For a non-technical entrepreneur wanting to up her technical capabilities what would you recommend?<p>Not looking to be a programmer, but ideally learn enough to better lead and work with engineers and/or build a crappy prototype.
I'm still learning so take my advice with a grain of salt.
That being said, first we ought to applaud you for taking the interest in understanding what goes on behind the scenes and better communicate with the engineers.<p>If I may, there are three courses you could look into. I've only taken the last one, which is fantastic for people that don't have a CS background. You'll learn about data structures.<p>The other two I just came across them today.<p>Now, the intent of this is only to give you a general idea of the amount of information these people deal with. If you happen to be a P.M. and deal with clients, this will help you avoid making promises for x feature to be ready x day due to lacking an understanding of what must be done to get it working. And so forth... Once again, I'm just starting, so take my advice with a grain of salt.<p><a href="https://class.stanford.edu/courses/Engineering/CS101/Summer2014/about" rel="nofollow">https://class.stanford.edu/courses/Engineering/CS101/Summer2...</a>
<a href="https://www.coursera.org/learn/insidetheinternet" rel="nofollow">https://www.coursera.org/learn/insidetheinternet</a>
<a href="https://www.coursera.org/course/pythonlearn" rel="nofollow">https://www.coursera.org/course/pythonlearn</a>
There is only one way to learn: have a problem then solve it. It has to be a real one, too.<p>So go and find (small) problem, work out how to solve it and implement it. Then if you really want to learn: promote and sell the damn thing.
Sorry there are no shortcuts. Study as hard as you can and spend as many hours you can practicing programming. Then in a few years you'll be able to productively work with other developers.
I would say just learn basic data structures, and understand client/server model. Learning about these two will help you have conversation about how your product strategy goals go along with engineering design. You probably shouldn't need to talk with your engineers in deeper details but at design level.<p>Hope this helps.
Spend a lot of time reading technical material, and be active on Twitter and other places were engineers hang out. Watching videos also helps. There's a lot of JS/Rails/Python stuff on YouTube etc...