Brainstorminnovation Learning

Ted Nash.

When Ted Nash was 16 he decided to build an app to test out Apple's new App Store. He called it "Fit or Fugly," and it claimed to scientifically analyse photos of your friends to judge whether they were attractive or not.
It was a simple app, more of a joke than anything else. But as people bought iPhones and experimented with the App Store, Fit or Fugly took off.

The app was downloaded over 6 million times, and it received 180,000 downloads in a day. Nash priced his app at $1, so take away Apple's 30% App Store cut, and he made $126,000 (£85,000) in just a single day. It wasn't bad for a 16-year-old living in a farmhouse in Somerset, experimenting with the App Store.
Fit Or Fugly

Nash didn't stop there. He made a lot of money from Fit or Fugly (later renamed FaceRate), but he released another app that skirted controversy: Little Gossip. It was an early version of modern apps like Secret, Whisper, and Yik Yak that allow people to post anonymous comments online. But Little Gossip was designed for schools.

Nash says he was 17 when he released Little Gossip. "I didn't do socialising, to be honest. I was useless at it," he says. "I built a platform that was totally anonymous for my friends at school to write about what happened the night before." But that platform for his friends at school quickly spread to other schools, then to universities and offices. Little Gossip was flooded with anonymous posts, and it was more than Nash could handle.

Little Gossip

A screenshot of Little Gossip before it was shut down.

"In the first hour we had something like 33,000 hits," he says. "We ended up getting 50,000 pieces of gossip submitted every day." Nash decided not to moderate the content (known as gossips) on his service. Instead, he left it to become a free-for-all, and malicious content spread.

"About 10% of all gossip submitted was incredibly malicious, to the point of it being dangerous. If someone was on the receiving end of that you could become mentally unstable or suicidal. I was getting complaints left, right and centre. I was getting legal threats from different people at school."

Nash says that journalists started to take notice of his site, and some even travelled to his family home to ask him about it. "The intercom was ringing on the gate, and my Mum went out after having her morning shower, in her dressing gown, to find The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, and The Guardian outside our gate saying 'Does Ted Nash live here? We want to talk to him about Little Gossip.' Mum was like 'What on earth have you done?'"

Eventually Nash shut down Little Gossip because of the negative press attention and malicious content that spread through the site. "If I was in Silicon Valley I could have gone and raised a hell of a lot of money and grown it," he says, but he still pulled the plug.

That was back in 2011. Now, five years later, Nash is still involved in the App Store. But this time he's not developing apps himself. Instead, he's running a mobile advertising company called Tapdaq that helps developers attract users to their own apps. It works by encouraging users to shuffle between similar apps on the Tapdaq network, preventing them from getting bored and leaving.

he Tapdaq team.

It's all about building a community of likeminded developers that have similar apps. One developer who runs a shooting game could use Tapdaq to advertise his app to another, similar, app. It doesn't matter whether it's an app they own or one by another company, Tapdaq lets them cross-promote.

They "collaborate with each other as opposed to compete" and encourage users to swap between their apps. Right now Tapdaq is more about retaining users rather than showing ads to them, but that functionality is coming soon.

Nash previously created its own virtual currency known as "daq" that developers could earn and trade for app installs. It was a complicated way of encouraging developers to sign up, and Tapdaq killed off "daq." Nash now admits that his virtual currency for developers was "convoluted" and "over-intellectualised."

5 Tips to Learn Programming Faster

The tech sector has long been considered one of the best for job seekers, and two recent reports suggest that demand for tech careers will only continue to grow. This is particularly good news for aspiring software developers, computer programmers, and Web developers, who all make the Top 10 list of best Technology Jobs of 2015, according to U.S. News and World Report.

There is one downside to this, however: Learning to program is tough work. Whether you’re pursuing a degree in computer science, a student at a coding boot camp, or attempting to teach yourself how to code on nights and weekends, you’re going to need patience, grit, perseverance, and lots of time. Here are five tips to speed up the process so that you can learn programming faster.

