How I learned to code in my 30s

I started to learn to code last November at 37yo.<p>About 30 hours a week for two months I finished the Front End Certificate from freeCodeCamp (highly recommend the site for starters). Then I decided it was better to build my own projects with the tech I wanted to learn (mostly React) using official documentation and tutorials. This is what I accomplished in around 3 months: www.rodrigo-pontes.glitch.me<p>Then I started to apply to jobs. After around 4 rejections, last week I started as Front End Junior Developer (using Ember actually) at a funded fintech startup with a great learning environment for the tech team.<p>Very proud of my accomplishment so far, but I know the rough part is only starting.

Somewhat related, perhaps the most spectacular story of a late coder I&#x27;ve ever heard is that of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;George_Pruteanu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;George_Pruteanu</a> (somewhat controversial Romanian literary critic and politician).<p>Basically, despite having a major in Romanian literature and spending a lifetime as a literary critic, with almost 0 contact with computers, he decided in his late 40s and early 50s to understand the things behind the internet.<p>So he picked up on his own: PC usage, internet browsing, PHP and MySQL coding, enough to make his own website and a few apps. That, starting from a point where he could barely use a mouse.<p>When asked during a TV show how he did it, he replied:<p>Like I did things for my literary criticism: I read an 1 meter [high stack] of books about the subject.<p>Every time I need motivation I think about that quote :)

When computers were invented, a lot of the people involved were already adults - plenty in their 40s and above. Before home computers, you didn&#x27;t get to use a computer until your 20s.<p>Therefore, the first few waves of programmers included a lot of &quot;already olds.&quot;<p>This is always overlooked as evidence that older people can learn to program.

I&#x27;m sorry, but I can&#x27;t help but be incredibly cynical and jaded about this, and from reading the comments, nobody seems to have the same sentiment. If this was titled &quot;How I learned to play the piano in my 30s&quot;, I don&#x27;t think anybody would bat an eye: learning an instrument is not like joining some secret cult, and anybody can develop basic music literacy over a year or two. I also do not doubt this man&#x27;s proficiency, but 30 is not old outside of tech circles. This youth fetishization in tandem with the &quot;everybody&#x27;s dog should learn to code&quot; meme I think is very short-sighted.<p>Tech is wildly lucrative, is in current demand, and is <i>not</i> physical labor. That reduces the barrier to entry to anybody who has a laptop and an Internet connection. Honestly how many people would be so eager to learn to code if you dropped down the average tech salary to 45,000 (matching other professions)? I think far less: people seem to learn to want to code to ride the high-pay wave, not for the actual love of code.<p>Again, let&#x27;s compare to music. Anybody can go to a guitar store and buy a 200$ keyboard. But if I took a 14-week class and afterwards had the aught to call myself a &quot;Music Ninja Rockstar&quot; or some other such nonsense, and start applying to orchestras and bands, I would be called crazy.<p>Software has eaten the world, and it&#x27;s here to stay. Increasing the general software literacy is no more different than saying we should teach everybody how to read (and a good thing). However, throwing each person in a bootcamp telling them &quot;coding is wonderful! <i>you</i> can master it in 5 seconds and make 200k a year!&quot; is no different than holding a similar bootcamp for any other vocation and then wondering why the average plumber can&#x27;t actually fix your house, but can only use a plunger. I sincerely hope this trend stops. This mindset is broken, and the paradigm is highly unsustainable. Where will we be in 20 years?

I&#x27;ve started learning to code when I was 26 and people told me I was too old and should stay with my shitty job.<p>Fast forward ten years and I&#x27;m a senior software engineer which gives trainings on Spring Boot and Microservices and helps companies implementing Continuous Delivery and Microservice architectures.<p>You may think I&#x27;m gifted but I&#x27;m actually not. I&#x27;m a very slow learner and bad at Math. I mostly program from 9 - 5 and only work on side projects when I&#x27;m feeling to (which sometimes means not doing any commits for months).<p>But I like what I&#x27;m doing and work hard to improve.

This is generally a decent article about the balancing non-technical skills, and exerting effort in learning.<p>I found it noteworthy that the &quot;hook&quot; in the title is that the person started in (gasp) their 30s. Why should that be noteworthy? Why wouldn&#x27;t someone start coding in their 30s, 40s or 50s?<p>Now it is true that starting a new profession late in life may not always make sense because, presumably, you have to little time left you might as well &quot;ride it out&quot; contributing what you know.<p>So, yes, it is unusual for a doctor to start learning mathematics in their 40s (though not unheard of: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Endre_Szemer%C3%A9di" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Endre_Szemer%C3%A9di</a>), but it isn&#x27;t less strange to make such a change in computer science than any other field.

