Great advice, will this work for other technical professions, too? Say, brain surgery, for instance.
Business guy still looking for that elusive code monkey? Read this first.
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Re: Business guy still looking for that elusive code monkey? Read this first.
#12Great advice, will this work for other technical professions, too? Say, brain surgery, for instance.
You don't need to learn brain surgery when you can just trade your brain surgeon friend a six-pack of beer for their services.
Re: Business guy still looking for that elusive code monkey? Read this first.
#13Can't agree more with this advice. Everybody's talking about MOOCs, CodeAcademy etc and while I used those platforms for sure, looking back it was the experience that really helped me. The hours and hours of not knowing why your code is not compiling and learning the hard way is invaluable - but schools and classes can't emulate that well enough.
I took my first software classes 2 years ago at the University and HATED every second of it! That summer I landed a co-op where I spent 6 months (I was invited back to mentor) learning Ruby on Rails and related technology. During that time, I tried to throw up as many apps as I could for practice. Thos included Rails apps, Cordova apps, JS apps etc...Those 'practice apps' landed me my first starter position making the industry standard for a rails dev with 2 years or so of experience. I am learning WAY more now then I ever thought I could and have built a hell of a resume over the past year with real world experience. Online tools got my foot in the door. A year and a half later, I am making an honest living and developing features that I thought would take me years to master. I started with a single GOOGLE search...For me, it was a mix. The experience of the co-op was the driver to what I have today though.
Re: Business guy still looking for that elusive code monkey? Read this first.
#14It seems a lot of people misinterpret "don't reinvent the wheel" as "if they exist, use lots of pre-written libraries". End result is I see projects with ridiculous numbers of dependencies. Reinventing the wheel is very useful as a learning experience and to take a peek at how things work behind the scenes. Often you may only need a portion of what a certain library does, and it is perfectly feasible and correct to i…
So are you saying that novice developers (i dont think the author would even call himself that) should not use bootstrap and instead waste extra time learning how to structure their pages? Its not hard to insert a 'pre-written' bootstrap css stylesheet and completely change how a bootstrap page looks while still taking advantage of the grid system etc.
Learning how to structure your pages is not a waste of time. It's quite essential, actually.
Re: Business guy still looking for that elusive code monkey? Read this first.
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
So are you saying that novice developers (i dont think the author would even call himself that) should not use bootstrap and instead waste extra time learning how to structure their pages? Its not hard to insert a 'pre-written' bootstrap css stylesheet and completely change how a bootstrap page looks while still taking advantage of the grid system etc.
Learning how to structure your pages is not a waste of time. It's quite essential, actually.
If your aim is to make websites, yes. If your aim is to make a website for your startup, no.
Re: Business guy still looking for that elusive code monkey? Read this first.
#16I have to say, as a "business guy" cofounder who is finally pushing out his first apps, that starting with Codecademy is probably the worst way to go about things. I don't know how many times I started different Codecademy courses and ended up saying, "OK, I can create a loop... now what?" That is decidedly not the first step in learning how to program. The first step is learning how to use the command line, getting…
Agree with this wholeheartedly. I started learning C++ back in 1997 with "Learn C++ in 21 days" and other books. I quickly got burned out with building simple print out programs and over the past 16 years have started different languages in fits and starts.
There are so few one language projects that are worth using, that the single language approach seems really outdated.
To me a much better approach would be to have learning structured around a specific project type. In general projects fall into only a handful of categories so I don't think it would be terribly hard to structure. For example "Web commerce" (Javascript, CSS, HTML5, mySQL), "Machine learning" (Python, Java) etc... You wouldn't learn all the details of a language up front but you would get to your goal more quickly and have a framework/template for future projects.
Re: Business guy still looking for that elusive code monkey? Read this first.
#17It seems like the development environment is the hardest part for beginners. Seems like a niche that all the cloud development environments could go after?