Steps for My Little Sister to Get Coding
My younger sister recently left her Plan A college program, generally unsure of her career path. I’m a major advocate of not paying for education that you are unsure you’ll use, and a believer that understanding computer technology is the modern day literacy. I had an epiphany that she would fit right into the programming culture, I reached out, and was delighted to hear how excited she was about learning to code.
I’m still not all the way there myself — the past 6 years have been very full — but I have been successful at creating an environment around me to foster natural growth toward being a competent software engineer. The purpose of this post is to share the habits that have helped me stay focused and on track toward my goals, in the midst of all the craziness of starting and running businesses and building a family.
Gain a Solid Understanding
Web applications are hands-down my most used piece of software, and essential for pretty much any business these days. I recommend gaining and introduction to this technology through the free Codecademy HTML, CSS, and Javascript courses.
What tied all these basic courses together for me, and opened up a whole new world, was Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial. Thanks to the full stack nature and picky conventions of Rails, paired with Michael’s gift of teaching, through this tutorial I finally understood how all the pieces come together to serve up working web applications. If I had to pick one piece of educational material to be required for everyone, this would be it for sure. Before tackling the Rails Tutorial you may find a little Ruby foundation helpful, through Codecademy or Poignant’s Guide to Ruby.
Surround Yourself With Like-minded People
I visited the meet ups, but they didn’t really click for me. If I had full time availability, a formal program like Launchcode could have been an excellent route.
What worked well in my situation was keeping a dialogue going with a couple good friends about tech. Additionally, I joined some vibrant Telegram groups: Geeks Chat, Python Telegram Bot, Python, Javascript Party. Getting these discussions around me has kept programming a natural part of my day-to-day.
Read About Code Everyday
In addition to the conversations I have going with friends, and passively through the Telegram groups, I intentionally read about code every day. RubyFlow and CSS Tricks keep good stuff in my Feedly daily, and my Medium feed is tailored to serve up helpful coding posts. Lately I’ve been syncing programming books to my Kindle to keep my head in the game when there’s a little time to kill.
Start Some Projects
Speaking from experience, there’s no greater motivator to bring it all together than a real life project. For me, it was putting up a static site in less than a week that started to make some money. For over a year I’ve been able to work with a talented friend to transfer that little one page to a full feature rails application. It has been pure joy and the impetus I needed to finally make meaningful use of all the time spent on tutorials. Get some code out there into the wild.
Good luck, Ally!
