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On finally learning to program at the age of 40

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Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#161

Post by karmicthreat »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #155
karmicthreat wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I am in West Michigan. This is not a place with terribly interesting problems. I probably need to put together my own thing. Whats the hardest problem anyone here has that they would pay money to have solved?

You'd be surprised how often people can't express the problem and can't find the proper software solution. A lot of manpower in most organizations is wasted because they can't find a contractor who will listen to their problems and actually try to fix them.

Oh I'm not surprised at all. I'm guilty of this at my job as is everyone else where we work. What is our problem, what is our customers problem is always a hard question.

One of my big goals right now is to figure out how to extract problems out of customers in a useful way. (I seem to be heading more and more to product manager/product owner skill set).

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#162

Post by guyzero »

pmiller2 wrote: post #139
guyzero wrote: post #136

So while I learned to program BASIC at 10 or so on a Commodore PET, there were plenty of adults who were also learning BASIC for the first time in that same wave of early home computers. I had a friend whose dad (an optometrist) was very into programming their TI 99/4A. And I'm pretty sure my high school computer science teacher hadn't been programming a lot longer than I had (although he was a good teacher). So in a…

I learned to program on a TI 99/4A, and my high school “computer science” teacher was actually a math teacher who took some interest in computers. I wish I had been able to take a fuller CS curriculum in HS.

it was actually pretty shocking how good my high school CS program was - this was Ontario in the mid-80's. I learned boolean logic and basic CS theory as well as getting to work on a full-fledged UNIX system (QNX). I even figured out how to write my own login prompt emulator to phish for other people's logins. What more could you want?

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#163

Post by joelbluminator »

throwaway17_17 wrote: post #160
joelbluminator wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're capable of becoming a lawyer you're capable of becoming a programmer. 38 ain't that old. But why drop being attorney?

Lawyering is not really the problem, I have a quite successful career. I am mostly content to just program in my spare time and programming/automating those areas of my practice where there is value. But, and it’s probably more specific to my situation, but I do almost exclusively criminal defense work and it can be tiring, I’ve been at it long enough that I could use a change of focus. Biggest problem for me is that…

> That is not the most marketable skill

It is, but you have to be quite the expert. It's not like app development where even limited experience can be enough to get by. However if you like that sort of stuff you can try to become a web develoepr (pick say Python or Ruby) and then become an expert in backendy / performence issues.

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#164

Post by Stratoscope »

ApolloRising wrote: post #66
Stratoscope wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I don't know how to thank you enough for that word of encouragement. I am really grateful after a long week of interviews and a much-too-hot weekend here in the Bay Area. But shhhh... We're not supposed to tell anyone that it's been 50+ years! Right? The advice I usually get is to remove everything from more than 5 years ago, maybe 10 at the very most, otherwise someone might think I'm old! ;-) Yeah, I don't buy…

Did you have trouble getting past the HR filter? I recently started on a similar journey and am curious how you managed the non coding portion to get your feet somewhat in the door.

Actually one of their internal recruiters contacted me out of the blue. So I don't have any advice on that aspect.

Alas, after going through their interview process it turned out to be a "no", but no worries, it looks like I have at least one good offer, maybe 2-3 coming in this week.

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#165

Post by imtringued »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #16
mlindner wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's quite an interesting take. This is the first time I've seen someone come into programming with their first real learned language being Rust. I'll be awesome to see more of this in the future. It gives me encouragement to properly learn Rust as well (my problem with learning languages is that I never actually want to write anything in any language so I can't actually learn the language without finding a us…

> (my problem with learning languages is that I never actually want to write anything in any language so I can't actually learn the language without finding a use for it). This also seems the author's problem. It reads like he feels he should ought to learn programming but he doesn't actually have any particular problems he wants solved.

Well, in that case on should look at existing learning materials. Maybe something like Project Euler, advent of code or a good old fashioned dead tree (book).

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#166

Post by thepicklestork »

swyx wrote: post #156
thepicklestork wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please elaborate! I just turned 30 and made it a goal to attempt a serious career change. Currently I’m 4 months in clocking 3+/hrs a day of (html,css,js) study. How long did it take before you felt comfortable throwing your hat into the career ring? I have tons of questions, but I would love to hear your story first. Thanks!

here: https://medium.com/hackernoon/no-zero-days-my-path-from-code... good luck, friend

Good stuff, thanks!

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#167

Post by imtringued »

asdfman123 wrote: post #118
lordnacho wrote: post #95

There's something about games as your motivation for learning to code that is quite unfortunate: Games, especially the popular ones, are monstrously difficult to write. And I say this as a C++ HFT guy who's written a load of programs for all sorts of other things. - Games will break your OOP tutorial learnings. If you're starting out with a game, it is gonna get mighty difficult to fit whatever it is into a set of ob…

I was tinkering around in the Minecraft code and man, I have no idea how people use inheritance when designing complex games without completely losing their minds. I know composition vs. inheritance is a nuanced debate, and there are people who can tell me exactly how to do inheritance the right way and why they feel it's better -- but after I learned how much cleaner composition feels I went with it and never seriou…

I'm not sure what you mean. Subtyping is primarily used for polymorphism. A pretty common mistake is doing polymorphism at the wrong layer but not using polymorphism at all is also a mistake.

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#168

Post by rcxdude »

lordnacho wrote: post #95

There's something about games as your motivation for learning to code that is quite unfortunate: Games, especially the popular ones, are monstrously difficult to write. And I say this as a C++ HFT guy who's written a load of programs for all sorts of other things. - Games will break your OOP tutorial learnings. If you're starting out with a game, it is gonna get mighty difficult to fit whatever it is into a set of ob…

While it's true there's a lot of deep coding that can go into games (especially ones which push the capabilities of the hardware), it's also quite possible with the tools we have to make very successful (and quite good) games with fairly little coding ability. A lot of indie games are a complete trainwreck at the source code level and yet very fun to play. For a good example, see the source code for VVVVVV[0], which is not elegant or high quality C++ code (and it was ported from not particularly elegant ActionScript) but it clearly did the job.

[0] https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#169

Post by blaser-waffle »

client4 wrote: post #128
mcv wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a lot of room for programmers with deep domain knowledge about some topic. If writing software for lawyers or law-related issues, I'm pretty sure experience as a lawyer can be very useful.

Just interviewing other lawyers for their “if it existed I would buy it” software would show there’s a lot of opportunity. A friend of mine has been looking for a service that emails her whenever a local municipality does something with easements/property access. This actually took me down a long rabbit hole of how local government software is horrible and someone could crush this area — my only concern would be lack…

Funny, I know a guy doing just that, former roommate He was mostly writing code for things that handle municipal water supplies and other water monitoring stuff. He worked for a code shop that built the original system and after he left he kept doing maintenance work on the side until he went (mostly) full time at it.

OTOH, he's basically a one-man show, and has implied that if he had to scale -- e.g. add 3+ people -- then the $$$ wouldn't go as far. By himself it's a decent paycheck, though.

The problem is municipalities are all different, with different state/local requirements, and they often don't have the money or operational depth to support deeply customized software. I grew up near a park that had to shutdown for several months because they couldn't get enough funds together to have people mow the lawns; where would they find the money for custom code?

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