3 ms·

Honestly props to you for choosing self-improvement as the route forward instead of railing at the developers for not understanding you. I would recommend pick

Honestly props to you for choosing self-improvement as the route forward instead of railing at the developers for not understanding you. I would recommend picking a programming language and doing the basic tutorials for it to start, all languages have them. If you hit upon something you feel the tutorial isn't explaining well, open a new tab, google that specific thing, e.g. "what is a function" / "how does a function work" / "what is a function in python" / "how does a function work in python" until you get the results you want, and read different ones til you find an explanation that makes sense to you. If the tutorial you chose is consistently unclear to you, pick a different tutorial. Use a variety of resources. Which language kind of depends what you're working on. Python is the lowest barrier-to-entry, probably, but for all I know you're working on an iOS app and maybe Swift would be a better starting point since it's more relevant to what you're doing. Avoid Perl, probably. Once you've got a handle on the general basics of a programming language, solve some basic problems. Use google to find a list of basic 101 programming challenges that suits you. Solve them. Once you've got a handle on basic programming, try building a simple app of whatever nature you like. The classic example is a TODO reminder/checklist app, but you can do whatever interests you. The goal should be to pick something that you definitely don't know how to build, thus forcing yourself to learn how. It will involve a lot of googling but you'll find yourself learning rapidly. You'll feel it. Lastly, StackOverflow is your friend.

ghaff 6y ago
The one thing I'd add to that with respect to looking at various Intro to CS MOOCs that are out there is this. Many of them are very good, e.g. the MIT 6.001x ones (assuming those are the current numbers), but many of the "intro" courses from top schools actually assume you pretty much know the basics of programming in at least some language. So the advice of starting from the basics is good.
brittpart_ 6y ago
We're going into the next iteration because the first product was terribly unusable and I want it to be a more efficient process this time. I remember at one point we were arguing about validation in a text field and I came up with bananas explanations and to add to it, I thought I needed to point out every field in the entire application where it needed to be fixed - mortified to say the least, and I learned that the word is "validation" for what I was trying to describe. Right now, I think I should keep it as a web app because it seems easier (?) but will need to add desktop and then mobile (maybe mobile before desktop for upload and portability reasons, but I haven't decided). MERN stack: ReactJS with Redux Node.js MongoDB / Atlas AWS EC2 I just checked out StackOverflow, we're going to be friends :)

ghaff 6y ago

The one thing I'd add to that with respect to looking at various Intro to CS MOOCs that are out there is this. Many of them are very good, e.g. the MIT 6.001x ones (assuming those are the current numbers), but many of the "intro" courses from top schools actually assume you pretty much know the basics of programming in at least some language. So the advice of starting from the basics is good.

brittpart_ 6y ago

We're going into the next iteration because the first product was terribly unusable and I want it to be a more efficient process this time. I remember at one point we were arguing about validation in a text field and I came up with bananas explanations and to add to it, I thought I needed to point out every field in the entire application where it needed to be fixed - mortified to say the least, and I learned that the word is "validation" for what I was trying to describe. Right now, I think I should keep it as a web app because it seems easier (?) but will need to add desktop and then mobile (maybe mobile before desktop for upload and portability reasons, but I haven't decided). MERN stack: ReactJS with Redux Node.js MongoDB / Atlas AWS EC2 I just checked out StackOverflow, we're going to be friends :)