91–100 of 190 posts
I envy that the author learnt programming and web development now as opposed to even a few years ago. Without devolving into "in my day I walked ten miles in the snow just to compile"; it's just so much more pleasant now. Stack Overflow, Heroku (and similar), GitHub, PDF Books. Obviously it takes time and effort to get better everyday but the learning curve is a bit flatter now.
You can certainly be a programmer in 12 weeks, but you will be different programmer than what we are expecting here. You can also learn programming by reading 'Learn programming in 30 days'. But that is a very different kind of programming than what most people are expecting in this thread. You can learn enough programming to begin to understand how to work with software. It gives you a start. It also works if your j…
>>in case you think you have spent 10 years learning all the secret recipes in computer science books but are not good in other areas. You are no better than the 'Learn programming in 30 days guy'.
and
>>Your regular data structure and algorithm sauce is probably 1% of what is required
is just false. Sure, studying classical CS concepts is not all there is to software development and success in the software development industry, but your comment largely renders advanced degrees, like PhDs, about as useful as some poorly written Java book with regard to success as a software engineer.
I did something similar when I got started and yeah it got me a job but that was just the beginning, now, about 2 years later, I'm still learning and pushing myself to learn lower and lower level things about software development (as I started with high-level, dynamic languages) as well as more about design patterns, etc. Its definitely true that there's always more to learn so never be complacent. Its definitely pos…
The hardest part to that for me is the "get to know people" part. He already had a mentor before he started learning. How would one get a mentor in the first place? How do you get to know other people?
Go to meetups and lurk IRL IMO. Just start small conversations. Say hi, ask what someone's working on, what the program is they have open, if they read HN or Reddit or whatever. Let them know you admire their work and ask for help.
Learn a language, not a web framework for god's sake. Learning frameworks is harder than learning programming languages, IMO, especially after you lean one language. You should learn both.
So naturally when you're talking about dealing with an abstraction layer built on another abstraction layer it's going to be even hard to understand. That's why I say don't learn the framework. Learn the language, the concepts, the principles. It will make understanding the complexities easier to untangle.
Hmm, I started programming over a decade and a half ago, writing my own little game engines in dos, and a nice little x-mode GUI. I've worked as the software architect for a moderately popular (top 2000 alexa) social networking websites, I've worked at fortune 500s, I've been on the dev side, the test side, the pm side, and worked as an IC and as a lead/manager. I still don't really consider myself as being anywhere…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He learned some Python, Django, HTML, CSS, Javascript and wrote programs. Can "programmer" not encompass both people getting their feet wet and 20 years experience mastering multiple languages?
He hasn't made any hard choices, he just picked what is most available and put the pieces together. Frankly he'd have bought me if he made his hands dirty with some obscure 8bit assembler. There he'd have to really THINK his way out. At least some sweat during rolling his own data structures and algos around them would make him something in a shape of a programmer, but not this. Of course what he's done is cool, lear…
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My biggest problem with the article is that it's essentially a puff piece about how awesome the writer thinks he is, and how special he is for being able to learn the basics in a short amount of time. The post is entirely too hand-wavy about actual details; telling someone to read some blogs, Q&A sites and code doesn't help anyone. Where is the substance? Were there any interesting ah-ha moments? What would he do dif…
My blog has comments. My email address is in my HN profile. If you wanted more information you could've asked instead of insulting me.
You can certainly be a programmer in 12 weeks, but you will be different programmer than what we are expecting here. You can also learn programming by reading 'Learn programming in 30 days'. But that is a very different kind of programming than what most people are expecting in this thread. You can learn enough programming to begin to understand how to work with software. It gives you a start. It also works if your j…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My blog has comments. My email address is in my HN profile. If you wanted more information you could've asked instead of insulting me.
I don't think he was trying to be insulting. From what I gather, he was trying to justify the negativity theme in the comments for this post, which was the subject of the original comment. I agree that the blog post was not detailed enough, and didn't talk enough about HOW you became a programmer in 12 weeks.
We're knowledge workers. I gained enough programming knowledge to be a programmer. Where's the confusion?