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Mid-Life Coding Newbie

Will on May 13, 2021

My name is Will and I do NOT consider myself a coder, but a future hopeful. However, even at the age of 45 with 3 kids, a full time career (not any...
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GrahamTheDev

Age is nothing but a number!

I hope I speak on behalf of the community by saying “welcome, can’t wait to see you progress and to see more posts from you!”

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Chadric Gotis

Very well said. Age is just but a number.
Dev community is rooting for you my man @ravhawk

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Ben Sinclair

Exactly. This year I'll turn 30 ... in hexadecimal.

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GrahamTheDev • Edited

That took me way longer than I care to admit to actually process your age 🤣. Looks like I need to go work on my hexadecimal, it could be useful 😋....

Clip from The Martian - hexadecimal

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ravhawk profile image
Will

Thank you, I know it's a long process and not easy to do, but this group seems like a good one to be apart of.

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Will

Thank you for the encouragement. I will say that I was a little hesitant to start a blog and put myself out there at such a new point in this process. However, with all I've read about how good it is to start blogging at the beginning of the process and the good group of people who are on this site, it made sense to do so.

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Chris Briggs

I'm 51, I designed data networks for many of those, and now I teach English as a second language; not your typical career path haha. Last year I got into programming, for the pleasure and interest of it. That comes above all. I've started learning Rust, simply because I find it intriguing, for the same reason I also learned Neo4j. I have also got into discrete maths because it's interesting, and links my world of data networks with programming and language.

I built my own simple website, codioma.com from scratch, and using that as a project to build upon and improve. In my opinion, there is too much attention on programming as a career choice, and 'failure' if you don't find a job with these skills.

Richard Feynman said it best: the pleasure of finding things out. Claude Shannon embodied it with his inventions. It's no coincidence they are two of the 20th Century's greatest minds; knowledge comes from tinkering.

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Will

That is nearly EXACTLY what I'm thinking. While I'd love to be able to do this now full time, pre-retirement, I've not convinced myself or found enough evidence I could jump into a programming career that is enough to equal what I'm doing now to fully support my family.

However, in thinking about later in life. Once the kids are out of the house and I can possibly downsize, also what to do at or beyond retirement? I hope to be able to do side gigs and freelance work now to be able to set myself up later.

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James Madison

I’m sitting here reading this wondering who was narrating my current situation in life. All that was missing was “…a 42 yo firefighter with 2 years until retirement trying to figure out what he wants to be when he grows up”. 🤣 Best of luck as we both go through this journey.

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Will

First, I like the name, I used to live very close to the university of the same name.

I find it very interesting and slightly funny as to the close correlation. Thank you for the words of encouragement and good luck to you as well.

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erica (she/her)

Welcome! There's no wrong age to learn to code! What tech are you interested in learning?

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Will

In a perfect world, I would love to get into game development. Not so much mobile applications, but more on the side of computer or console. However, in order to do that, programs like C#, C++, etc. are needed. That is definitely not a beginner friendly path. Plus, I want to ideally work remotely overseas or with a European company. So that is an additional challenge/hurdle in itself.

I believe the easiest method is usually best to start. So I'm starting with Front End and the Back End development, to get an understanding of programming. Then I can branch off from there.

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erica (she/her)

Don't limit yourself on what's for beginners! C# was one of my first languages (javascript came first) and once I understood OOP, it became my favorite language! I've found that the 'easy' stuff is what gets you excited to learn.

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ravhawk profile image
Will

That's good to hear! I think I actually have a beginner book to C# but was nervous about going down that path so early, so I opted to wait. I'll need to go back and take a deeper look at that.

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Coderslang: Become a Software Engineer

Keep the motivation up!

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xenochem

You got this!

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Rusredmi

Thanks Will! Hope you write more ✌️☺️✌️

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Will

Thank you. I def hope/plan too as I go along.

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Rusredmi

Nice Will! I'm excited ✌️☺️✌️

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Travis Fantina

I'd be interested in hearing more about what you have already learned, probably played with a bit of JavaScript if you were using freeCodeCamp, what you are looking to learn and what your goals are.

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Will

I am still firmly on the front end path. I could probably move at a faster pace than I am, but am wanting to really soak it all in before getting ahead of myself. I think doing web development is a good path towards freelance work, but in a perfect world, I'd love to do computer game development.

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Haddock

I’m rookie too and 40! Your welcome !

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Will

Thank you!