Hi. I might be able to give you some advice. It's centered around
You are too young and inexperienced to make money.
I don't mean you can't make money... actually you did, but it's not the right thing to do now. Focus on learning instead. When I was your age, I was interested in making money and I worked hard building websites but not learning how to build them correctly (the kind of collecting stuff and making them work together). I made some money, however that money didn't really last and my experience/knowledge didn't get so far.
Now I regret the time that I have spent on that. If I spent it on learning a programming language or a framework, I'll be able to do some freelancing in the side with a higher rate. That's my advice: Go and learn something. It can be a programming language (C#.net, ruby on rails, PHP...), networking (DNS, Active directory...), finance, cryptography...
Anything that you are interested on. Don't take tutorials. Read a book. Or may be a couple of books and add some more. Delve into the topic you select. Become an expert in your field. Know the ins and outs and inner workings of it. Be an active member in related communities. Get a portfolio.
By the time you are 20 (and that's 5 years!). You'll have an amazing experience. You can at that time choose whether to work for $100/hour or to run your own startup or may be take CS in Standford. The point is: You are free to choose and you have something invaluable in your brain: The knowledge and the experience.
If I took that road when I was 15, I might be in a completely other life... and it would be a lot better and more engaging.
Thanks for the advice (I'm assuming it applies to me too).
I've spent the past year getting really interested in Lisp (I just finished my senior year of high school, in which I took Lisp as an independent study). For a science fair, I got into genetic programming (https://github.com/tsmacdonald/Genetic-Tic-Tac-Toe), and that project got me interested in AI, and I think that I'd like to spend the summer working through Peter Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming. This is in addition to my job--doing code monkey, pay-by-the-hour work in Java.
But I've been bothered by a persistent thought: "Sure, Lisp is cool and AI is cool and there's probably interesting research to be done...but you want to make a startup in a few years, and all the cool kids are making websites or smartphone apps. Say...you know Java, you just got an Android phone...you have four (or maybe three) years of college to get all academic with. A professor already expressed an interest in doing FP research over the summer with you. The smart thing to do would be to crank out an app this summer, use the experience to crank out a better app, hopefully make a revenue source for while you're in college..."
But to heck with making a bit of extra money, and to heck with overanalyzing the startup market of 2015. I'll do what I find really interesting, and assume that something awesome will present itself in due course.
I did a degree in biomedical sciences at Waterloo, a school in Ontario with a big focus on tech. I went to events, met people. Earned a degree in something almost entirely unrelated. I worked in several foreign countries in the summers because of my knowledge of web programming and made money making web stuff during school. I'm now doing a law degree and continue to build websites. A major web company tried to recruit me last year but I turned it down. I'm now working for another major tech company in the legal department. You never know where things will take you and keep doing what's interesting. Tech will open doors. Keep an eye out for them.
I took the path you described (I went from doing web-based stuff in PHP from 12-14 to reverse-engineering network protocols and file formats, which is still my expertise from 15-23), and outside of a lot of dumb luck, I can completely attribute my success to it. I found it was interesting, and I just started doing it; that thought process has gotten me where I am today.
The only thing I'd disagree with is "Read a book" -- while there are many fine books out there, they should be used to fill in gaps while you're doing things, IMO. Start doing something, and when you run into issues or have questions about how certain things behave, open up a relevant book and figure out what's going on.
Hi. Read a book doesn't mean don't start doing things. It doesn't mean don't have fun and play soccer. It means "Read a book from A to Z". And most of the time, even before I complete reading the book, I become more enlightened and new ideas come to my mind.
Hey, I read your comment and wanted some more info, so I started a separate thread (since the questions I had weren't entirely pertinent to this one): http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2647750
You are too young and inexperienced to make money.
I don't mean you can't make money... actually you did, but it's not the right thing to do now. Focus on learning instead. When I was your age, I was interested in making money and I worked hard building websites but not learning how to build them correctly (the kind of collecting stuff and making them work together). I made some money, however that money didn't really last and my experience/knowledge didn't get so far.
Now I regret the time that I have spent on that. If I spent it on learning a programming language or a framework, I'll be able to do some freelancing in the side with a higher rate. That's my advice: Go and learn something. It can be a programming language (C#.net, ruby on rails, PHP...), networking (DNS, Active directory...), finance, cryptography...
Anything that you are interested on. Don't take tutorials. Read a book. Or may be a couple of books and add some more. Delve into the topic you select. Become an expert in your field. Know the ins and outs and inner workings of it. Be an active member in related communities. Get a portfolio.
By the time you are 20 (and that's 5 years!). You'll have an amazing experience. You can at that time choose whether to work for $100/hour or to run your own startup or may be take CS in Standford. The point is: You are free to choose and you have something invaluable in your brain: The knowledge and the experience.
If I took that road when I was 15, I might be in a completely other life... and it would be a lot better and more engaging.