Career Change | Hacker News Reader

Career Change

1 pointavidev3 comments

Hi, I am 31 years old right now and i have just had experience in manufacturing as of now. i want to get into coding and i have learnt the python basics. i just wanted to ask you guys what would be the best way to do this? are coding bootcamps like brainstaion, hackeryou, lighthouse labs worth it as they claim to help find jobs too? any advice would be really helpful. Thank You!

View on HN

Bootcamps might be a decent option. You could also apply to jobs you want and see what they say. Chances are, many of them will want a special piece of paper - a degree. So you should look into that too.

Get hired as a QA engineer, then use and refine your coding skills by writing automated tests. If you do well or enjoy it, consider pivoting into development.

find a fun challenge you personally enjoy solving, and start with some high level languages to get some experience of what "coding means", and slowly give yourself time to learn, through trial and error, copy other people's work from places like github and "check out" copies to work with, see if you can get things to build, or "compile" and run, and be patient, take your time, keep it interesting and fun, and find groups to work with, at least 2 or 3 peers learning at the same pace as you, and a few mentors to learn from, folk you can easily meet online, join some meetup.com groups, virtual and in person, dial into googel hangouts or zoom calls where you can to listen, watch, and absorb, and be careful and selective about the amount of content you consume from youtube or similar as it's easy to get caught wasting time on folk who are not good teachers or programmers and you go down a dead end rabbit hole..

start small, have fun, build many things - even start with things like HTML and build a web page you can load with a web browsers, then add some simple JavaScript for popups or forms, don't write off the fun languages like LOGO and BASIC can give you to get started, jumping in too deep too soon will potentially turn you off coding..

you can have a lot of fun with web based programming spaces as well..

here's a fun COmmodore 64 BASIC emulator to play with

https://c64emulator.111mb.de/index.php?site=pp_javascript&la...

here's a fun simple workspace to learn how to program in different languages, try this one:

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/execute_basic_online.php

here are some other great resources

https://www.businessinsider.com/64-places-you-can-learn-to-c...

https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/learn-coding-online-for-...

https://learntocodewith.me/posts/code-for-free/

https://dynomapper.com/blog/410-top-25-websites-to-learn-to-...

https://skillcrush.com/blog/64-online-resources-to-learn-to-...

have fun!!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com