1. Learn by Coding, Not by Reading
Children don’t learn how to tie their shoes by reading about it; they have to actually do it, over and over, until it’s firmly entrenched in their brains. Coding works in much the same way. You might fly through a chapter of reading and have no problem understanding a topic like “for loops,” but if you don’t play with the code right there and then, you’ll never remember the syntax when you go to actually implement it for the first time. The same applies to sample code: Thanks to the additions of comments and instructions, it’s easy to read and always seems fairly intuitive, but to fully grasp the concepts, you need to actually tinker around and write (or at least run) the code yourself. Therefore, get your hands dirty whenever you can and embrace the mantra, “code as you go.”

Hint: If you’re just starting out, build a personal project in tandem with your reading, so you’ll always have a tangible canvas to try out what you’re learning.

2. Grasp the Fundamentals for Long-Term Benefits
As elementary as they may appear at first, programming fundamentals always need to come first: The better you understand them, the easier it is to learn more advanced concepts. At Coding Dojo, the students who rush through the beginning of our software boot camp (where we focus on Web development fundamentals) are often the first to get stuck as we transition into more advanced material, such as back-end programming. So before you ditch your first Computer Science 101 class or skim Chapter 1 of an online tutorial, keep in mind that you’re overlooking the most important step in your learning. As eager as you might be to reach the end, you must be patient and respect the process.

Hint: Read this great article about the 5 Basic Concepts of Any Programming Language

3. Code by Hand to Sharpen Proficiency
Computer monitors become thinner, hard drives lighter, and programming languages more powerful, but coding by hand still remains one of the most effective methods to learn how to program. Whether it’s on a whiteboard or in a notebook, coding by hand forces you to be more cautious and precise, because you can’t run hand-written code midway through to check if your work is correct. While this restriction will slow you down a bit at first, it will mold you into a more fundamentally sound developer and help you tremendously in college exams. So start early and get used to this old-school practice.

Hint: Coding by hand will also help you land a job! When it comes to technical interviews—a critical component of the job interview process—you’ll have to code by hand, because it’s universally viewed as the ultimate test for a programmer’s proficiency. Ace that, and you have a serious edge over other job seekers.

4. Seek Out Help and Additional Resources
Too often, aspiring programmers feel that asking for help is an admission of failure, or a sign that they’re just not “cut out” for programming. In truth, every programmer has needed help along the way. So when you’re stuck on something, don’t be shy to reach out to classmates, mentors, or even established developers. If there’s one thing passionate individuals enjoy, it’s sharing their knowledge with others.

Likewise, if you’re struggling to understand a concept in a textbook, class lecture, or on Codeacademy, try out a different resource. Everyone learns in different ways, and just because one source doesn’t make sense doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. It means that you’re not clicking with the delivery of the material. There are countless online resources to help you learn computer programming, and there’s always a Reddit post, YouTube tutorial, or blog explanation that will make the material-at-hand crystal clear. We are especially fond of Stack Overflow and Reddit’s “learn programming” subreddit .

Hint: At Coding Dojo, we suggest the 20-minute rule: Take at least 20 minutes to figure out something on your own before seeking help. Not only will this force you to think in new ways and become a better programmer, but there’s a good chance the answer is right in front of you.

5. Take Breaks When Debugging
Debugging—the act of hunting down and fixing that errant code that’s causing your website or application grief—is painfully tedious work. It’s easy to go down the rabbit hole for hours, becoming more frustrated as you go, and thus less productive in your work. To avoid this, take regular breaks. Stepping away for a while—whether it’s 30 minutes or three hours—will allow you to clear your head and come back with a fresh perspective.

Hint: Give your eyes a break, ditch the computer screen and go outside, read a book, eat food or take a nap. This will not only keep you sane, but it will restore the focus you need to successfully fix the bug.

Conclusion: Keep Calm and Code On
In addition to these tips, there’s one other thing you can do to learn programming faster: remain confident. Be patient with your progress and accept the fact that you are going to fail repeatedly—it’s the only way to learn. If doubts ever cloud your mind, remember that every programmer has walked this path before, none of them any more “destined” to become a developer than you.