Simon Willison’s Weblog

Should I take the time to learn programming, or take my idea and run with it?

11th February 2012

My answer to Should I take the time to learn programming, or take my idea and run with it? on Quora

Stop reading, start building. You’ll progress a LOT faster if you’re solving actual problems and writing real code, rather than spending 5-8 hours a day reading but not practicing.

It sounds like your target project is way too ambitious... so pick a smaller project to develop your skills with. You’ll learn way more from having a small live project that people are interacting with than you will spending years building a huge project without any feedback on how it works.

Don’t worry too much about someone else executing your Big Idea first—Howard Aiken’s famous quote comes to mind: “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”

And if someone does build something similar, you can always execute it better.