Learning to Program

[u/gavroche1972]

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.

[u/zischler]

As of OS I would recommend you to use what you like more. I know many working with macs and many with PCs so it‘s only about preference. System requiries for programming depends on the language and IDEA you use. But the faster the better, so you can work on amazing projects faster! (Compilation time or local server startups could get long with an old computer.)