How to become a software developer

facilitated by Rabble and Lena

Intro

• There's a computer science test in the UK to figure out who should be a developer through a series of mathematical questions.
• People are told the need to score well, but there's no way to get it right.
• Strategies from programmers - can you create a sufficient mental image to move forward?
  • Random guessing
  • Invent a fantasy world where each symbol has a meaning
  • Try to figure them out one by one

Education

• People in ten-week developer programs:
  • Have curiosity
  • Experiment
  • Find resources
• Computer science degrees teach computation, not useful
• Rabble hires CS-degreed people and self-taught people - considers them equal
• However, design practices and engineering patterns (recursion) are difficult to teach yourself

Bootcamps

• DevBootCamp
• HackReactor
• Hackbright
• BootCampIO (reviews and pricing)
• Bootcamps are fast. Self teaching is important.

What hiring managers are looking for

• Rabble rarely hires people who started programming after puberty.
• You don't have to be a genius developer
• The best programmers are better because they see the code better, write more elegant solutions.
• You need people with different backgrounds.
• "Become a programmer! (You just won't be great.)" -Rabble

Other Notes for New Programmers

• The problems nonprofit developers solve don't need to be complicated, innovative, or new. Fit the needs of the org.
• "We haven't even started our need for programmers. Software is eating the world. We really need more programmers."
• Learning to code can mean being able to have an intelligent conversation.
• "Disproportionate power of a programmer - programmers can drive and everyone else is walking."
• When you build something, if you build it well, you don't have to build it again.

Learning to Program?

1. Learn fundamentals (not bugs!)
2. If you get a job, try a consultancy, you'll get lots of types of projects.
3. Learn in open source programs/languages (more transferable! bigger community!)

Where to Get Fundamentals?

• CodeAcademy for JS & Python
• Learn Python the hard way
• Coursera for data science
• Hadebright's curriculum in GitHub
• Learning a programming language isn't as hard as learning a human language.
  • More like learning a dialect of a language you already know.
  • Programming concepts are pretty universal.
  • Doesn't matter which language you start with.
• Javascript is the universal language for the web
• For those doing self-teaching, are tehre common pitfalls or things to look out for?
  • No, there are a lot of good tutorials.
• Python is a good teaching language.
• Start learning database MySQL
• SQL is a useful language to learn - traditional databases use SQL.
• Valuable to learn, there is a lot to learn.
• At Twitter, everyone should have some working knowledge.
• Get a mentor to check in with who can help you see your progress
• Programming is like "yak-shaving" - you are trying to do something basic, but you get lost and start fixing other things and then forget what you initially wanted to do.
• Pair programming - two keyboards, two monitors, and two mice. You work with a senior programmer to teach and share knowledge, save time, with two heads being better than one.
• Programming is mostly de-bugging
• Time is very important - so is flow.
  • You get into a state, sot to interrupt a programmer is breaking that.
  • This is why tech companies provide food service and laundry - you don't want to interrupt flow

Final Thoughts

• Learn programming to better yourself!
• Male developers play the alpha geek game which is uninclusive which is unfortunate
• In sociology they tell you you can't fix anything; social change takes forever, unlike coding and software.
  • You can have immediate impact and fix the world!
• Developers can't estimate how long it is going to take.
• Best software is buildt up from small pieces.