The principles of following a career path are simple. You want to work as a lawyer? Go to Law School. You want to be a doctor? Study medicine. You want to be a programmer? Get a Computer Science degree… Actually, that’s not true anymore.
Unlike other professions, you don’t need to pass exams and get certifications to start working in programming. Pick up a book, attend a course or just fiddle around with GitHub projects until you get the confidence to start doing the same for others. It’s as simple as that. I know it to be true because I did exactly that.
Why not get a degree?
For me the reason to not get a Computer Science degree had nothing to do with money. In Pakistan, if you go to a government run university, the fees are relatively affordable. I was lucky enough to get in (despite the intense competition). But studied business only because I didn’t know much about programming at the time and because I couldn’t get into my first choice of medicine.
I hated studying business. It was immensely boring. Nothing fascinating or challenging about it. I often found myself reading books, writing blogs or falling asleep during lectures — my friends actually have pictures! Just so you know I wasn’t a bad student; I graduated with a 3.9 GPA out of 4.
A passion relatedly realized
It was midway during university that I started a tech blog and absolutely loved it. It felt good working on something I was passionate about. I was always interested in gadgets and computers. All that writing led me to programming and it was something that deeply intrigued me.
This was about a decade ago when there wasn’t that much content online as there is today. What I did find back then were Harvard CS lectures on iTunes-U which I downloaded onto my iPod, but I remember hitting a road bump there because of missing notes and assignments referred to in the lectures. I still have those lectures downloaded even though I never finished the course.
Moving on, I got busy with life. Post-graduation I started working and doing an MBA. I no longer had the time. But as time went on and I found myself not enjoying my work, I gravitated back towards programming.
So much information!
This time around there were much more resources on the internet. It was the era of Google’s campaign on teaching kids and girls how to code. The era of the HBO’s Silicon Valley. The era of technology. Or maybe I had just learned to Google better.
This time around I found Udacity. It offers paid nanodegrees, but if you search its catalog you can find the courses from those degrees for free (but without teacher support). They are really good. I learnt Android programming and made two hobby apps. One for tracking study progress and the other a tourist app for my hometown. I never got around to publishing them. It was just something I enjoyed doing.
Additionally, I downloaded a ton of programming eBooks. I would just search the top-rated books on Amazon and download them. I really enjoyed learning Java and I breezed through those books. Problem was that although they taught the language, they didn’t teach you how to use that language to actually build and publish an application.
I took a course
One day I was browsing YouTube and I saw a recommended video about a school in San Francisco which had this new-age teaching style on programming. They had a two year college course that taught you all the skills you needed for a career in computer science, but without a degree. While I couldn’t spare 2 years, there was another option I was interested in: a 6-week summer school for teaching iOS and web apps.
For some reason that year, the price of the course had drastically gone down. Not thinking twice I applied instantly, got in, flew to SF and learnt web development in the space of 6 weeks. What I sound surprising was how much I already knew.
The course helped give me structure and link together all those pieces of knowledge I had learnt from books. I learnt the technical terms for things I thought I didn’t know but actually did. And with their help, I learnt how to publish a fully coded node.js website hosted on Heroku.
Although a majority of the class were high school students and much younger than me, I did enjoy being surrounded by their creativity and enthusiasm for coding. At the end of the course, my project was selected as a top app so I think I did pretty well ;)
I would definitely recommend taking a course for anybody wanting to learn how to code. Don’t go for anything expensive or long. A month’s long course is good enough. Even if you know everything from stuff online, the course will give you structure and access to a community for support and guidance.
Switching careers
Well immediately after the course I got a freelance web development project. One led to another and now I work as a web developer. I mean I actually get paid for programming!
On the side, I work on my own website: thiscodeworks.com — a social network of code snippets. Kind of like the Pinterest of Code. I built it as a place to save code snippets because I was getting tired of switching between notebooks, projects and tutorials to copy code.
It was one of the winning projects on Pioneer and has received some interest from other developers learning how to code.
Conclusion
If you want to learn how to code, take some free courses on Udacity, download some eBooks (for those who can’t afford it, you know where to go) and take a cheap programming course.
Get in touch if you want specifics, I’d be more than happy to help.
Good luck!
