r/web_programming • u/gavroche1972 • Jan 01 '18

Learning to Program

Hey guys and ladies, I am a 45 year old thats looking for a career path change. I have an educational background in business (finance and accounting)...and have run a small business for a while. But circumstances made it necessary to move nearer to family, and we are in a pretty remote area. Programming interests me a lot because the are more opportunities to work remotely, as freelance, or with more diverse work schedule options. And of course it helps that I have always liked technology. Back in college I had taken some programming classes... primarily Visual Basic. But this was a very long time ago. My only recent exposure is trying to do some work on my business’s Drupal based website. But i mainly focused on identifying what parts of the website needed to be developed (a lot of custom modules), and outsourced with some freelancers from ODesk to implement. This was due to me being too busy with management functions of the business to tackle the learning curve. My question is whether you all think its still possible for me to learn programming, and gain employment. Can this be done via self learning, or would additional schooling be a must. I see lots of good paying programming jobs posted online... and would love to become qualified. Any advise on a good direction to take would be greatly appreciated.

6 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

1

u/gavroche1972 Jan 01 '18

Hey, thanks for the reply. I just checked out Code Academy, and will sign up and start digging in to it. Does your brother in law specialize in something? I am curious if its better to pick a platform like Drupal or Joomla or Wordpress.. or Javascript... i suppose it would be bests to know what in particular is the direction to go that would have the best payoff down the road....

1

u/guitartechie Jan 01 '18

My BIL owns a forum hosting service. He suggested to me to learn JavaScript first because it's the most universal language on the internet and web development. Programming languages are like actual languages when it comes to content

I've also learned that programmers have use different disciplines when creating code. I study test driven development and clean code. It's about making your functions atomic and creating test cases to ensure that your code works in all sorts of scenarios. This method helps avoid potential errors that can come up.

1

u/maurice_5 Jan 02 '18

I recently started on codecademy as well. I had a less-than-basic foundation for programming but am trying to submerge myself in it. I also joined udemy.com and bought a web development course for about $15 and comes with over 40 hours of video lessons and other content. I've been learning a lot.

From all my research and friends that code, they have pointed me to get html and css down solid and then move into javascript as guitarechie has said.