This route (learn to code it yourself) is the one I took. I now have a pretty technically credible* product with actual paying customers and everything.
The language I learned first was JavaScript because it's ubiquitous. There are a million tutorials to get you going.
A lot of JS tutorials suck, which is a disadvantage, but it gives you a pretty big confidence boost to be able to read a tutorial and think "that's moronic, I know 6 other ways to do that which will work better". Python tutorials tend to break out advanced/elegant/clever stuff really quickly which has the opposite effect.
I wrote a couple of little apps, then a prototype, then it felt like I knew enough to really get going.
I then picked up Python (actually Django) because the relative maturity of server side JS platforms isn't as good. Switching languages was easy.
The total time to get to that point was about 4 months (whilst working full time), but I had the advantage of living in a place where everything shut when it went dark at 7pm.
*Except for the bugs, and the scaling issues, and the bad design decisions I made early on. As far as I can tell I'm not the only person to have problems like this though, and refactoring is a good way to spend a plane ride.
The language I learned first was JavaScript because it's ubiquitous. There are a million tutorials to get you going.
A lot of JS tutorials suck, which is a disadvantage, but it gives you a pretty big confidence boost to be able to read a tutorial and think "that's moronic, I know 6 other ways to do that which will work better". Python tutorials tend to break out advanced/elegant/clever stuff really quickly which has the opposite effect.
I wrote a couple of little apps, then a prototype, then it felt like I knew enough to really get going.
I then picked up Python (actually Django) because the relative maturity of server side JS platforms isn't as good. Switching languages was easy.
The total time to get to that point was about 4 months (whilst working full time), but I had the advantage of living in a place where everything shut when it went dark at 7pm.
*Except for the bugs, and the scaling issues, and the bad design decisions I made early on. As far as I can tell I'm not the only person to have problems like this though, and refactoring is a good way to spend a plane ride.