Experience

I’m interested in how people learn to program. Over the past few years, friends or relatives have asked me about resources for learning to program for themselves or for people they know. I’ve collected and refined that advice here. It’s hard to know what approach will work for someone to learn to program. It’s hard work so it’s important that each step be interesting and rewarding enough to keep going particularly when there’s no external force such as formal courses.

I’m pretty passionate about automating tasks. I don’t think people should spend time doing things that computers can do, especially when automating those things is easy. I have, in the past, slid down expansive, deep ratholes writing a program to automate some grunt work or another. Sometimes the time to write the program takes longer than doing it by hand, but I believe the time was still well spent because of learning during the automation or because of how unlikely it is that the grunt work will really only have to be done once.

I once presented my vision for how a group could automate enough of a bunch of content publishing tasks to allow the people that created the content to take care of publishing site refreshes rather than requiring the involvement of engineering folks and doing code-and-content pushes.

The person I was talking to responded, “Are you trying to engineer yourself out of a job?”

It was a startling moment because our new product development was usually gated on engineering effort – freeing up our time to focus on product development and making the content creator’s job more rewarding by allowing them to make and publish content on their own seemed like a win for everybody. Of course I wanted to engineer us out of the job of pushing content so we could focus on improving the code.

The future audience weighs heavily on me when I’m writing things to post to the Internet. I assume virtually everything I post to the Internet could eventually be read by anyone I know now or may know in the future. I am fortunate that I went through the most pronounced part of my angry, stupid new Internet teenager phase in a forum with less robust archiving than Usenet.

It should matter less to me but it’s hard to post something that says anything at all when all I can think of is how will this seem years from now to people I don’t even know yet.