To become good at anything takes hours and hours of hard work. Once you get started it becomes easy since you enjoy it. I’ve been lucky to have had friends and mentors to help as I delved into world of computer science.

Getting started

The barrier to entry for coding has both decreased yet can seem overwhelming at the same time as the industry has progressed. It is a fine balance between just learning how to be a code monkey or gaining an understanding of why decisions are made and to start to learn how computers actually work. I love how the industry is just full of good and free content such that if you are interested and have an unencumbered internet connection you could go quite far in your learning.

However the issue I see amongst new developers is not knowing where to start or spending time learning concepts which don’t seem to have any weight (setting up your environment) and the barrier to entry seems instead discouraging rather than trying to nurture that interest in the field and show how amazing and powerful the skill can be.

How I got started

Well my method might not be that interesting but I started through university. It gave a good foundation of what topics to learn and in order to get my monies worth provided an incentive to learn the theory.

Whilst at the time I was learning for the sake of marks what really changed it around was having a friend who was (and still is :)) the best developer I know provide context of why things were in addition to inspiring me with his current projects and issues he was facing. I am always grateful of the fact that he would always take the time to help explain concepts and link them to real world projects and examples. For example showing me why algorithms were so interesting and important by showing googles Page Rank or linking data structure to their implementations.

How you can get started

If you are interested I highly suggest 30 days of javascript as most of the projects are quite visual and helpful. I havn’t found much success with showing people hackerrank and the like as these are more coding basics which can be stale. I can also suggest learn python the hard way . For theory I highly recommend any computer science lectures on youtube (start with networking as it seems to be the most relatable) and also usually most university course content is publically available. Of course if you need additional guidance and help feel free to make a request on Todemy for an Expert to help if you get stuck or for additional guidance.

Best of Luck