Changing Careers

I have basically written this post before. However, I recently got the following email:

I'm an electrical engineer looking hard at web development bootcamps. How was your experience transitioning from engineering to software?  Did you do a bootcamp, self study, or something else?  The bootcamp is full stack and looks pretty comprehensive, but I'm just so nervous about such a big commitment. 

and oh boy did I feel like I had more to say. I ended up writing enough that I felt like maybe I should go ahead and put it in a blog post as well. I’m going to add some annotations to this to make my intentions even more clear. Here goes (again):

I actually found transitioning from engineering to software to be fairly easy. Hiring managers are more likely to take you seriously (versus if you had a philosophy degree [1]). Granted, a lot of what I’m going to say is assuming you currently have a job. If you do not, a boot camp is not a bad idea. If you do, a boot camp is 100% not worth it [2]. I’ve heard many people who went to boot camp say that they valued it for giving them projects and deadlines but that they basically taught themselves. If you require external deadlines to learn, that’s about all a $15K boot camp is going to give you. Here’s what I would recommend:

1) Find a language that does what you want to do. If you want to do more data-focused work, choose python. Web development? Ruby. Systems programming? Rust or C. There are a lot more (so. many. languages), but you want to make sure it’s common enough that there are resources and you can get a job. Then learn it. Not completely, but enough to get started on projects.

2) Practice and get feedback. Exercism.io is perfect for this. You can do exercises in any language and, once you’ve submitted your solution, get feedback from mentors and also give feedback to other users.

3) If possible, code at work. Automate tasks that you do regularly. When I worked at MailChimp, I was able to write scripts to automate log parsing. Again, this might not be possible! But think outside the box, because if you can do this, it can go on your resume under your current job.

4) Have one or two good projects on Github. These are projects you want to show a potential employer to effectively prove you can code. It doesn’t have to be huge! If you wrote a great script that is really useful, that counts. If you wrote a web app, that counts. Just get some friends to review the code, maybe do a bit of QA on the app and open up issues for things you want to fix.

5) Another alternative (or in addition if you are feeling extra ambitious) is to find an open source project or two that you find interesting and contribute. In many ways this is better because it means someone else will have reviewed your code. But it’s often harder to find a project that you feel confident putting up a pull request.

6) NETWORK. Oftentimes bootcamps tout this as a benefit of the bootcamp, but really they just send you to local meetups. You can do this on your own! Meetups are almost always free.

7) Review some basic CS concepts. I hate that people interview this way, but enough people do that it’s worth your time to do a small amount of studying. This video series by Rob Conery covers most of what you need to know, but you can also do a lot of googling because everything is out there.

8) Just start applying to jobs. Even if you don’t feel 100% ready. You’ll be applying for junior positions and no one interviewing you should expect you to know everything (or even most things). You might get questions that feel that way, but they are just trying to gauge your knowledge level. Or maybe they are assholes! But then you don’t want to work there.

Annotations:
1. There is nothing wrong with a philosophy degree! One of the best developers I know has a degree in Classics. However, many developers still think that having a liberal arts degree means you are less technical and will have more trouble as a developer. This is not true, but you might encounter it.

2. I know this is a strong opinion. And it’s just an opinion. I know great developers who went through boot camps. However, I am quite certain that they would be great developers without the boot camp.

Learning Rust with a Java Background

Last year, I volunteered with TEALS, working with a local teacher once a month who was teaching the AP CS class. There was some extra time at the end of the year, so my teacher requested that I put together some materials to teach the kids something new. Since I was teaching myself Rust at the time, I decided to write a guide specifically aimed at high school students who have learned some Java but are now interested in Rust. I was heavily inspired by the Rust Book, but tried to simplify it so you could make it through in about one and a half hours. I’d love feedback on it and I hope someone finds it useful.

Rust Tutorial for AP CS (Java) Students

Introduction to Scala

I signed myself up to teach a Scala class through Girl Develop It Pittsburgh a few months ago and the class was supposed to be tomorrow. I say "supposed to" because we only had two people sign up, so we ended up canceling. However, I still made a presentation! And since I spent all that time on a presentation, I decided to make a set of screencasts to accompany that presentation. If you've ever been interested in trying out Scala, I hope this helps. If you need any help or want me to go through some other aspect of Scala, feel free to contact me.

Find the rest of the series here.

Getting Started As A Developer

Through my work with PyLadies Boston, I have been asked quite a few times on how to get started with development. I'm going to try to write it all down here.

So you want to become a software developer?

Awesome! It's a pretty fun (albeit sometimes frustrating) gig and the pay is pretty decent too. Just be patient... it's not super easy and sometimes it'll get difficult. It's worth it though, so stick with it.

Step 1: Pick a language

Don't spend too long on this step! I would recommend either Python or Ruby as good beginner languages. The syntax is relatively similar to English, so it's not too hard to read code from early on. Also, these are two languages that are widely used at actual companies! Ruby is a fan favorite of startups and Python has a huge following in the scientific/academic communities. If you want to further progress into web development, I would recommend Ruby because, in my opinion, I think the documentation and tutorials available for Rails are much better (and in some cases easier to understand) than the docs/tutorials for Django.

Either way: don't think too hard about it. You just need to pick one. Once you learn one, you can always, much more easily, learn another.

