.

i did IT for a long time and the ability to program becomes a necessary evil once you reach a certain point. that coupled with the covid shortages led me to becoming a software developer.

it looks like the employment landscape is undergoing a dramatic shift again. i’m being forced to find a new job thanks to biden and developer jobs in my area dramatically fewer and insanely fiercely competitive; nothing at all like it was like during covid.

I’ve been “learning” programming for about 10 years in a self-taught way. I don’t even know why I started, but it was with C, but I quit soon after when I realized I didn’t understand anything. I was jumping between C#, Javascript, and other languages until I landed on Python, mainly because I wanted to learn how to use Godot, and in the documentation of the Engine it said that its language, GDScript, was very similar to Python, and my reasoning was “Ah, ok. Then if I learn Python it will be easier for me to learn GDScript”. So I started learning Python and was able to create my first programs, but after a while I lost interest and forgot why I was learning it in the first place.

When the controversy with Unity happened, I don’t know what happened to me but I felt a kind of wake-up call, like that was the moment to go back to Godot, and that’s what I did. And while I was making my first game suddenly everything I had learned the previous years made sense, now I really enjoy programming.

I had my start with Python, albeit as a kid and I didn’t actually understand too much about the principles at the time. Still, I think that was a good place to start learning about the concepts of instructions and variables.

I learned more about the ideas underpinning it all later, and most of my understanding came when actually working in software development on a live and in-development codebase. I think that’s a good progression: start small, then learn some theory just so you’ve heard the terms once, then try to make sense of actual code using that.

Edit: definitely work on some goal though. Don’t code in a vacuum, think of something small you want to achieve and learn to do that.

I had a triple major of Psych/Soc/Phil with the intent of teaching. My focus in Philosophy was mostly logic and analytical reasoning. I ended up marrying my GF and had to quit college in my junior year and go to work where I ended up doing a lot of computer work on the IBM XT. One late night working on electronic bids for parts we sold I realized computers are not going anywhere and focusing on that would get me out of this sales job. I went to Control Data for a year which got me in the door of a company. Programming was nothing but logic which was my focus in college so it came pretty easy to me. That was 1989. I contracted to Ford for the next 30+ years doing everything from data analysis at the start to SQL and DB’s for a while, and then I ended up on teams delivering software to the plants. I always wanted a job that would allow me to see the world and for over 20 years I traveled on the corporate dime, including an around the world trip for work in Asia and Europe on the same trip. I traveled almost 300k miles on planes during that time and had a chance to see how people live and work all over the world.