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My Answers to Questions from New Coders

Ali Spittel on February 23, 2019

As a follow up to my blogging question and answer post, I asked new coders for their questions, and I will be answering some of them here! ...
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rhymes profile image
rhymes • Edited

It's a great post Ali! I'm sure you already know what's my favorite answer eheh:

If I were to pick one thing, it would be the ability to teach yourself new things effectively and efficiently

🥳🚀🔥

ps. there's a small typo in the table, you put a 10 instead of a 2 in the first row.

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Ali Spittel

Great catch! Thank you!

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Sundeep

nice post again! waiting for your course so that I can refer ppl to that - many learning forums have beginners asking how to proceed from basics, what to code, etc

I have some links as well related to that

also, heads up - you've got add and subtract mixed up in function showcase

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Fred Ross

Which languages do you consider important having good working knowledge of.

Longterm in your career, you'll need to know C, and you'll want to learn a logic language (Prolog), a functional language (Haskell, ML, Clean, Miranda), a code generation system (Lisp or EMF), and a concatenative language (Forth, Factor, Postscript). That's over the course of a decade or more, though.

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Mike

I agree with every other comment I've seen here except this one.
There's no reason for anyone to ever have to learn everything (or anything) you've listed here. Telling a budding developer that these things are "need to know" is setting them up for failure.

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Fred Ross

There's no reason for anyone to ever have to learn everything (or anything) you've listed here.

In your milieu that may be true. In mine, it is not.

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Jonathan Kuhl

How much experience do I need before learning Git and GitHub?

You had a great answer for that question.

New developers should put their first projects on Github. No reason not to. There are five commands you need to know to manage your own git hub. Five. Init, status, add, commit, push. You do the last 4 in that order about 99% of the time, and github gives you the special commands you need to set up with them as the remote.

The rest of git? Not necessary with small projects unless you're in a team. Maybe branching. Most of Git's complexity only arises in large team projects.

Though it wouldn't be a bad idea for new programmers to at least familiarize themselves with the concept of the feature branch git work flow and other patterns, because it'll be something akin to what they'll do in a real job.

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Jackson Elfers • Edited

I might add don't be afraid of the command prompt. Get out of those shiny IDEs and get your hands dirty navigating around and using programs. It's both enlightening and rewarding, plus you'll look like a 90's hacker. 😁 I think git was the first thing I learned how to use via command line.

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Steelsector

I don't agree with you, working with IDE made my days 30% more efficient, git, jira, virtual env everything what I need is there.

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Shinyuy Marcel

It was great! thanks. I didn't take part in your QA session but thank God I can ask a question here. My question is how did you if you ever did or how would you advise mixing practice of software development skills through projects as a way to get better at it and doing coding challenges as a way to think better as a programmer and for technical interview preparation when they come. I would be glad if your answer has a method and a time frame in terms of how often you will do each, cause for me doing one always seems to take away attention to the other, meanwhile I think I need both.

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Gregor Dzierzon

Great article, with many great little hints that prove to be important in succeeding in this career. Well done!

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Chris Bertrand

Great post as always Ali. The free resources will be invaluable to alot of readers!

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Saurabh Sharma

@aspittel you mis-typed 10 instead of 2 in the subtract table

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Vijay Koushik, S. 👨🏽‍💻

Hi,
I have a question. What is the best way to organize good posts like this across the internet? Because bookmarking is not helping me.

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rhymes

Have you tried services like Pocket ? They are a social bookmarking system, with search, a snippet of the text and a preview. You can create categories, like standard bookmarks, you can tag stuff and so on.

Alternatives are Instapaper or Pinboard.

Keep in mind that search is usually in the paid tier of these services.

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Vijay Koushik, S. 👨🏽‍💻

After looking into your suggestions, I've decided to use pocket as it fits my needs. I never knew social bookmarking systems were a thing. Thanks ☺