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I self-learned to code at 30

kaapi.team

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Re: I self-learned to code at 30

#131

Post by tgerhard60 »

ok_coo wrote: post #103
codazoda wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a 35 year veteran programmer, so I might not remember clearly, but I totally disagree with this. You will NEVER cover all the core areas of CS, there are too many. So, most developers specialize, somewhere. You can get pretty good at some core thing in 6 months and I give you permission to call yourself a programmer as soon as you have successfully built, and regularly use, something you wanted for yourself.

I support this kind of encouragement. Please, if you've built something that you or someone else has used, you're a programmer/developer. This field is so broad that I also feel like I don't know what I'm doing with 10+ years of experience. You will never learn/know everything and that's OK.

OK, so if I wrote a UI that a call center used to more easily allow staff to access different customer categories, and I also wrote a text analysis script to analyze and categorize customer feedback, I'm officially a programmer/developer?

Re: I self-learned to code at 30

#132

Post by adityarao310 »

bluedino wrote: post #8
systemvoltage wrote: post #5

Learning from YT videos, the kind you get by searching “learn programming” is IMO not a good idea. These videos are engineered for ad revenue and engagement metrics. Maybe be watch one or two to get a gist of how things come together but please buy a good book on the topic. Even better, take a college course in Coursera or EDx.

He called JSON, Git, and CSV 'languages' so... I have the feeling he didn't learn programming but was able to copy/paste a small project together.

I think you are talking about the pie chart image in the blog post? I think "programming languages" is the default tag that Wakatime assigns to any file type inside VS Code.

I took the screenshot from my Wakatime account :)

Re: I self-learned to code at 30

#133

Post by adityarao310 »

codazoda wrote: post #101
asmr wrote: post #97

Not a big fan of these survivorship bias blog posts. I've been fiddling with code since I was about 11 years old (ActionScript for Club Penguin cheat tools as well as some Visual Basic). I got pretty serious in High School and learned Java as well Python. I am now pretty comfortable in the web stack as well as C, but still do not have the confidence to become a developer. I don't get how people can spend roughly 3 mo…

I'm a 35 year veteran programmer, so I might not remember clearly, but I totally disagree with this. You will NEVER cover all the core areas of CS, there are too many. So, most developers specialize, somewhere. You can get pretty good at some core thing in 6 months and I give you permission to call yourself a programmer as soon as you have successfully built, and regularly use, something you wanted for yourself.

You are one of the few senior engineering leaders who think like this! And kudos to you! Wish I had talked to you in the earlier days of me struggling to learn

Re: I self-learned to code at 30

#134

Post by revskill »

jventura wrote: post #130
revskill wrote: post #25

My experience with learning how to code, is just find some good guide, follow it TO BUILD A REAL USABLE PRODUCT. Learning by making a real usable product is the most important part here, other kinds of learning didn't work for me. P/S: This is different from learning by project. Project mostly is for fun, not a real usable product.

> follow it TO BUILD A REAL USABLE PRODUCT And what would be a "real usable product" for you in that context? It's a genuine question, since I'm someone who would like to build engaging online courses. I do have a Python course online although it teaches concepts from small examples..

A real usable product consists of many things you need to do for it to be deliverable and usable.

Hobby projects often don't take much account into production usage, somethings we called it "best practices".

In short, imagine your code is in real world usage, which has real user, instead of just "small examples" or project to learn only.

It's about mindset here that settle us to be really serious at what we're coding and thinking.

No joke, but testing in production is one of the braviest ways to learn, too.

Re: I self-learned to code at 30

#136

Post by snicker7 »

klibertp wrote: post #120
crispyambulance wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...never be able to code a production application... It's true, the vast majority of people will never code a "production application". BUT, many folks code everyday in the form of excel macros, R, Mathematica, Matlab or Julia notebooks. Many people create programs and scripts in all kinds of tools to get stuff done. IT'S ALL STILL PROGRAMMING, it's just not what folks here would consider a traditional "production…

> There's nothing special about software development. There's also "nothing special" about writing. Somehow, though, we don't see millions of Hemingways pop up each year. Writing code is a form of art. There is a science behind it, but the same is true for many other art forms. It's true that everybody can be an artist. Not everybody can be a good artist, though. It's equally true for writers, painters, and coders.

