sincerelysleepy

I've been heavily working on this lately as well. Here are my best tips in order of importancy:

1) Get off your phone as much as possible. Disable all notifications if you can except text / call. Delete apps you don't need to aimlessly check out of boredom (Social media, Reddit, HN, etc).

2) Meditate in some form. For me, this is yoga and taking soothing baths in the morning before work. Clearing your head and getting away from technology for a bit. Allow your brain to breath and think without information being shoved in it's face.

3) Practice focusing on context switching instead of "multi tasking". Realize that as humans, we cannot actually multi task. Assuming you work at a computer all day, don't have streams up, a million tabs, emails, chat services, etc. You only need to have open what you NEED open and nothing else.

4) Exercise. I've found running in short 2 mi increments 3-4 times a week really provides me the energy I need to complete the above 3 items.

Cheers and good luck mate!

I would be down for sure. Self taught .NET dev but lacking a CS background so it's hard to transition out of consulting and IT. Looking for people actually driven to do this!

also: http://www.stefankendall.com/2013/01/all-i-learned-in-colleg...

Definitely! If you have any questions or want to talk further feel free to msg me

Fresh out of high school I wanted to develop software and petaled around the idea that only a genius could do it so I changed my major to Bio. After two semesters, I couldn't take how boring it was. Over the years in college, I found very few people who were actual developers. I met a senior level developer playing starcraft who I became really good buddies with and got a lot of insight to what it's really like to be a developer and how (for the MOST part depending on the company) little a degree actually mattered if you were going for a dev position somewhere.

My buddy knew that I was looking to get into programming and would tap at the idea from time to time. Finally, I got the balls to start playing around with javascript. Shortly after, he informed me his friend's friends were looking for someone to train (completely green to software development) to write software for their consulting company. I did the interview with them, landed the job and shortly I began to realizing how much I loved programming. When they said "train", they meant they'd buy me books and would pay me to read them.

I got to the point where I was in my Bio classes and it would drive me insane that I wasn't learning something about the software world. I began to skip classes, skip homework and eventually dropped out. (I do have my Associates in Computer Science, but not a BA). 10 months later I'm able to handle small yet fairly complex projects they throw at me and am familiar with several .NET frameworks. I've been able to familiarize myself with certain ways to Unit Test my code, I'm familiar with WCF, WPF, C#, MVVM, OOP concepts and a handful of other amazing things.

Now to make my point. Being completely new to all of this I felt I needed to go to school to get any type of job. Being surrounded by software developers who've had their own startups, consulting companies or do hiring at their company for developers, I've heard the same thing repeatedly "I don't give a shit if you have a degree or not. If you know what you're talking about I'm going to hire you. I've interviewed countless people with degrees who can't write code."

Moral of all of this. Be good at what you do. If you're going to drop out of school, you better bust your ass to learn and you'll be fine :)