I once said that &quot;I realize nothing I do in engineering will ever end up on the front page of Hacker News.&quot; Feels like a once-in-a-lifetime moment. Thank you

I&#x27;ve been programming for 13 years. I started when I was 14 years old and studied software engineering at university. These days, when I take on well-paid contract work, sometimes I find myself working alongside people who only started learning to code at around 25 and never went to university.<p>It&#x27;s upsetting for me to think of all the fun I missed out on in my early life because I was learning programming and pushing myself through university and it turns out that it doesn&#x27;t even get me a higher pay check in the end.<p>These days, nobody cares that I&#x27;m proficient in all of ActionScript 2 , ActionScript 3, C&#x2F;C++, C#, Java, Python, AVR studio (microcontroller programming), MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, RethinkDB, PHP, Zend, Kohana, CakePHP, HTML, CSS, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, JavaScript, Node.js, Backbone, CanJS, Angular 1, Angular 2, Polymer, React, Artificial Neural Networks, decision trees, evolutionary computation, times&#x2F;space complexity, ADTs, 3D shaders programming with OpenGL, 3D transformations with matrices, image processing... I can&#x27;t even list them all. I could wipe out 95% of these skills from my memory and get paid the same.<p>It only gives me extra flexibility... Which it turns out I don&#x27;t need because I only really need two of these languages (C&#x2F;C++ and JavaScript) and a couple of databases.

When I was a kid, my mom was teaching high school, and thought that she might get laid off due to declining school enrollment in the rust belt. She took a year of programming courses at a community college. The next year, they asked her to teach the course, which she did.<p>Most of her students were 30+, many were working in the auto industry, including assembly line workers. At the time, there were a lot of bright people working the lines because it had always been possible to skip college and land a decent middle class job at the car plants. But that was coming to an end.<p>Her students were taking one year of CS and getting hired into reasonably decent programming jobs.<p>In fact, I was also interested in programming, and learned it in school. When I went to college, my mom discouraged me from majoring in CS because she literally thought programming was too easy to justify 4 years of classroom training, and she thought that the job market for programmers would quickly saturate.<p>Let&#x27;s just say we guessed wrong. ;-)<p>But at the time, college level CS was still maturing as a discipline. Many of the 4 year colleges didn&#x27;t have full blown CS major programs. I&#x27;m betting it&#x27;s harder now, but I honestly don&#x27;t know if programming <i>per se</i> has fundamentally gotten any harder.<p>Edit: Noting some of the comments, I certainly don&#x27;t want to disparage the CS degree. After all, I majored in math and physics -- hardly a turn towards a practical training. I think these are fields where you have to be interested enough in the subject matter, to study it as an end unto itself. Being able to do actual practical work in a so called real world setting is always its own beast, no matter what you study.

What i always tell people if you find yourself naturally drawn to it then you will eventually find some level of success. If your in for just the money then you will not stick with it and it probably won&#x27;t happen.<p>Same is true for just about most things in life.<p>This guy found he was naturally drawn to it. End of story.

I also learned to code after 30. At some point Excel and Origin weren&#x27;t dealing well with ever increasing data sizes in my field (biology). I did an intro course on Python (2) of 3 days (basic Python and some Numpy). Back on the job I immediatly switched to Python 3, learned about Jupyter and was lucky enough to have a job where I could take time to learn (although it doesn&#x27;t take much time to get back up to Excel&#x2F;Origin level data analysis skills with Pandas&#x2F;Seaborn&#x2F;Jupyter!).<p>That combination is still gold for me although bioinformatics is forcing me into VSCode&#x2F;Bash&#x2F;Git territory more and more. I can recommend anyone wanting to do data analysis to start with the Jupyter&#x2F;Python&#x2F;Pandas&#x2F;Seaborn combo, the notebook just makes it very easy to write small code snippets at a time, test them and move on. Writing markdown instructions and introductions&#x2F;conclusions in the document itself help you to make highly readable reports that make it easy to reproduce what you did years ago.

&gt; Immersion means 100% focus. If possible, no friends, no drinking, no TV, just reading and writing code. If you take five minutes off to read the news, be aware you are breaking the mental state of immersion. Stay focused, be patient, your mind will adapt. Eliminate all distractions, of which you may find doubt to be the loudest. Immersion is the difference between success and failure.<p>Certainly, I think Deep Work require full concentration. So when in the mode of learning, I find keeping focus instead of going to a website to read news, or checking e-mail&#x2F;messages to be incredibly important in maximizing the incremental process of grasping concepts.<p>That being said, whereas the author seems to prefer taking a few months to go deep into it, I prefer to immerse myself over a long period of time by learning and practicing a few hours per day (just like an instrument), letting my mind stew in the knowledge during diffuse thinking periods, and then come back to it the next day.