And "writing" is still a good skill to have, even if you are not a professional essayist or author.

Re: I self-learned to code at 30

#137

Post by Dudeman112 »

lsiunsuex wrote: post #18
Proziam wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible that his technical abilities are now sufficient to do the work but he hasn't yet learned the language commonly used for describing the technology. This is a pretty common thing amongst self-taught people.

As a self taught programmer, I struggled with this for years. I could do the work; understood it; but sometimes I would get terms mixed up. For example: Is it called a method or a function? Conversely, I've known college taught programmers who struggle with basic CSS so... it's all relative IMO.

>I've known college taught programmers who struggle with basic CSS

During my 5 years studying Computer Engineering (BSc, 5 years is the normal amount of time if you don't fail any classes where I'm from), the total amount of time someone taught me CSS was 30 minutes.

Go back a few years and Web Programming would have been an optional class, meaning it could have been 0 minutes.

Re: I self-learned to code at 30

#138

Post by Ligrev »

benlumen wrote: post #50
marlowe221 wrote: post #36

I started at 37 and got my first full time job a couple of months after I turned 38. I was a lawyer and hated it - now I love going to work every day. But it wasn't easy. I was working full time in a demanding profession and I'm married with two kids under 5 years old. So basically I spent every free moment I had working on learning HTML/CSS/JavaScript. If my kids were asleep, I was coding. I basically had to burn th…

> My only regret is that I didn't do this 10 years earlier. It's not a bad thing to have a professional career before programming. I'd imagine that you'll have developed some non-technical skills that some developers lack, to be blunt about it.

Not only that, but developing websites 10 years ago kinda sucked. Browsers were wildly inconsistent, it was common to have another CSS stylesheet for IE only, JS was so fragmented that jQuery was an instant hit.

On the other hand pages were much smaller, you'd rely on HTML much more than on JS which meant you'd rarely be working with bundlers and such.

But still, if you take the state of the web for what it is, the sheer productivity with today's tools is unparalleled. I think the best time to start coding is tomorrow.

Re: I self-learned to code at 30

#139

Post by klibertp »

snicker7 wrote: post #136
klibertp wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's nothing special about software development. There's also "nothing special" about writing. Somehow, though, we don't see millions of Hemingways pop up each year. Writing code is a form of art. There is a science behind it, but the same is true for many other art forms. It's true that everybody can be an artist. Not everybody can be a good artist, though. It's equally true for writers, painters, and coders.

And "writing" is still a good skill to have, even if you are not a professional essayist or author.

Yes. But writing a letter to friend (or automating your accounting in Excel) differs from writing "War and Peace" (or writing an OS kernel). I think everybody is capable of learning to do the former, but have a really hard time beliving the same for the latter.

Re: I self-learned to code at 30

#140

Post by jventura »

revskill wrote: post #134
jventura wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> follow it TO BUILD A REAL USABLE PRODUCT And what would be a "real usable product" for you in that context? It's a genuine question, since I'm someone who would like to build engaging online courses. I do have a Python course online although it teaches concepts from small examples..

A real usable product consists of many things you need to do for it to be deliverable and usable. Hobby projects often don't take much account into production usage, somethings we called it "best practices". In short, imagine your code is in real world usage, which has real user, instead of just "small examples" or project to learn only. It's about mindset here that settle us to be really serious at what we're coding…

> In short, imagine your code is in real world usage, which has real user, instead of just "small examples" or project to learn only.

So, for instance, something like starting from an idea (a "webforum for all my friends", or other usable example), designing the database, implementing authentication, implementing the frontend (html, css, js, etc.), then adding those small things and finally deploying to a webserver?

The thing I think I'm asking is what kind of topics would be good to motivate people to follow through? For instance, the webforum above could work for some while others would have other ideas. It would be hard to design a course around a moving target like that..

I hope I'm not boring you with my questions above, I'm mostly trying to understand your point because I've been thinking about designing interesting courses for people, but I wouldn't like to do another basic introductory course with small chapters and exercises as other 1000 courses out there..

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