Paths
- Educational paths toward programming
- Self-taught - blogs, articles, tutorials, online platforms like Udemy, code academy
- 4-year computer science degree
- 2-year “web design” degree
- 12-week full-time boot camp
- 6-month part-time bootcamps
- Bootcamps that specialize in a discipline like data science, graphics design
- Bootcamps that serve underrepresented groups - resilient coders, shecodes.io,
- time, attention, resources
- Master in computer science
- Side door and back door entryways to tech
- Product management
- The mom test
- product school
- Project management
- Support, then technical support
- Solution architects
- Developer marketing
Advice for people thinking about getting into programming
- Learn hello world
- Go through a codeacademy or similar interactive course
- Try to build something on replit or glitch where you don't need an actual environment set up
- Connect with other new devs on Twitter
- Use https://exercism.io/ to get feedback about your code, don’t work in a silo
- https://roadmap.sh/
How to pick a language or stack to start with in 2022
- Programming languages are tools
- Some are more commonly used to build specific things
- JavaScript/TypeScript - web (started as front end, now is also backend, is what browsers run), iot, drones, most things support javascript (Airtable, lambdas, google sheets, etc.)
- HTML/CSS - web (front end only, structure and style)
- Python - web, data, machine learning
- Ruby - web, small utilities
- PHP - web
- C#/F# - enterprise, windows, azure, games like X-Box
- Go - CLI tools, scalable servers and large-scale programs
- Elixir - web, event-driven systems, distributed systems
- Java - enterprise tools
- SQL - data only, not for building applications
- R - data
- Fortran, COBOL, VBA, objective-c, Perl - I would not invest much in learning these unless it was required for a job I was already hired at
- CJ says - learn javascript, but then I say learn ruby and ruby on rails
- Whatever you decide, stick with it until you feel comfortable building decent working applications
Cord management
Other mentions
Black tech pipeline - https://blacktechpipeline.com/
wnb.rb - https://www.wnb-rb.dev/
codeacademy - https://www.codecademy.com/