Just starting out...

A few days ago I had the idea of penning an entry on how I'm starting to educate myself on coding and app development skill. Things happened so I didn't have the time to ever get to it. I always feel there's a need for a skill development journey for newbies in tech (especially girls ;) ). Growing up with a great programmer - my brother, I've always been intimidated by coding, thinking I'll never become great at something like this.

And then I discovered you don't really have to be great to make coding useful in life. The skills of code enable me to retrieve data, think computationally, and solve problems logically. All the great things right? It gave me an edge over other people who do repetitive things by hand at least and many people do that in a typical office, non-programming environment.

So I started out with a bunch of different free introductory resources. You name it: Codecademy, Udacity, Coursera, etc. I know everyone's experience differs but since I have a math background, intro courses that only cover programming but not the basic mathematical thinking behind it generally don't work for me. I got through the lessons easily without even thinking much and the concepts escaped my brain just equally easy :) Eventually I picked edX's 6.000x Intro to Computer Science and Programming with Python thinking MIT is a great institution and they tend to make more challenging math and science classes.

Overall, I really enjoy the class so far. Some theory, lots of exercise, rigorous design. Only con is it's a lot of  work for someone with a full-time job. However I don't regret starting out with it. It definitely made me a better programmer even as I've only completed the first half, which culminated with the midterm exam I did last weekend.

Topics covered include basic programming, efficiency, intro to search and sorting, OOP. How do I ever get to that with Codecademy and similar resources? To be fair, I don't think those are bad sites. It's just that if you already know basic computer science (stress the science part), you'll get more out of those sites as they teach mostly syntax and rules of the language not how to think computationally. With the MIT class I'm taking I'm building the foundation to solve problems using programming. The boasting of how many languages I can write in will comfortably come at a later point.

As of now I'm at lecture 10 working on memory and search. It's definitely challenging for first-timers even with a math degree! More on my plan of how I work to get to this point or complete MOOC classes later.