Any coders or developers out there?

[thesameage]

Is anyone out there a coder? I'm seriously thinking of doing some kind of coding boot camp to get more of a coding background. Would love to connect with any madbeaners who do that kind of work to find out more about getting involved as a... cough... 41 year old!

[mattc]

I manage a team of developers, and do coding myself.

I only hire people with degrees in Math or Computer Science, but that shouldn't stop you from getting into coding.  I'd think that if you could take a course on Java or SQL at the local community college, you could find a junior position somewhere.

[thesameage]

Interesting and good to hear. I'm an interactive content manager right now and work extensively in drupal. I have great writing, editing (copy, audio, and video), and people skills but want to open my options and make more money. Not sure if going into coding is like saying "I think I'll be a doctor now" or if it's worth opening that door. I'd love to find a way to use it to build on the skills I already have.

[angrykoko]

I'm a enterprise system architect;  been coding for about 18 years.
Java is main bread and butter but also php, c#, C,C++, Javascript and Html, SQL and anything else I need to know at any given moment.

Working in drupal, writing and editing copy is not like writing code but writing code is also not like saying "I'll be doctor today" either. 

It's pretty easy and free to give coding a try to see if
a) you like it
b) your any good at it.

Java is free and the development environments are free and excellent too.  Lots of tutorials on java too, just google search.
Java Developer Kit
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk7-downloads-1880260.html

Eclipse IDE:
https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

If you want to go more of the HTML/Javascript route I prefer NetBeans IDE:
https://netbeans.org/

Actually, dont start with HTML / CSS / Javascript.. you will become frustrated pretty quick.

PHP is good to know and fairly easy to learn.  Search for Xampp to get a php environment up and running quickly.

If you have any specific questions, just shoot me a message and I'll try to help.

[thesameage]

All good advice and thanks! I will def shoot you some questions after I poke around some more. There's a ceiling on being a writer and editor these days (I'm on my second career right now!), but it seems like the sky is the limit as far as developers and coders go, so I'd like to give it some time.

[angrykoko]

I only hire people with degrees in Math or Computer Science

Really? You are either located somewhere with an abundance of developers or working in a very specific industry.  We have a hard time finding developers, actually it seems to be the re-occuring theme over my career and companies. 

[thesameage]

Here in NYC people always seem to have a hard time finding developers... that's why I was thinking of it as a second/third career.

[RobA]

Here in NYC people always seem to have a hard time finding developers... that's why I was thinking of it as a second/third career.

I'm not really trying to put you off of looking into being a developer, but it is a notoriously ageist profession. It doesn't mean you can't get a job in the field, but it can make it more difficult.

What you should study depends on what you want to do. It is a very broad field and the tools and libraries tend to be pretty specialized. The skills needed are actually pretty common in all the various areas, but the knowledge of the tools used in specific areas of work is more specialized

One thing to do to get an idea of what to start learning is to look at job descriptions in the fields you are interested in and see the tools and skills they are looking for.

[thesameage]

Good and bad, it's all good info to know! I expected that it would be pretty ageist. You are right that I need to think pretty strategically. My benefit in being older is that I have worked in high level, managerial positions in big companies and have a feel for how things work and how to work with and manage people. Not sure how to align that with learning new technical skills, but maybe that's there somewhere. 

[angrykoko]

Here in NYC people always seem to have a hard time finding developers... that's why I was thinking of it as a second/third career.

What you should study depends on what you want to do.

And sometimes what you want to do is dictated by the people you work for

Yeah RobA makes some good points, I glossed over all that because you need to first see if you might even like doing any part of coding and... I tend to get over zealous to help someone who wants to learn something new in life (even if they never use it).

Regardless of all the failure points, just try doing some tutorials to see if programming even catches your interest.  If you cant stand it then you've wasted nothing but a couple hours, if you love it then you can start thinking which language or platform and of a path to potentially doing it as a career or even side work or something. 

From your comments you seem to realize the difficulties involved in changing careers so I wont add to the comments so far.

Cheers!

[mremic01]

Is anyone out there a coder? I'm seriously thinking of doing some kind of coding boot camp to get more of a coding background. Would love to connect with any madbeaners who do that kind of work to find out more about getting involved as a... cough... 41 year old!

I did a 2 year 'Programmer/Analyst' degree at a community college right after I graduated from a big university with a useless humanities degree. A lot of the people in the program were middle-aged, and I think if you're the kind of person to be building your own pedals, you'll have an easy time. One thing to consider is outsourcing. Coding jobs can be done by anyone in the world. IT jobs that require someone on site might have better job security.

[lars]

I use this....

[alanp]

Had a lot of fun with Commodore 64 basic (POKE 54321, #) and after that, Turbo Pascal 7. Never really progressed past that, though.

[RobA]

Good and bad, it's all good info to know! I expected that it would be pretty ageist. You are right that I need to think pretty strategically. My benefit in being older is that I have worked in high level, managerial positions in big companies and have a feel for how things work and how to work with and manage people. Not sure how to align that with learning new technical skills, but maybe that's there somewhere.

There are plenty of positions in software companies for people with project management and people skills. Having a knowledge of coding and development process is a big plus for people in these positions. But these types of jobs don't usually involve coding itself if that's your goal. That's not always true and particularly in smaller companies you might be able to find a job that lets you do both.

On the pure development side, team lead positions and then architects involve lots of people and managerial skills but these are almost always going to be filled by people with lots of development experience because they need to know how to solve the programming problems that come up. It's good to have your skills though, because a company might look at you as someone they think can fairly rapidly grow into one of these positions with solid development experience. That depends on the company though and most companies in the software world have a long term vision of about six months at max.

In large companies and some smaller companies in certain areas, there are positions that specialize in the process side of things. For these positions, having programming knowledge is important, but detailed knowledge of process and requirements is far more important. Communication skills are really important in these types of positions. If you don't find the prospect of doing this type of work dead boring, it might be something worth targeting. It could also end up being a long path to get there and there are fewer positions of this sort than pure programming positions. But, your non-software background could be benefit here.

This piece of advice is going to go against what almost everyone will tell you, so take that into consideration. The best place to start to learn to program is still C. Not C++ or C# or any of the other C derived languages, but just plain old (very old now) procedural C. It is really pretty fast to learn to program C. Once you know C, it's easier to learn anything else. Almost all system level libraries are written in C at their base. They'll almost always have wrappers and API's in C++ or Java or Objective-C, ... but the base level is written in C. It helps to know how this level works. A bunch of coding is done for embedded systems. These almost always use C (Some still use assembly).

After you know C, you can pickup other languages more quickly. After you know C and have a solid understanding of O-O principles, you learn any O-O language in days (even those that don't use a C based syntax). Once you know C and a functional language you can grok this style of programing in any language. Etc. The heavy work of learning an new system or environment is usually learning the API's and libraries. I find that a lot easier by knowing the foundations of how things work and that means knowing how systems programming in C works.

The downside of learning C first is that you aren't going to be learning to program by doing web development, UI development, or pretty much anything that is what people consider to be programming now days. Almost all of that is done in higher level languages. So, the actual learning to program this way can feel boring and pointless even if it is pretty fast to do. One way to get around that would be to start doing some projects using little embedded micro-controllers that you are interested in. I'd still suggest starting out learning C with basic command line programs on a normal computer, because you get quicker feedback that way and the learning process will go faster. But, a switch to working on an embedded project (possibly even pedal related) when you get bored with the process of learning C could keep up the interest level. 

[thesameage]

More good advice. I'm going to check out some C info today.

What do you think about looking into developing front end developer skills vs backend?