About the Book

You are building a business, not a career path.

You aren't interested in programming because it could land you a job at a Big Tech company. You have a great idea, and you need it built. But, hiring a developer comes with a lot of risks, both financial and to your vision. So, you have decided the answer is to build it yourself!

You have tried to learn programming, but there is so much information and none of it seems to get you any closer to building the product you are dreaming of. You don't have the time to learn all of these irrelevant details of programming. Once you start making sales, you will just hire a full time developer anyway, right?

What you really need, is to

Learn Just Enough

Stop worrying about learning every detail of a programming language. You don't really need to know the underlying memory arrangement of an array. Who cares about the performance differences of QuickSort vs HeapSort?

You need to learn enough about programming to be able to build the Minimum Sellable Product. All you should care about at first is how to build a system that has:

• Accounts - Can your users create an account? Is there a difference between User and Admin accounts?
• Payments - Can your users pay you? One-time payments and Subscriptions are important for an online business.
• Team Management - Can users invite other users to their team?
• Email - Can the application send "Lost Password" and "Team Invite" emails?
• Admin UI - Can you manage your users accounts?
• Look and Feel - Does it look professional?

The Power of Rails

Ruby on Rails is a programming framework that makes building an application fast, fun, and easy. Within minutes of starting, you can have an application with a basic User Account creation and login. The entire scaffold of your application can be set up in days, versus the weeks it takes in other languages and frameworks. If you are looking to get up and running quickly, there is no better programming language and framework.

Just Add Water

Programming For Entrepreneurs will walk you through building all of the basic systems required for a modern web application. All you need to bring is your idea and business logic. If at any time you get stuck, you can reach out to the author and community at his website GetUpgraded.

About the Author

Christopher Franklin

@codersbeware

Chris is a software engineer with 15 years of experience building at every level of the stack. His recent fascination is building microservices using serverless technology.