1. An extremely long and comprehensive story on the very early Facebook days
2. The Art Of Launching An App: A Case Study
3. Getting Ahead: A Letter to Myself
4. Playing B-Ball with Obama: 6 Steps to Crossing Anything Off Your Bucket List
5. Marketing 101 for Developers

1. Hidden habits of ineffective people
2. Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was Eighteen
3. How Getting Rejected By Founder Collective Helped Save Our Startup
4. There’s no speed limit. (The lessons that changed my life.)
5. How to thrive as a solo non-technical founder

1. How Rovio made Angry Birds a winner (and what’s next)
2. Inside the clone factory: The story of Germany’s Samwer brothers
3. Are you building a company, or your credentials?
4. How To Get Media Coverage For Your Startup: A Complete Guide
5. Learn By Copy

However, the desire to start my own tech startup, combined with the difficulty (and costly endeavour) of finding a technical co-founder, development of online education to teach programming and reading about other non-techie people successfully picking up programming has finally made me set a goal to master programming to build a web app prototype myself instead of relying on someone else.

In short, I’ve been teaching myself Python over the past couple of months and I have found several useful resources for the non-techie startup enthusiast who is interested in mastering this language. Before I begin, I would like to share a couple of Python success stories to get you motivated on learning Python (I got motivated on these so I hope it will have the same positive effect on you) – it’s possible, I know! Here’s the links: How I Learnt enough Python/Django to be Dangerous in 1 Month, Python from scratch and Instagram Founder’s Girlfriend Learns How To Code For V-Day, Builds Lovestagram.

Now for my Top 3 Python learning tools:

1. Udacity CS101 Online Course

   This is by far the best resource for learning Python programming. It’s the absolute best thing for pure beginners as it explains programming in a fundamental level. It’s taught by a Stanford professor to build a search engine and there is no text book or long texts to read. Instead classes are structured in short video clips explaining concepts in 2-5 minutes . At the end of the explanation of each small concept, there is a quiz where you have to answer a simple multiple-choice question or use the online Python IDE to solve a problem. This course is structured like a university module that is to be run in 7 weeks. The current course is into week 5 out of 7. There are weekly lectures, homeworks and office hours just like university. And there is an online forum where other students can discuss homework or lectures (but not answers) to supplement learning. This is by far the best way to learn programming for me as it humanises the learning experience, includes social element and provides many quick wins to avoid the frustration of learning through the quizzes.

2. MIT Python Tutor

   This is a great debugging tool. Often, as a person beginning to learn programming, I am always lost as to why a programme is not behaving the way I want it to be. I may have a wrong understanding of the while loop etc. This tool is a tool that goes through your Python code step-by-step and shows you the effect of running each line. It shows you what each variable is being assigned to, the process that a list is being mutated – in other words it helps in debugging without the need to use the print function. The only downside is that it has a limit of 200 steps and so cannot run longer codes but this 200 steps is generally good enough to help run almost any procedure for a beginner learner.

3. Google Code Python Class

   This was actually my first resource when learning Python. I started using this mainly as a result of reading about it from one of the success stories above. I did all the exercise over there. It’s a little more interesting with the exercises giving you instant Correct/False answers to your solutions but it is still very dry with long chunks of texts and lectures that are an hour long. Also there is not enough sample exercises and simple exercises for quick wins to continue motivated. And the text is written at quite a high level sometimes that I lose track and just get plain confused. Nevertheless, it’s a good place to start learning. It could be better with more exercises and simpler explanations.

These are the 3 primary methods which I have been using to learn Python. I have seen a couple of other resources out there but I honestly think using Udacity and MIT Python Tutor is all that is needed to be good at this. If you do not like the above 3 then I suppose you may use the following other resources: Learn Python The Hard Way, PySchools, Invent With Python and MIT OpenCourseware: Intro to CS and Programming.

That’s it folks. I just want to share my excitement about learning Python through Udacity. I’m hooked onto this thing now. I started halfway through the course. Caught up with the first 4 weeks of work in 1 week. Now I’m back on track with the class and looking forward to completing this class and to start their next Udacity CS253 course taught by the founder of Reddit where they will teach Django to build a blog. Seriously the guys at Udacity are just plain awesome.

Anyway, I may have missed out on some possibly useful Python resources. Kindly comment with any Python resources which I should be made aware of so that I can further improve my Python skills. I think the ones where I think I would be most interested will have a social element and many practice questions/challenges.

1. Taking the long view
2. The Spanx Woman Is Worth A Billion?! My Key Takeaways
3. Send The Right Signal
4. How to Do What You Love
5. The essential startup team: content, analytics, design, engineering

1. How Three Germans Are Cloning the Web
2. Breakdown of DollarShaveClub’s Signup UX
3. Silicon Valley’s dirty little secret: The ‘Startup Boom’ is a disguised jobs fair for big corporations
4. VC insanity, explained…or, why VCs do what they do
5. Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

Ever so often I go about talking to people (non-startup founders or wannabe startup founders) and I ask them if they have any ideas that they are interested to implement or think would be cool to see in the world. I will normally get either of the following two responses:

a) The wannabe startup founder will tell me that it’s a secret but the idea is revolutionary and will change the world; or
b) The wannabe startup founder will tell me their idea but then they do not take any action to bring their idea to life. Prompting them further as to why aren’t they doing something about the idea, they will usually come out with all kind of excuses

Let’s leave case (b) for the moment for another blog post and focus on case (a).

I have a very big problem with people who are very secretive about their idea. I have one thing to say to people like these: YOUR IDEA IS WORTHLESS! It’s probably worth $0! There are tonnes of idea out there that can be easily obtained and besides, what makes you think you are so smart to come out with the killer idea? Someone else might have thought about it and did something about the idea before you!

If you don’t believe me, check out Springwise – there are literally thousands of ideas from all over the world on interesting startups and concepts by other companies! The website is just simply awesome in helping me keep ahead of the curve on the types of ideas coming out. If you are keen, you can simply copy some of the ideas there and implement them in a different country. There is certainly some merit of this business concept, hence the clone factory business model made famous by Rocket Internet.

You see the thing about ideas is, ideas are practically worth nothing. Everything is about execution and how well you can bring the idea into the real world. There is no point building something in stealth mode and not informing anyone about it. The moment you launch your idea, it is for all to see what you are doing. You might think that you will have a first-mover advantage. Truth is, you probably will not get that much of an advantage. Someone who is more determined than you can take the exact same idea and make it better and out-execute you even though you are the first in the market.

The thing about sharing ideas is that you may think your idea is perfect but once you start discussing it with other people, other people may start questioning you about the feasibility and viability of your assumption. You will have plenty of questions about the underlying assumptions and these questions help you understand your business better and the questions may even trigger a better idea in you. I certainly had many of such moments whenever I discuss my ideas with others.

I have tonnes of idea. I have to admit I am an ideas kind of guy. Check out my Ventures page to see what kind of random ideas I have tried testing out – some were OK while some were just plain bad ideas. But hey, at least I tested my ideas out and I am now a tiny bit wiser on what works and what doesn’t work instead of having a very hypothetical view of what might work in the real world. However, being an ideas guy is practically worth nothing to a startup because there is almost no skill that can be marketed. (I will probably write another post on what skills a non-technical co-founder can bring to a startup – and accountancy skill is definitely not on the list!)

OK this blog post is not meant to disrespect those who are very protective of their ideas but is meant mainly to illustrate my point that ideas are worthless unless actions are taken to bring them to life. So don’t start attacking me but instead start funneling that energy into taking actions to bring your ideas to life!

Photo, Photo via (cc) via Flickr user qisur, mil8