Helping You
Become A Programmer

Learn about algorithms, they actually matter. Don’t try to master them on day one, but don’t ignore them either.

I would have told myself that I needed to focus more on execution at a faster rate – I slowed myself down a lot because I would spend days finding all answers by myself, because I was convinced that I needed to prove myself and do it all on my own. Your team and mentors are there to help you – use them!

Being a female in tech I wish I would have spoken up more. It wasn’t until I had a great manager that saw my potential in me did I start to do that and my career has taken off a bit by then. People may think I’m a lot sometimes but others have said I have given them even more confidence than they had already. Being yourself is more important than fitting a mold.

It all depends on the industry that you’re in. I have seen “”successful”” developers be tyrants in how code is built and deployed into the system they manage and it’s only their way or the highway. They have gotten high regards from management because they always deliver. I on the other hand don’t count those developers as the successful ones. I gauge the developers I have worked with as being successful when they are always learning more about their craft and then also sharing what they learn with those around them to help others get to their level. It’s a film my cup and let it runneth over into the next cup. I have always told people I know I am doing my job right when those that report to me can take my job from me. As a software developer the most successful developers are those that are fostering that relationship. You end up with more mutual respect and support across the board.

A successful manager is intentional in creating a team culture that will enable all engineers to be successful. She is a good communicator and has early awareness of problems so that she can help work on resolutions before things get out of hand. She is always thinking ahead – thinking about the team’s growth in terms of projects and work, and also knows every team member’s career goals so that she can help them reach those goals.

Being able to sit in the trenches. The best managers will act as a player-coach, which often means pair programming or splitting up work. If the manager can’t play because of many years off the field, it diminishes their ability to teach and relate.

Learning to code was a highly contextual experience for me; the more I could relate the details of the language to real world scenarios, the easier it was to understand and remember the concepts. For this reason, one of the most helpful things that I did was simply to write an application, backend and frontend, for an idea that I had. This will seem scary at first, but breaking it down into small pieces that you can research (even with help from generative AI, these days) will make this possible; for example, if you’re making a simple note-taking application, you’ll have questions like, “How can my notes stick around after I’ve closed my browser window?”, “How do I authenticate with the app so that it knows to show me only my notes?”, “How can I make this app available to people on the internet?” This is what I mean by contextualization- they’re all very-pertinent and important questions you may not have thought about when using Instagram but now you will need to learn how to answer, and actively trying to apply this when learning will accelerate the process.

Learn concepts and pseudo-code first. Don’t worry about the language. Every language has the same basis of having to be able to break down and understand a problem at the granular level. If you can’t breakdown a problem into tasks and individual components and can only see the larger picture as only one thing to solve you are going to have a really hard time being able to be truly successful as a software engineer.

Focus on a task you want to accomplish. One of my first programming languages was Python. Picking up the Python book felt like trying to boil the ocean since it’s useful for so many tasks. When I decided to focus just on web apps with the Django framework I gained enough fundamentals to progress to learning the whole language.

There hasn’t been a better time in our history to learn using various resources on the internet. Depending on what kind of learner you are, you have options: YouTube is pretty much filled with endless tutorials on various languages, frameworks, tools, etc. If you wanna get started with anything, start in YouTube. Even tho a lot of the content in YouTube can be pretty high quality, more often than not you can find more polished “”classes”” in places like Udemy or MasterClass. Tons of written articles and resources available, both paid and free. If you’re a self starter, there are plenty of project ideas for beginners to get started with new languages. The very famous “”TODO App”” has been written and re-written in almost every language out there, and someone usually has documented this process. Reddit and Stack Overflow can be good resources to ask questions and get solid answers. Google is your friend, use it!

Learning how to ask questions. For some people, it means that they don’t know how to ask questions and will waste too much time trying to find answers on their own. The key to early success is finding the way to be most efficient in the execution of your work – of course we all want to learn things on our own, but we also need to recognize how to unblock ourselves so that we can get tasks done in a timely manner. Your team needs to be able to rely on you to do the work and to get it done when you say it will. So ask questions when you need to – and find a wide range of resources to ask from (i.e. don’t keep going to the same engineer over and over with the same questions). On the other end of the spectrum, don’t ask too many questions if you haven’t put in initial work. When I was a teacher, I used to tell my students that they had to tell me 3-5 things that they did to first try to answer a question themselves. Make sure you put in the bare minimum before asking questions to your team – no one wants to be bombarded with questions that are already answered in your team’s docs, or are easily discovered on stack overflow, etc.

There are so many free resources to be able to learn to code in almost any language. A good way to learn to code is to think of a problem you have and code to solve it. You end up more invested in the outcome and it causes you to break out your critical thinking skills vs just following a tutorial that gives you every step.

Some of the best developers I have worked with transferred from other industries. Being able to combine the skills they learned in their previous fields with software development skills gave them a leg up in the long run. The transition can be a lot of work, but those who do it can go on to have very successful careers in tech.

It’s never too late to change. Whatever field you are in there is always a spot in tech for you. It may not be as a software engineer at first but you can pivot into it by learning the ropes. There are analyst jobs, support roles, QA testers, and product roles. A lot of these roles require no coding knowledge up front but as you move up within in them you become more exposed to the engineers and can start to make your move.

Never, often you can take some aspects of your current work into software design.

No. I think it can be helpful later to distinguish yourself from other applicants and provide the skills necessary to advance beyond hands-on engineering such as management or ownership. When you are just getting started it is absolutely not necessary in my opinion, your skills and aptitude are far more important.

I don’t think it is necessary at all to get a degree to get into software engineering but it does help. You can teach yourself the hard skills on your own but software engineering is much more than being able to code. There are so many soft skills that you learn through working on projects throughout school. You could skip the degree course and opt for a bootcamp like study if you want.

Strictly speaking, a college degree is not needed to get to almost any level in tech that you want to; that said, the amount of effort you need to put in may be comparable, as there is a vast amount of knowledge out there. When trying to get into your first job, I recommend targeting a very specific subset of tech jobs to start off with- Junior Web Developer, for example. In this case I would compile a list of expectations from job descriptions for this position and go as deep as you can on each item.