tweeting about it. A company saw it and then DMed me looking to see if I could build them an internal tool in that space. I don't know what industry your family member is in, but perhaps the same thing might apply. If she can show potential employers something physical that proves she knows what she is doing, that might be very helpful. I wish her the best of luck with finding work!

Best motivational quote...?

"Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall"

-Confucius