Andy Su

Following up my last post (over a month ago), I have been working slightly on pastacodes.com. This site is still in development. It is a really easy site to build but I obviously have my priority set to school and indinero (the main project I’m making with Jessica Mah). Last week I spent a good 4 days on it and deployed it. Right now, anyone interested in learning php and ruby on rails should sign up for the mailing list.

The site will be launched on June 15th. I’m pretty sure I won’t make that deadline but setting inconcievable deadlines is actually good practice in this industry. Besides, our army of interns for Indinero will be at our house this summer at around June 15th I am currently looking for alpha testers to rip the site apart and spit it in my face. So if anyone’s interested please email me at alpha[at]pastacodes.com.

Also, since pastacodes is a site to teach programming, I would like to compose a list of awesome tutorial blogs and spam those guys. Anyone with a decent tutorial on php or rails please comment or email me too

So it’s been 6 months since I first started programming. I now know c, c++, java, mysql, php, ruby on rails, xml, a little python and some server side management crap. I can learn a new programming language in less than three days and I feel like I can make a small web company in like a week. Yet I still see so many people missing programmers. People who need programming interns and such. Is the barrier to entry really that high? Or do people just want the easy way out by delegating some poor intern for every bug fix. That must be the shittiest job ever by the way. It is so much harder to look at someone else’s code and try to fix it than to create one yourself. Those interns should be paid more than lead developers in my opinion.

I think someone should build a step by step programming site. This’ll be one of my future side projects if no one explores it. Coming up spring break hopefully. Along with Jess’s and my new project. Life’s a lot more exciting once I got into college.

High school student alone in a summer afternoon.

What brought me into the world of entrepreneurship was one of those adolescent phases we all go through. What’s my purpose in life, what’s my future. No matter how I thought about it all I was left with was death or some miracle longevity medicine from stem cells (south park). So pretty much, make the best out of your life. Write a list of stuff to do before you die or something. Just don’t be stuck in your 80s without a single significant thing to tell your grandchildren other than you won a local halo tournament or something.

Several hours later.

A great way to do something awesome is through entrepreneurship! A great way to start your first project is to make a goal, tell everyone about your goal, and then maybe accomplish your goal with the pressure of everyone knowing about it. Finding cool equally bored people to work with is even better. You get to keep each other motivated it really helps to have a cofounder.

The next day with a bunch of other idiots.

Even the smallest projects could start off a entrepreneur roller-coaster. Just do something small and fun like a prank or funny movie and video tape it. Then somehow incorporate an ad like “drink Pepsi” or something. Let’s say that the video turned out well. If I were an advertising agency I’d love to have you work on a mini-project. I wouldn’t care less if you bombed your last math final.

Internshipin is the latest company that I’ve worked on. It got started quite fast and I learned a lot from it. Here’s practically how it started.

Two weeks after moving into Berkeley, I met Jessica Mah. After finishing our discrete mathematics howework that day, we started talking about making a company. Pretty soon, we drew out an outline for internshipin and got started.

Within a week, we had a rough search and employer posting page ready. We then rented a $160 server from Softlayer and pumped out more of the code. With midterms and homework bogging us down, we took a month to make the first beta and released it to employers.

The main thing is publicity. We had like 6 postings signed up and 1 paying internship. It wasn’t until the techcrunch post that we actually had people on our site. The moral here - know lots of people like Jessica and if you can get them to write a post about your site, great things will happen.