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by sixhobbits·10y ago·view on hn ↗
1) Some background is necessary for building and monetizing projects. Not necessarily university education, but you're not just going to pick up a book on CS and start monetizing projects that month. What's your time frame for this?

2) "Just". This is not a trivial exercise. I recommend reading your way through patio11's extensive writings on bootstrapping software companies if you're serious about this

3) OK.

4) You can't really build web apps without JS, at least in some form. Which part about web apps do you like, if it's not JS or "python/ruby/...". This is probably the easiest way to monetize software projects these days though, so maybe reconsider. You can still do some pretty nifty things if you find a niche market and put up a public facing CRUD application with a few lines of Django/Ruby boilerplate.

?) I think all that's really left after your exclusions is to try pick up on the dying markets like Wordpress/CMS development. This can be done through plugins or managing entire sites for other people, or building your own ecommerce business. For the latter, look into ready-made stuff like Magento. This is really how people made money a few decades ago though -- I know a few people who have tried recently and failed.

Last suggestion is to look at more business oriented stuff. VBA is still exceptionally powerful in terms of integrating into tools (Excel) that non-tech people use. A lot of managers etc spend an inordinate amount of time doing repetitive work on spreadsheets -- you can save them hours every day with a few lines of VBA dev. Not fun, but might be what you're looking for.

1 comments
Good points!

About that VBA thing, I was actually thinking about automation. Bash, Python, ruby, even JS, are really great for that. But then we have VBA. I guess most things you can do with VBA in Excel, you can do with python as well.

I agree, I need some background building before jumping into programming. I just figured maybe a good programming book will cover the necessary CS parts, too. "Learning Python" is over 1500 pages, and really is intimidating. "Haskell Programming" is also +1000 pages. Do you think picking up huge books like these, will help me build the required background?

Yes, everything you can do in VBA you can do in another language, and probably more easily. But then you have to persuade the users to use your app - if they're already comfortable with spreadsheets, VBA can make it easier to get them using your product.

If you can work your way through an intro book, it'll be super beneficial! Everything in either of those books will probably be useful at some point or another. No way I'd be able to do that in your position though. Personally the only way I can learn new technology is to have a goal that I find motivating (often, 'build a system that can solve some pain point in my life') and then identify the minimum useful step I can take towards that goal, and then mess around with books, forums, documentation, etc until I've achieved that step.