Step 2: Pick a method

There are a load of resources out there. One I recommend is Zed Shaw's Learn Code the Hard Way (for Ruby, Python, SQL, and C). There's also How To Think Like A Computer Scientist (for Python), along with plenty of others. If you prefer a book, I can recommend both Dietel's How To Program (Java) and Pine's Learn To Program (Ruby, also a web tutorial!). The world of programming books/tutorials is  your oyster! Just pick a learning style that you like and stick with it. If videos are your thing, Codeschool has excellent video tutorials.

What I do not recommend: while Codecademy can be good for trying to decide what language to use, I do not recommend it for learning. Codecademy is software (what you will be building) and software has bugs. What you don't want to be spending time on is trying to figure out if the bug is yours or Codecademy's. If you think that sounds crazy, I have had Python code that I've run locally with no errors that gets a random error on Codecademy. Plus, one of the most difficult parts is installation and setup. You miss that with Codecademy. If this is your tool of choice, you have been warned.

Step 3: Give it some time

Try to dedicate some amount of time every day. 10 minutes when you first get in to work? 30 minutes when you get home? Doesn't matter. The more time you can dedicate, the faster you will progress, but the important thing is to make it a habit so you stick with it. Most of these resources have forums that you can utilize if you run into problems. If they don't, then you can also use StackOverflow. If you google for your error message, you will probably get a result on StackOverflow. Check it out and see if you can fix your bug. Once you get past the basics, give yourself a challenge by trying some exercism.io problems. They have problems for almost all languages and your submissions will actually get code reviewed!

Step 4: Level up!

You have a solid foundation! Time to take it to next level! And by that I mean web development. Is that the only route you can go? Nope! But I'm a web developer, so that's what I actually have experience on. Also, I have the most experience in Python and Ruby, so those are the languages that I'll have the most links for. If anyone has some next level topics for non-web developers, put it in the comments! Or link to your own post. Depending on what you started with, here are some resources:

Ruby:

• Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial - This is the best Rails tutorial out there. I'd almost argue that it's the best web dev tutorial out of any language.
• CodeSchool's Rails For Zombies - If you prefer videos, Rails For Zombies is corny, but pretty great. And the first course is free!
• Sinatra - a microframework for Ruby. If you really want to dig in and try to learn how things work, using a microframework that doesn't enable all the bells and whistles by default is awesome. 

Python:

• Tracy Osborn's Hello Web App - Awesome book series made to teach non-programmers web development through Django
• Getting Started With Django - Short video series. Starts you after the official Django tutorial
• Django Book - The official Django tutorial. I'm hoping it's been updated since I tried to go through it because it was a bit buggy then.
• Flask - a microframework for Python. Also see this tutorial. 
• Lynn Root's NewCoder.io - Not web dev, but definitely a level up. Lynn has written tutorials on APIs, web scraping, data visualization, GUIs, and networks. These are great if one of these topics is of interest to you.
• Daniel and Audrey Roy Greenfield's Two Scoops of Django - this is not really a beginner book. More an "after your first app" book. But this is one of the best programming books I have ever read, so I absolutely had to add it to this list.

Java:

• Play Framework - As far as I can tell, this is the most popular web framework for Java. Their own documentation contains a solid amount of good tutorials to get you up and running fast.

Step 5: Build something!

This is absolutely the hardest step. Why? Because it requires you to actually be a little imaginative and think of something that you want to create. To start, you can create a website (either a personal site or a landing page for your project) on Github Pages. It's free and super easy to get started! As far as picking a project, there are shortcuts if your brain is a bit fried and you can't think of anything. There are lists of coding projects that you can pick from. You can also contribute to open source. Whatever you choose, the important thing is to keep working at it. Even senior developers are still constantly improving their skills, so you will constantly be learning at all stages of your career.

Polymorphic Routes

I just started classes (working toward the CS certificate at BU Met) and my new big project at work is porting over a ton of code from Rails 2 to Rails 4, so I’m sure I’m about to have tons to write about. For today, here’s something I somehow just found out about: polymorphic routes in Rails.

What are polymorphic routes? Let’s say you want to have a partial that is used for quite a few different models. Every model you have has a show page for individual instances of that model and each show page has an edit link. So instead of creating a new page for each, the view you have reads in a generic @object and then you can use polymorphic routes to generate the path for the edit link! In this example, I’ll have the @object represent an instance of the Article class. Like so:

edit_polymorphic_path(@object)

results in:

edit_article_path(@object)

I’m pretty surprised I haven’t seen this yet, but now I’m glad that I have! This is pretty cool :D

#ReplaceCodeSchoolsWithCommunity2016

My friend Pamela had some thoughts on code schools that she shared on Twitter today and I just have to echo them in every venue that I have. Code schools have long made me feel uncomfortable. It really started when a local code school started amping up representation at RailsBridge (free & community driven), obviously with an aim to drive RailsBridge grads to their boot camp. Considering the other TAs were there from companies that were interested in hiring, I thought it really sleazy that they were just using it to try to recruit more students. Add this in to women generally needing more validation before they feel comfortable calling themselves developers and that makes me feel even more uncomfortable.

I try to do my part by running PyLadies Boston and Pamela runs Rails Girls Atlanta. Both of these groups exist to provide a community for women to learn to code, with no charge. I’ve actually had multiple women from my group start applying to jobs as developers and I know the same goes with Rails Girls. Community can make a big different and we need to let women know that you don’t have to shell out $$$ to become a developer. The community will help!

PS - I have met so many wonderful and smart grads of code schools. This is not a knock on you! It’s a knock on this f’ed up industry.