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I started learning programming at about 24, I'm 28 now and have been an indie developer since starting. I completed a 6 courses at a local university for a prog

I started learning programming at about 24, I'm 28 now and have been an indie developer since starting. I completed a 6 courses at a local university for a programming certificate. To be fair I haven't started looking for a job, but I might after this year. I wish I just went to school and got it over with. When you teach yourself you'll come across topics that you wish you were exposed to sooner, and would probably help propel you further and quicker. For example, one of my courses covered data structures and algorithms, but barely. If I want a job I still need to learn how to practically implement them and practice, which is a difficult choice to make when I could be working on products. I might not have the discipline to teach myself algorithms/data structures today because I mostly don't care about them, but if it were a school assignment I would have done it and learned it.

gremlinsinc 10y ago
My brother graduated from school w/ degree in web development -- he can't find a job because they teach out-dated js/css/html -- but don't teach anything at all about Angular, Twitter Bootstrap, etc -- and most companies that hire frontend won't touch you if you don't have some JS framework experience.. I'm backend/php dev in Laravel, and self-taught and work for a decent company, I'm a jr dev now in my first major gig. I don't really think you can 'practice'for a job -- honestly getting your first job is the best way to learn. Or building stuff, going through classes only gets you so far--you learn way more by pushing stuff into production. Since becoming full-time and moving from side projects I've learned 500% more from working with team-mates than I ever could've in College or on my own alone.
- coralreef 10y ago
  The context of my reply was generally towards a 4 year program in engineering or computer science. I think if you just want to be a front-end app or web developer than a bootcamp or alternative education can suffice. And I agree you learn more by producing work. Teaching yourself how to use frameworks like bootstrap or angular is easy. But teaching yourself fundamental CS principles like traversing a linked list or rotating a 2D matrix is much harder, and the payoff comes much later. For example, you mentioned that you do backend dev. Suppose your boss asks you to do load balancing to handle server traffic. You could probably hack something together with AWS tutorials and Stack Overflow, but do you understand the principles behind it? Can you actually improve whatever it is you built? What if you can't afford AWS or you need a custom solution? If you don't know or can't do these things, then you'll never be as valuable or useful than someone who does.
  - gremlinsinc 10y ago
    True I guess, I'm a bit of a jack of all trades, master of none I'd say. PHP I'm pretty intermediate on, and linux. I can hack things and make them work, but I've taken college classes on programming, and to this day I've never used linked lists in my code. I've also never rotated a 2D matrix, but a lot of web apps and even mobile is a lot of the same interacting with api's, manipulating data, etc.. I've used linode before for node balancers as they have those as builtins. -- I do actually spend about 2 hours per week going through CS courses on things I haven't learned from a github CS syllabus which basically has an entire CS degree crammed into free online lessons. I'm also becoming more interested in learning pentesting - not only to be able to become a Whitehat hacker, but because it'll give me more insight into securing my own applications better from malicious hackers.

gremlinsinc 10y ago

My brother graduated from school w/ degree in web development -- he can't find a job because they teach out-dated js/css/html -- but don't teach anything at all about Angular, Twitter Bootstrap, etc -- and most companies that hire frontend won't touch you if you don't have some JS framework experience.. I'm backend/php dev in Laravel, and self-taught and work for a decent company, I'm a jr dev now in my first major gig. I don't really think you can 'practice'for a job -- honestly getting your first job is the best way to learn. Or building stuff, going through classes only gets you so far--you learn way more by pushing stuff into production. Since becoming full-time and moving from side projects I've learned 500% more from working with team-mates than I ever could've in College or on my own alone.

coralreef 10y ago
The context of my reply was generally towards a 4 year program in engineering or computer science. I think if you just want to be a front-end app or web developer than a bootcamp or alternative education can suffice. And I agree you learn more by producing work. Teaching yourself how to use frameworks like bootstrap or angular is easy. But teaching yourself fundamental CS principles like traversing a linked list or rotating a 2D matrix is much harder, and the payoff comes much later. For example, you mentioned that you do backend dev. Suppose your boss asks you to do load balancing to handle server traffic. You could probably hack something together with AWS tutorials and Stack Overflow, but do you understand the principles behind it? Can you actually improve whatever it is you built? What if you can't afford AWS or you need a custom solution? If you don't know or can't do these things, then you'll never be as valuable or useful than someone who does.
- gremlinsinc 10y ago
  True I guess, I'm a bit of a jack of all trades, master of none I'd say. PHP I'm pretty intermediate on, and linux. I can hack things and make them work, but I've taken college classes on programming, and to this day I've never used linked lists in my code. I've also never rotated a 2D matrix, but a lot of web apps and even mobile is a lot of the same interacting with api's, manipulating data, etc.. I've used linode before for node balancers as they have those as builtins. -- I do actually spend about 2 hours per week going through CS courses on things I haven't learned from a github CS syllabus which basically has an entire CS degree crammed into free online lessons. I'm also becoming more interested in learning pentesting - not only to be able to become a Whitehat hacker, but because it'll give me more insight into securing my own applications better from malicious hackers.