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Andrew Warner
4,144 PointsWhat do you recommend I study?
I am a real estate broker working in the mobile home park industry which is far behind when it comes to technology and innovation. I have also, while working with many investors found huge inefficiencies in the industry that are in favor of the property owners at the detriment to the tenants. Because of this I am building a website that will provide a service that will address this issue and help many of America's poorest people (If successful). It will reward responsible property owners who maintain and care about thier communities and punish slumlords. I am currently building an Minimum Viable Product and have been working with a few developers. Since it is simply an MVP it will be using Wordpress as its base but also has several API's. I have started to learn Wordpress but would also need to build a database of 3 different groups/stakeholders in the industry as well as developer a solid marketing plan (I know marketing is 70% of the job) targeted at these 3 groups (Like Uber had to do except 3 instead of 2). As far as the programming knowledge I care more about knowing enough to be able to communicate effectively with developers but also to know when to scrap a project vs when to put more work into it & fix the bugs. -Appreciate any advice on what would be the best courses to study on here
4 Answers
Gabriel Plackey
11,064 PointsI would probably definitely take the Database course to get a feel and some know how, language with that. i think that could be very important. Besides that, if you're building a website it could never heart to learn the basics of HTML, CSS, JS, jQuery and AJAX. Not too much in depth stuff, just so you could understand what the devs are saying and get what you want across to them.
Jennifer Nordell
Treehouse TeacherAndrew Warner I have a slightly differing opinion here. From what I gather from your description, you are more interested in the data coming in and going out of this site rather than the minutia of how it works. Given that your target audience seems to be rather large, I would probably leave the design in the hands of designers. Clearly, you will have opinions about how things should work etc, but I would be willing to bet that the majority of your interest is in the data you are collecting, receiving, and sending out.
Database administration and normalization are a subject in and of themselves. Plus, you will likely be thinking about the security and privacy of your customers. Given that WordPress is built on PHP, I might suggest learning PHP and anything you can about databases. Also, basic security practices in regards to privacy and the security of your servers would be highly recommended.
Hope this helps!
behar
10,799 PointsHey Andrew! To be completely honesty with you, i dont think Treehouse is the best place for this question. The community here, while supportive mostly just deal with Treehouse related stuff.
That being said, you want enough knowleagde to be able to communicate with your developers? Well in what area? Wordpress is good for a MVP, but once thats done your probably gonna want to built from scratch. So what does this require? HTML - to structure the website, CSS - to style it, Javascript, ajax and jquery - to animate and add interactive content, and as you pointed out some database, there are many languages for this obviously, but SQL is very popular.
As you can see that is alot of stuff, and getting to a point were your gonna be able to communicate "effectively" in each and everyone of these topics, is not gonna be reached anytime soon if your just getting started. Not just that but you also mentioned you wont to be able to see when to scratch a project vs when to continue developing it? If a senior developer who has been working in the field for say 15 years cant see that, how would you ever expect to be able to do so?
I have no knowleagde of tech buisness but I dont see why you, as a manager or whatever think this to be a legitamte project? Are you currently not able to communicate effectively with your developers? If so, then I would think your developers are the issue, as they should definetly be able to explain their code in a straigt forward way.
All that being said, take this with a huge bag of salt, as im really out of depth here.
Michael Hulet
47,913 PointsI’d just like to interject that while from a manager’s viewpoint, it’s always best to listen to and trust your developers and designers, but the best managers know how to use the tools their developers work with so that they can communicate most effectively, instead of developers having to constantly describe things in abstract and still not be able to get much information across. It’ll take a bit to become fluent in all the technologies your developers use, but it’s awesome that you’re trying to get there!
Andrew Warner
4,144 PointsThank you for all your answers! I have taken classes in SQL (in community college), and have some knowledge of programming (I've done a decent amount of Swift - although I know that is mostly unrelated to this project). As of right now I think my developers are doing a fine job & I have already designed and given them wire-frames & sitemaps. I think am more or less learning as possible in order to make the best decisions I can.