I&#x27;m 36 and learning how to be a real programmer. Was a Linux Admin, and an architect for my career. Did presales, and became an expert at a lot of different roles within the field.<p>Never was truly a developer, and decided I wanted to accept a job as one. I&#x27;ve programmed in the past, how hard can it be?<p>Wow, it&#x27;s been enlightening. Really hard. I thought it would be straight forward since I&#x27;ve used scripted quite a bit in perl in my past, but being a developer is much more than writing a few scripts to automate a task.<p>I&#x27;m a few months in now, and I am still slower than all my colleagues by quite a bit, and the main language I&#x27;m working in has changed already, moved from Python to Go.<p>Even right now, I&#x27;m stuck on an issue around pointers and data structures that feels like it should be easy, and I&#x27;m just not getting it.<p>All you can do is keep confidence up, and keep at it. Immersing in it, and knowing that irrational levels of effort will lead to results.<p>I thought it would be easier though :)

Every time I see stuff like this I think of Grandma Moses, an accomplished artist who started painting at 78: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Grandma_Moses" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Grandma_Moses</a>

My father is 59 and started to learn programming half a year ago. So far I was giving him algorithmic tasks to learn basic language constructs, he is now comfortable with basic Java and is able to solve most of easy problems from programming contests. And idea where to go from here? I don&#x27;t think solving more difficult problems (like that involving algorithms or creative thinking) would make sense at this point. I tried to give him simple GUI project (tick-tac-toe in Swing), this kind of worked with lots of my help, but of course it was badly designed with model-view mixed, and he is unable to understand design pattern concepts at this point.

At 31 I took my savings for my house, quit my robotic customer service job and started a startup. I worked on my 1st startup for three years and along the way taught myself front end development and design. Which I now do for a living.<p>I say startup and if it fails like 80 to 90% due you gained an in-demand skill that you can use to make a nice living.

&quot;Learning to code&quot; is somewhat vague.<p>The &quot;Sorites paradox&quot; is something like: how many grains of sand form a heap? if you remove or add one, is it still a heap?<p>So, exactly what exactly makes you a programmer? that varies a lot depending on who you ask. Someone said a programmer should be able to detect and report a bug to a hardware manufacturer. Some others say that &quot;learning&quot; (partially, because most programmers don&#x27;t know every single aspect of a programming language) a general purpose or Turing-complete language makes you a programmer.<p>I define an &quot;X programmer&quot; where X is backend, frontend, data, whatever... as someone who can not only implement a feature, but do it through understanding rather than through a heuristic of trial and error or reusing code. Also, a person that is able to troubleshoot what is going on if some of the underlying systems is not working as expected.

I started in my 30s after an earlier stint in high school. It was a real struggle. I work in a SE engineering role now with a focus on data science. My stats and math skills have given me an advantage but I still feel like I&#x27;m a rookie in many ways. It is important for more of us who transition to SW careers to speak about our struggles and techniques to hang in there. It will render confidence to those who feel alone as they try to find their footing.

You need more stories like this to show people who wouldn&#x27;t normally consider CS as a viable, lucrative path to a second career. Areas with high unemployment and people in dwindling old industries may get a second wind in life if they tried his approach. A big change like this also requires multiple exposures to the currently much easier to reach CS education as a possible solution, so I hope more people produce accessible content like this.

As student trying to make sense of job space and prospects, there&#x27;s just too many statements that gets posted on the internet that seems to contradict each other.

Going from not working in the industry to leading a team of developers in just a few years is extremely impressive. I have over a decade of experience as developer and have not made it yet to that kind of lead position. Is this because your technical skills were superior to your peers or because you possessed additional soft skills, if so, what advice would you give for moving into Lead Developer&#x2F;Engineering Manager roles?

