[steevoyang]

Thanks Alex, this is great. I think a lot of people have the inspiration and understand the "why" behind learning to code, but the issue most of the time is where to start and having a roadmap for getting there. This is a great resource for that. How many hours per week were you spending on this material, how did you keep yourself motivated, and did you have any people you could go to for resources when you got stuck?

[Alex3917]

I probably spent 3 - 5 hours per day, 6 days per week. I kept myself motivated mostly by choosing the easiest resources to learn from I could find, which made it much easier to make measurable progress. I didn't have anyone else helping me in real life, so I just relied on the Udacity forums, Stack Overflow, and IRC. But again, because I was using really easy materials to learn from, fortunately I never got stuck that badly. Usually it was just a matter of putting down the book and doing a couple YouTube/Google searches.

[jaynos]

I'm also interested in how many hours. Additionally, were you employed full time or taking some sort of hiatus while learning?

[Alex3917]

I was working on a startup. But then one day I saw a post on HN about Udacity, and that it was starting in a couple days, so I signed up. I never thought I'd get anywhere near as far as I did, and certainly I didn't even intend to, but I just kind of got into a groove and kept going. Eventually I had to do the startup as a side project and get a job, so I was applying for mostly marketing jobs. But then I also applied for a couple coding jobs on a whim, and discovered it was actually much easier for me to get interviews for coding jobs even though I'm much more talented as a marketer. Go figure. So that's partly why I decided to go that direction as well.