Time to Concentrate On the Big Idea Plus Programming Update

I want to give an update as to what I’ve been up to. In my last post I mentioned I was going to take some time off from updating my sites such as this one so that I can take time to learn how to become a full stack web developer. But I don’t want this site to sit out there and become stale. So for now I’m just going to use it as a platform to update my status.

I Picked One Idea Out of 11 Potential Ideas Of Mine

I have many ideas for products and I keep getting new ideas. My goal is for these ideas to create side income and ultimately full time income. Currently, I have 11 ideas. Out of all 11 ideas I said to myself, I have to pick one that I’m going to concentrate on. One idea has stood out to me as the smartest of them all. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what the idea is. But I can tell you this. My idea meets three different criteria.

It’s an original idea. Now that said, I just read an article where an entrepreneur said you should come up with an idea that is based off a pain point for a number of users. Now my idea is a pain point but there’s nothing out there to solve the problem in the way that I am going to. Why? I believe people just don’t know to ask for it. But it’s a really really good idea that could potentially change a particular industry. This brings me to point two.
Obviously, if I believe this idea could change a whole entire industry then there is money to be made. I see this as a very profitable venture idea.
It’s something that I like. It’s in an industry that I like. I could see myself doing this 5 years from now, 10 years from now and so on, still loving it.

Also, this idea just so happens to be the last idea that I came up with. So I came up with, over time, 11, what I believe to be, great ideas. About two weeks ago I came up with this idea that I’ve decided to tackle. It hit me after listening to a podcast. It was an ah ha moment that I know is going to result in something that will be a huge success.

Big Idea Equals Lots To Think About

Obviously this is a big idea which means there’s going to be a lot to think about and a lot to do. Not just on the programming side of things. I don’t know if this is something that I will be able to bootstrap by myself. As I dive more into this and figure out all the details I may come to the conclusion that I need to find some funding. If that is the case then I may go searching for an angel or maybe I’ll look into IndieGoGo. I noticed they started a new solution to help entrepreneurs get funding. I may also look into applying for something like YCombinator.

Like I said, I looked at this idea and it was the one that stood out to me. I got my wife’s opinion as well and this idea stood out to her the most. So she agreed with me. It’s a big idea. I kind of wanted to pick a smaller idea at first to do but I guess the old saying “go big or go home” is in my head right now. So I’m going big.

Started Out Learning Ruby On Rails

Over the past month I’ve been diving into programming. I wanted to give an update on where I’m at with that. So I decided on Ruby on Rails as my language of choice. I was into learning Ruby on Rails, investing many hours into learning it. During that time I decided to look into what other programming languages would be beneficial to learn. It brought me down a rabbit hole of looking into multiple languages and programming stacks.

Changed to the MEAN Stack

I arrived at the conclusion that I need to abandon (at least for now) learning Ruby on Rails and instead pick up the MEAN (Mongo DB, Express, Angular, Node JS) stack.

The more I looked into this full stack framework the more I realized that it is the most powerful, up-to-date, and popular framework right now based off the statistics I’ve seen of how it’s been growing. There’s lots of employers looking for MEAN developers. So MEAN is where I was at. I started learning that, investing many hours into it.

Finally Arrived at Meteor

I had picked the MEAN stack because of it’s popularity. That said, it’s still something I plan on learning. It’s a powerful system worth knowing. But more importantly, what I didn’t realize then that I’m now realizing is that the solution that I use, whether it be PHP, MEAN, or Meteor is really dependent on what I’m trying to do. So based on what I’m trying to do I believe Meteor is the best solution of choice. Also there was a great article I read online comparing the MEAN stack and Meteor that helped solidify my decision.

What Does I Mean to Be a Full Stack Web Developer?

Now I was still looking into other programming languages. This got me thinking, what does it really mean to be a full stack web developer? In a nutshell, it means you have need to understand and be proficient in programming both the front end and back end of an app. So how does this break down in regards to what technologies you need to learn? Well, I don’t claim to be a web developer (at least not yet). But I have spent a lot of time researching what it takes to be one.

Based off a lot of research that I accomplished in order to give myself an academic path to go down here’s what I came up with. I’ll try to start at the front end level and then work back to the back end and database level. So here’s the technologies followed by the courses that I’m taking to master them (and yes they are affiliate links. But they’re great courses).

Technologies to learn

HTML5

CSS3

Bootstrap

Javascript

JQuery

APIs

Either the MEAN stack or Meteor (I opted for Meteor but it’s a good idea to learn both)

PHP –Note – my sole purpose for learning PHP is all based around being able to do more with WordPress (create custom themes, and possibly my own plugins). But I believe the MEAN stack and Meteor are the ones to learn. They are the latest and greatest (from what I’ve researched).

GraphQL

React

Git

GitHub

Heroku

Amazon Web Services

Google Web Services

Courses I’m Taking

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate 2017