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Homeless Coding?

 
dot com said:
My job is so easy any homeless guy can do it days! Why are they paying me!
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I have wanted to gain some rudimentary knowledge of app writing. What would be the best way to go about it. I really want to learn enough to introduce it to my children at a young age. I believe that the masters of technology will become the only stable source of income in the future and want to make sure my kids are ready for it. Any thoughts?
 
I first fiddled around with BASIC on my TRS 80 when I was five. Nowadays javascript is probably the easiest to wrap your head around and can be done entirely online.
http://www.w3schools.com/js/
There are several initiatives I've seen that turn learning programming into a game for kids, you'd have to google for them though as I didn't bookmark anything.
 
Not sure where it ranks these days, but the Webmonkey.com tutorials got me started back in the day. For instance, in the other thread I mentioned healthcare.gov being built on JSON - they have an excellent "getting started with JSON" walk through with nice, simple examples.

If you want to focus somewhere, I'd focus on modern web technologies. In the old days it was: design a graphical site, convert it to html, make the html dynamic via a scripting server-side language like asp or php, add features via client-side scripting like javascript, and tie it all together with SQL queries on the back end.

Web 2.0 is essentially the effort of breaking that paradigm to allow data to be accessed and traded around by all kinds of devices. That's where the good shit is now. MongoDB, Drupal, JSON, Ruby on Rails, Python, JQuery...

I seriously think anyone with a laptop and a browser could spend 3 months on Webmonkey tutorials (and similar sites) and be worth $100k/year if they have any aptitude for it.
 
JSFiddle is a fun little sandbox for trying out code.
 
DCDeac said:
I seriously think anyone with a laptop and a browser could spend 3 months on Webmonkey tutorials (and similar sites) and be worth $100k/year if they have any aptitude for it.
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This is basically what happened during the 90's boom and my god we had so many shitty programmers. I was almost happy about the crash because it was a good excuse to cleave the bottom 50% from the workforce.
 
dot com said:
This is basically what happened during the 90's boom and my god we had so many shitty programmers. I was almost happy about the crash because it was a good excuse to cleave the bottom 50% from the workforce.
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Who is "we" in that sentence out of curiosity?

In my world here in DC there is such a lack of even remotely adequate talent that complaining of "shitty" programmers sounds like a luxury.

Not to mention programmers are made on the job, not in school. Shitty programmers either don't have the aptitude for the work or they're poorly developed by their companies generally.
 
I like the wrangor c++ student tag. Will give pos rep if you out yourself. Ironically I made a C+ in C++. That class took actually doing your homework. Bad combination for a freshman with no direction.
 
DCDeac said:
Who is "we" in that sentence out of curiosity?
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At the time I was at IBM. The talent we had on staff was mostly good - we just couldn't find anybody to hire worth a damn. At the tail end I was at a small startup and it was way worse trying to find people. We ended up making a few hires we regretted, even with extensive guidance/handholding/mentoring, they just couldn't do it. Most lacked any kind of problem solving. If you showed them how to do something, they could repeat it, but couldn't apply the logic behind it to new situations or come up with anything on their own.
 
dot com said:
This is basically what happened during the 90's boom and my god we had so many shitty programmers. I was almost happy about the crash because it was a good excuse to cleave the bottom 50% from the workforce.
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At the other end of the spectrum, my company hires a ton of over-educated shitty programmers who come in with a masters degree and try to over engineer every piece of code.
 
Yeah once they go Masters they're often too far entrenched in "academic" coding. To me, a bachelors with 2-3 years industry experience is usually your best bang for the buck.
 
dot com said:
Yeah once they go Masters they're often too far entrenched in "academic" coding. To me, a bachelors with 2-3 years industry experience is usually your best bang for the buck.
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Bingo. And considering I'm on an IBM program as we speak - one that's mired in years of waste, failure, and is wildly over-budget - I can certainly relate.
 
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