Is a full stack person still realistic with today&#x27;s web technologies?<p>I mean to build up expert level skillset, you&#x27;d have to really dedicate your self into learning the particularities of not just languages but also their runtime environments.<p>Unless you have no life, and only sleep, eat, code, or super intelligent, being able to absorb and stay current with everything.....<p>Other than that, I just don&#x27;t see the full stack mentality working

A possibly similar tale is the one being done by some former Kentucky coal miners:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;spectrum.ieee.org&#x2F;energywise&#x2F;energy&#x2F;fossil-fuels&#x2F;the-kentucky-startup-that-is-teaching-coal-miners-to-code" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;spectrum.ieee.org&#x2F;energywise&#x2F;energy&#x2F;fossil-fuels&#x2F;the-...</a>

I learned to code at 18. I did not fall in love with programming: this owed at least in part to Fortran IV, punch cards, and a Burroughs mainframe that was often under maintenance. But I coded a craps game simulation, and passed.<p>I relearned to code at 31 or so. There was data over here that I needed in a different format over there, and didn&#x27;t care to retype. I taught myself some minicomputer assembler from the instruction set reference. At that same job, I learned to write macros in the OS&#x27;s command-line interpreter. I found that I enjoyed programming. And I went back to school.<p>That was a while ago, long enough that the second or third language that I learned on my own was Perl 4. I would never have called myself a ninja or a rockstar. Yet I have over the years written some very useful code.

I learnt C, C++, Shell scripting gnu makefile creation directly on project. When I did my degree I only knew C just for sake of passing. I was directly exposed to writing device driver for I2C and SPI the very first day and someone just dumped a 1GB of technical junk on my PC which include some APIs of RTOS I was supposed to work on! But I would say that that was really a steeeep learning curve... I am amazed and surprised today when I look back from where I started 13 years back :)

I have found that the problem i have with learning programming is not the logic of it, but of memorizing and internalizing all the functionality provided by the standard lib etc.

What I found recently of someone who switched from another career to programming is not that they struggled with programming so much but that they struggled with the environment. I had the misfortune of working with an ex-lawyer, two years of programming experience. Hell. He also lacked the ability to have any sort of interesting conversation about programming as he had no background to reference.

So do bootcamps teach data structures and algorithms?

I read this as &quot;How I learned to code in 30s&quot; and I thought it&#x27;d be a parody of &quot;Learn X in Y&quot; tutorials.

Reading that makes me glad to be a network engineer. Ethernet, BGP, and OSPF don&#x27;t change all that much. I am all for learning the latest Python, NetMiko, NAPALM stuff for network automation. This article reads like masochism.

2017 : codecamps produce an army of amateurs that make interent of shit.

The title implies as if you are ever &#x27;finished&#x27; with learning to code, anybody thinking about starting, this is a lie, it&#x27;s a never ending road :)

I&#x27;m facing problem of finding a mentor and space I want to succeed is being able to do anything with power of Python!

This is great advice for someone learning to break into the coding world.

Good inspiring story

contains a lot of real advice. the sharing of experiences and insight into his process makes this piece really great.

I started learning to code when I was 31. Though I did have an engineering degree, but I learnt basically nothing after getting into engg school. Spent most of the 4.5 years worrying whether I was smart enough for this to do this and setting myself up for very dismal results.<p>Became an advertising copywriter after college and spent 7 years in the copy mines. It was truly a profoundly uninspiring industry (though I continued to doubt myself and never really got to where I wanted to and should have)<p>Founded a startup with a friend hoping for a fresh start. Took forever to find a developer so in some strange moment of overconfidence (sanity?) I decided I would take a shot at it and started learning Python. Found myself hypnotized by the codeacademy course and knocked it off in 3 days or less.<p>Some a few started programs then a developer friend came on board as an advisor and told me to pick up Django. In a few months (with him and another good friend doing all the heavy lifting) I got enough into the thing to be able to scrape data, make API calls and develop the admin interface.<p>With everything I learnt I found a block of that constant self doubt melting away. I had never felt so capable and in control in my entire life.<p>Startup wound up though and I had to take a job at a design agency. Though I picked up the basics of HTML and CSS there most of my work was managing clients (aarghh) Left in a few months as a writer at this startup working part time.<p>But within a month of me joining the CTO quit and the company was in massive flux. I just stepped forward and said I would code. The other developers happily took the help and I got my first job as programmer. The next 1.2 years were just full days of writing scripts to automate our workflow and figuring out this danged JS, Node thingy (which I really love now btw)<p>When this place wound up too and I studied React, now have a big 6 month project at this company helping them automate their workflow with an admin app. Am writing the fullstack code, all by myself. Which is so exciting and empowering.<p>Programming is awesome. It&#x27;s my one advice to anyone who asks me for advice these days. It changed my life completely. From being a constantly depressed and volatile guy I am now fairly confident and really rare to anger.<p>Surprise bonus, I have become far more creatively productive after leaving the creative industry and have written a bunch of songs (that I don&#x27;t hate) and also started learning to play the Piano, something I always wanted to do.<p>Next up is Algos and Data Structures the next time I have enough saved for a 3 month immersion. I really do think they are super important. Plus picking up a new language. Suggestions welcome.

It&#x27;s not that hard jeez