What an inspiring article, thank you for sharing. I'm also in my late 30's switching to programming. I was wondering what some of your first tasks were in the workplace. Do you remember your first ticket or the first coding problem that you had to solve? I'd like to know what kinds of actual problems that entry level programmers are expected to solve. Thanks!
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Location
Washington DC
Education
Duke University | The Firehose Project (coding bootcamp)
Great question; my first-ever ticket was to set my development environment up, which was quite involved. My first contribution at work was to update the env-setup documentation :)
After that, I took tickets that involved small code updates, like HTML changes, or including a table column that allows an object to receive a new attribute. Most of what we code on my team ends up in front-end production, so I see the "fruit" of my work in a very visual way. Seeing my little changes reflected on our production sites gave my confidence such a boost.
I would say that, so far, my biggest trip-ups at work have been GitHub-flow related. Which is why I shout from the rooftops: "Get involved in opensource!!!" In my opinion, it's the closest you can approximate a professional coding environment, and it's great practice in code review, reading, understanding and modifying code, avoiding adding code debt, etc. If you're into Rails and/or JS, the Dev.To opensource project is just stellar!
Good luck!
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What an inspiring article, thank you for sharing. I'm also in my late 30's switching to programming. I was wondering what some of your first tasks were in the workplace. Do you remember your first ticket or the first coding problem that you had to solve? I'd like to know what kinds of actual problems that entry level programmers are expected to solve. Thanks!
Hi Joseph!
Great question; my first-ever ticket was to set my development environment up, which was quite involved. My first contribution at work was to update the env-setup documentation :)
After that, I took tickets that involved small code updates, like HTML changes, or including a table column that allows an object to receive a new attribute. Most of what we code on my team ends up in front-end production, so I see the "fruit" of my work in a very visual way. Seeing my little changes reflected on our production sites gave my confidence such a boost.
I would say that, so far, my biggest trip-ups at work have been GitHub-flow related. Which is why I shout from the rooftops: "Get involved in opensource!!!" In my opinion, it's the closest you can approximate a professional coding environment, and it's great practice in code review, reading, understanding and modifying code, avoiding adding code debt, etc. If you're into Rails and/or JS, the Dev.To opensource project is just stellar!
Good luck!