Everlater

More from our friends Nate and Natty at Everlater – this time on debugging. One of the most important techniques we used when learning how to code is debugging. It allowed us to do two things: fix our own code when it was broken and parse through others’ code to better understand how they were doing things. From a backend perspective, debugging is essential. When I first started writing code, I would write what I *thought* was the correct way to do it. Ninty-nine times out of a hundred I was wrong and the code would blow up with some ugly exception that I had no clue about. Copying and pasting the exception into google got me decent mileage, but the real silver bullet I discovered was just start from the beginning of the method and step through it using the ruby debugger and figure out where I had gone wrong. Almost always I had forgotten to assign some variable or I was calling a method that did something different than I thought. ...

I know it’s been a few weeks since my last Nate and Natty / Everlater post on learning to program. I’ve gotten a few notes asking for more – expect a couple of posts over the next few days. In the mean time, here’s Nate’s view on how to divide tasks between partners – in this case him and Natty. Having good systems in place around your coding is just as important as the coding itself. Natty and I spent a huge chunk of our time figuring out a great workflow that would allow us to program more effectively, and we think it’s paid huge dividends over the lifespan of Everlater. ...

Thanks for all the feedback and comments on the Learning to Program series with Nate Abbott and Natty Zola from Everlater. In the last post, titled Web Sites and Books for Novice Programmers , I foreshadowed some of the tools that Nate and Natty chose to build Everlater. Now that you know how they got started, here’s what they ended up choosing. Everlater is built on Ruby on Rails , postgreSQL and is hosted on Engine Yard using a passenger/nginx combination. Nate and Natty use several standard Ruby/Rails packages (gems) to extend the base functionality of Rails. On the front end, they use a combination of jQuery and Prototype for Javascript . ...

In the continuation of the Learning to Program series with Nate Abbott and Natty Zola from Everlater, I asked them a few questions about which web sites, books, and blogs they consumed at the beginning of their journey when they knew nothing about programming. It turns out that Nate and Natty spent most of their time simply searching for what they were looking for. Whenever a specific topic came up, they’d use Google, be patient when reading through the search results and forums, refine their search, and keep trying. They discovered that there are an amazing number of programmers who publish code on their personal blogs. As they were trying to get basic stuff to work, they spent time searching for and then reading the full posts and comments. ...

To start off the Learning to Program series with Nate Abbott and Natty Zola from Everlater, I asked them the simple question “What Was Day 1 Like?” Nate responded first: Day one was totally overwhelming. Overwhelming because we didn’t know what we didn’t know. It’s one thing when you don’t know how to do something (e.g., validate email addresses or change a button’s hover state). But we didn’t know what we needed to learn, and that made it difficult to even start down a path. The first week was spent just googling “web site design”, “web site architecture” and “web server” to try to get a handle on all of the acronyms we were coming across (such as CSS, HTML PHP MYSQL, ROR, JS, AJAX). Our goal was to piece together the list of skills that we were going to collectively learn in order to create a web service like Everlater. ...

I had lunch today with Nate Abbott and Natty Zola , the co-founders of Everlater, a TechStars 2009 company. Nate and Natty are two of my favorites – not only because they regularly kick my partner Seth Levine’s ass on bike rides but also because they starred in last year’s TechStars The Founders video series. Today, while enjoying a veggie burger at Mustard’s Last Stand , we talked about how Nate and Natty learned to program. When they came up with the idea for Everlater, they were both young finance geeks on wall street. Nate was a math major; Natty was a econ major, but neither had a clue how to build a web app. They decided that rather than find a “developer” to team up with, they would learn how to program. ...