Sold my company. Thinking of learning how to code.

A couple of months ago I sold my company. I now have plenty of money and a lot of free time and flexibility.

I don't want to work for anyone, I don't want employees, meetings, or hard deadlines. I want a stress-free life and I want to build useful things for the world.

I'm 30, and good at marketing. But I've grown very tired of marketing.

I've been thinking of trying to learn to code. But is it "too late"? Will AI take over coding forever In a few years?

What would you do in my situation? I would be grateful for any thoughts and input.

I started coding when i was 40+ lol Before then best I could manage was custom CSS in WP. Now I eat and build WP plugins for breakfast, lol. I can also program in C#, but I turned away from that recently specifically for an intense coding project for a few months.

Becoming good at coding is simply (once you get good at it) knowing how to solve many problems in succession in pursuit of a single competition goal.

Since you're skilled in marketing, once you pick up some coding skills, you could combine these to create unique and valuable products or services. You've got a couple of good options there! Hiring developers can get your project off the ground quickly if you're looking to move fast. Or, learning to code yourself gives you the flexibility and satisfaction of building it exactly how you want, although it might take a bit longer to ramp up. If you have the budget and a clear vision of what you want to build, hiring developers could be a great choice.

Panther28 said:

I started coding when i was 40+ lol Before then best I could manage was custom CSS in WP. Now I eat and build WP plugins for breakfast, lol. I can also program in C#, but I turned away from that recently specifically for an intense coding project for a few months.

Becoming good at coding is simply (once you get good at it) knowing how to solve many problems in succession in pursuit of a single competition goal.

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Awesome. How did you begin coding?

dkop said:

Awesome. How did you begin coding?

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By failing at Uni as a mature student, which i quit, cause I didn't enjoy working on projects not mine. It was a good jump start. But after I had to start afresh on my own agenda, I learned more from many udemy and youtube tutorials.

Now I just work with chatgpt. Compared with using stack overflow before is much better. (just knowledge isn't always up to date on chatgpt for library versions)

You can be a pretty good programmer after 2-3 years of trying from scratch I think, if you are working with ai now, you won't earn like a freelancer or anything, but you'll have a pretty solid determination and skillset to work on your own stuff.

For my current project, I'm 6 weeks in, and I've built 25+ WP plugins, for my project site already, and some of the functionality is pretty damn complicated (lots of interactive features). I hadn't really ever finished a WP plugin, and the guides I was reading made the whole process too complicated compared to what I got from ChatGPT 6 weeks ago.

Best of luck. I hope you give it a go. It's a worthwhile pastime and definitely helps keep your brain sharp for problem-solving in the finest details of your life.

Panther28 said:

By failing at Uni as a mature student, which i quit, cause I didn't enjoy working on projects not mine. It was a good jump start. But after I had to start afresh on my own agenda, I learned more from many udemy and youtube tutorials.

Now I just work with chatgpt. Compared with using stack overflow before is much better. (just knowledge isn't always up to date on chatgpt for library versions)

You can be a pretty good programmer after 2-3 years of trying from scratch I think, if you are working with ai now, you won't earn like a freelancer or anything, but you'll have a pretty solid determination and skillset to work on your own stuff.

For my current project, I'm 6 weeks in, and I've built 25+ WP plugins, for my project site already, and some of the functionality is pretty damn complicated (lots of interactive features). I hadn't really ever finished a WP plugin, and the guides I was reading made the whole process too complicated compared to what I got from ChatGPT 6 weeks ago.

Best of luck. I hope you give it a go. It's a worthwhile pastime and definitely helps keep your brain sharp for problem-solving in the finest details of your life.

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Thanks man. That's what i needed to hear. Best of luck on your projects!

Panther28 said:

You can be a pretty good programmer after 2-3 years of trying from scratch I think, if you are working with ai now, you won't earn like a freelancer or anything, but you'll have a pretty solid determination and skillset to work on your own stuff.

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Can confirm. Started learning how to code at 31. 33 now - - not a "great" coder but competent enough to code my own bots, my own wp plugins, CRUD applications.

dkop said:

A couple of months ago I sold my company. I now have plenty of money and a lot of free time and flexibility.

I don't want to work for anyone, I don't want employees, meetings, or hard deadlines. I want a stress-free life and I want to build useful things for the world.

I'm 30, and good at marketing. But I've grown very tired of marketing.

I've been thinking of trying to learn to code. But is it "too late"? Will AI take over coding forever In a few years?

What would you do in my situation? I would be grateful for any thoughts and input.

Click to expand...

try trading

What are we doing? Advertising account rental service. Do you have any ideas? Can I give them to you?

30 is not too old for anything.

If that is what you think is best for your future go ahead and learn and even if it is not part of your profession in the future it is part of you.

noellarkin said:

Can confirm. Started learning how to code at 31. 33 now - - not a "great" coder but competent enough to code my own bots, my own wp plugins, CRUD applications.

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Wp plugins? I think it can serve as just an extra source of income.

Building own frameworks and systems is where the money is. Close to the hardware of course.

If you do some shit like wp or react, you're 20 layers high. It's dumb. It's not gonna teach you much. Start doing C and assembly for power and pure typescript without libraries and dependencies. It's like God's powers on computer

When you think in pure procedures and pure code, you get that original vibe of programming and what this world is built on.

It lets you build your own landscape and it's like a private island nobody can touch.

reaaski said:

Wp plugins? I think it can serve as just an extra source of income.

Building own frameworks and systems is where the money is. Close to the hardware of course.

