Have you tried Codecombat.com? I think this is a great way to get started, have fun and at the same time learn the basic concepts of computer programming.

Once he understands this, you should encourage to hack into Minecraft hacks.

Later you can ask him about start their own projects and help him when he got stuck.

Programming should be fun and using a language only a tool for their mind, so help him become passionate about build things for himself.

Mexican here too. Please send me an email at kike@devf.mx, I'd love to connect you with a friend, he did exactly the same steps you're trying to achieve few years ago.

>> As my Google friends say, it's like already half retired.

This is very interesting. Few employees I know at Google are very busy and working in several things at the same time.

>> I just did not want to do that in my late 20s.

I'm 26 and I think the same too. I have the need to build something where every line of code matters, making people's life easier instead of working in a big company.

I think recruiters get paid by the number of positions they can fill, even if they get a "bad performance" for having few candidates.

I think this recruiter just was doing follow up after few months and trying to re-connect. Last year happened to me the same with a Pebble recruiter who later went to Greylock.

Without real experience in Javascript nor the framework, I created a Google Hangout face tracking app in five days. You can still try it here: http://cocacola-hangout.appspot.com/

Why Mexico City does not have BattleHack? I was lucky to organize AngelHack last year and our winners also won the finals in San Francisco. Overall, we have plenty of talented hackers down the Bravo river, so I think it would be a great choice.

Stay tuned on Mexico City - we may or may not have something to announce a little bit later.

I'm at SXSW and realized they're only serving trips when you're in downtown, so yes, Uber already works here now.

IIRC Uber did SXSW for '13 too, but they didn't stick around; Uber had no Austin service at all back in November.

That makes sense. In a personal note, I think doing monkey-patching code is okay in a discovery mode, but now we have a small revenue stream, we should focus on make the platform more reliable, and probably taking our users as the proxy to understand where the product lacks quality.

I like this approach, data cannot be argued.

I completely agree. I recently started looking for this topic because the feeling I get is that everything is messy and its becoming a nightmare just to think about it. In my case, I'm taking more responsabilities and I think we need to start implementing best practices with our engineering team. Does that makes sense to you?

Better practices going forward make sense. But rewriting working code should have a business case when the working code solves a business problem. Scaling and maintenance are second order problems. Success is the first order problem.