Ask HN: From biotech industry to web technology: how and where should I start?

Email is in my profile. I'll be periodically updating my blog with "life on the outside" type posts too.

As an aside, I'm a strong believer in micropreneurial projects as espoused by Rob Walling. One of his big points is deciding if you want to be a web entrepeneur, or a web developer. If you want to be an entrepeneur, it may be a better use of time/money to outsource development instead of taking the time to learn coding yourself.

With all that said, I absolutely adore programming itself. But not everyone does, and if your ultimate goal isn't to write code as a living, it may be better to sidestep that part of the process.

For RoR:

1) Have you seen the free Rails for Zombies course from code school? There is a part 2 which costs money ... but might be worth it if you enjoyed part 1.

2) There are a few screencasts on peepcode that might be useful. I think there are two on Rails3/3.1 for 10 or 12 bucks. I thought they were worth it.

MVP advice:

1) I am not a successful entrepreneur so take my advice with a grain of salt. I've learned after several MVPs that just writing code and putting it up on the web does not translate to cash. PG wrote an article relevant to this recently ... http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html

So basically, my experience has been that building an MVP is part of a much grander process. Do build a quick an dirty MVP to explore your ideas and get feedback. But also do think of the bigger picture and iterate.

For learning to code:

1) I'm not a fan of these bootcamp events that are quite popular these days. That said, I have a CS degree and code for fun. After attending a few of these events, I felt these events were pretty useless. You cannot learn to code in a weekend or a week. But so what? My suggestion is to pick a language (if you will do RoR, Ruby is a perfect choice; if you want to do server side stuff, I'd recommend Python). Once you picked a language, write code! For fun! Yes ... it sounds insane given you have an MVP to work on. But do it for fun! Write a sudoku solver or whatever strikes you as a fun toy problem. After a while, writing code will be as natural as thinking.

2) Go to Hackathons on weekends/evenings. There are ton of events all the time. Usually, they are very cheap to attend. Work with other developers. I picked up RoR from a dude at a hackathon (I was using Python and being too slow). Same thing for choice of programming editors, etc.

Have you thought of combining your biotech with coding? This is a different path than web programming. It might become very fruitful over time.

Shoot me an e-mail if you have time. I have a couple of ideas floating around that might need some biotech experience.

Would love to get in touch. My e-mail is in my profile.