If you do some shit like wp or react, you're 20 layers high. It's dumb. It's not gonna teach you much. Start doing C and assembly for power and pure typescript without libraries and dependencies. It's like God's powers on computer.

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I'm looking over my head as that is where this is.

Coding isn't that hard. Do a couple of really basic tutorials and then learn how to properly break an idea down into smaller, more manageable tasks and then learn how to complete each task.

You can use AI to learn how to complete each task, even how to break your idea down. If you don't rely on AI for code and always read the reasoning for it giving you that code and playing around with it, you can learn a lot really quickly.

It is definitely not too late, you are just a few skills away from being able to play around with a program / script and get it to do some cool shit.

jimbobo2779 said:

Coding isn't that hard. Do a couple of really basic tutorials and then learn how to properly break an idea down into smaller, more manageable tasks and then learn how to complete each task.

You can use AI to learn how to complete each task, even how to break your idea down. If you don't rely on AI for code and always read the reasoning for it giving you that code and playing around with it, you can learn a lot really quickly.

It is definitely not too late, you are just a few skills away from being able to play around with a program / script and get it to do some cool shit.

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https://roadmap.sh/

This is an example of how much things are out there. What you only need to do is be good at writing procedures, understanding oop, html / css and database operations / getting stuff from the internet. Nothing more. It's like 3 libraries but people need to understand what goal it has to serve which isn't easy for starters who don't know what they need to know. It's good to know most programming low level / mid level concepts. Higher levels are really just useful at very specific positions, usually corporate ones.

What can be useful is just class / prototypes based design. It will help in understanding how JavaScript in browser is different from backend. It's also good to know general data structures, then data formats and things like DOM are easier to understand.

You need to know what architecture and style to develop in your projects instead of trying to fit into someone's stuff like framework - this is good to work at teams, but solo it's a drawback

reaaski said:

When you think in pure procedures and pure code, you get that original vibe of programming and what this world is built on.

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sounds great, but its always a tradeoff in terms of client deliverables, time value of money, opportunity cost etc. There are some people who enjoy coding "for the process itself", and that's perfectly fine, but personally I just use it as a way to speed things up. Getting down to the assembly level just isn't going to give me ROI today, with existing clients, given my existing schedule and constraints. But hey, if you have the time and enthusiasm to go that deep, more power to you.

Since you have the financial resources, you don't need to master every detail. You just need to have a basic understanding and then hire the right people to execute your vision. There's no need to work for anyone else; focus on building your ideas. You have the money and the developers, so that's all you need!

noellarkin said:

sounds great, but its always a tradeoff in terms of client deliverables, time value of money, opportunity cost etc. There are some people who enjoy coding "for the process itself", and that's perfectly fine, but personally I just use it as a way to speed things up. Getting down to the assembly level just isn't going to give me ROI today, with existing clients, given my existing schedule and constraints. But hey, if you have the time and enthusiasm to go that deep, more power to you.

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There is this problem that if you need money right now, you go to clients. If you can delay that making money stuff (I still manage to), there's an opportunity to dive deeper. If you're fully loaded with clients only, it's not a good thing in any scenario. You need properties too, in real estate it would be houses or apartments, on a computer it's having some special personal stuff that let you create content, basically content machine that lets you build brands / scale marketing / automate content and some distribution operations like Zapier allows for example. You can do it with tools but it's pricey and not very... It doesn't let me develop hard skills other people don't have.

Different tools for different jobs. Do you have any particular area of interest at all right now?

Panther28 said:

I started coding when i was 40+ lol Before then best I could manage was custom CSS in WP. Now I eat and build WP plugins for breakfast, lol. I can also program in C#, but I turned away from that recently specifically for an intense coding project for a few months.

Becoming good at coding is simply (once you get good at it) knowing how to solve many problems in succession in pursuit of a single competition goal.

Click to expand...

Becoming good at coding means you can write code that doesn't break using just programming language and not frameworks / libraries. You just cut parts of libraries into your projects. You need a style. This is like art and you know it. More pike martial arts cause a proper kick saves you hours of fights.

In art and in engineering you need to find a style that resonates with your value system (your psychology). You cannot steal someone's style. You'll not be happy about copying people cause it's not building but copying, that's like living in someone's house vs having own house

I can create a filebased system that does what Facebook does without using servers and databaes. It's because I remove all complexity. I understood that simplicity is a great value to posses in business and life. Cause life is a chaotic complexity. If you simplify some things like your work, you have easier time putting order to things and you don't make yourself confused by inconsistent behavior. And that... Makes you happy.

If I had to build a Google clone using frameworks, it would take me years to build. Instead I can bulld a Google clone by designing a system using nothing but diagrams and class / procedures connected together using a variety of concepts. The thing is I'd never get be limited in my thought by some "framework feature"

Framework-less node.js is like C#. But the real deal is in C++ cause you have all direct access to your computer. It's strong.

I noticed that when I used frameworks, some basic programming concepts didn't make sense there cause it was so many layers of stuff. To understand those layers well, it's probably an investment of 2 years of learning. And the result is... You're just the same person who would learn by doing things using programming language but with more complexity, so you just learned how to create complex software and that's all which is a problem if you build solo.

It's a long road and it's worth it. You can learn at any age and it's best if you have some kind of mentor/teacher to explain you the basic concepts at least. The best advice for beginners I could give is to do a lot of exercises like in university, they assign you tons of codings projects. U can use websites like leetcode or hacker rank

Since last year I had a basic foundation in coding, however, I took the initiative to learn about backend systems and building APIs. I was afraid of JavaScript as well but I knew how to use python and started learning django for backend. I hope this year I will learn even more and build apps that don't break lol