Possible to learn coding/programming in a year?

[calamansi]

(03-24-2016, 10:10 PM)Hicks Wrote: Have you ever tried using a lead generation company to target potential customers for you?

No, I haven't. How would one go about that?

But I'm not actively looking just yet. My skills with current technologies aren't up to par at the moment. Wasted my life by staying in Japan far too long. LOL

I've always kept an interest and did some hobby programming but it's just recently that I've decided to pursue a career in it so it'll take a bit of time for me to get a handle on the whole stack. I can already put stuff out that looks impressive to non-programmers but I know myself that I've still got a long way to go. You don't need to know how to do everything by heart - and you never will anyway -- coders spend a LOT of time looking shit up - but I need to know what's there and what's possible before I start charging people money for work.

So I'm kinda doing what Rick is doing. Gonna spend the next few months self-studying and then get serious about looking for work.

Truth be told though, I'm a bit worried. I really don't want to go work in a cubicle and I wonder REALLY how easy it is to find work doing freelance. Lots of people say it's no problem after six months of study but is it? I also don't want to be finding work on UpWork for $3 an hour. As a white English-speaking male, I know they won't be real competition, even if their skills run circles around mine, because some clients will feel better about hiring someone who is the same culturally. (Also, from what I understand, a lot of Indians have ruined the reputation of everybody by doing shoddy work.) Still, this is something I'm going to have to figure out and I am not so sure I'm good at that.

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(03-26-2016, 04:13 AM)Rick91 Wrote: I'v heard it pretty common for people to do that.

I'v also heard you just don't get into competitions with Indians or pinoys as your basically dead in the water with anyone that would consider hiring them. Higher paying jobs will likely have a native English speakers only in the ad. Although totally not required for coding being a westerner will likely be your biggest strength and also weakness.

I'v heard of people having great success doing video proposals on job bid sites. I have no experience but I imagine if your not willing to put a lot of work into marketing yourself and trying out different strategies your not going to get far.

The real question is, how to do you get good work WITHOUT having to resort to places like UpWork when you're not in a western country? I have no idea where to start with this other than maybe building my own portfolio on my website, updating my LinkedIn profile and posting on Facebook.

Time to get out there and network with other foreigners. But you need money for that. LOL.

[Hicks]

(03-28-2016, 04:54 AM)calamansi Wrote:

(03-24-2016, 10:10 PM)Hicks Wrote: Have you ever tried using a lead generation company to target potential customers for you?

No, I haven't. How would one go about that?

With my business that I am no longer actively involved in we tried using one in the UK for clients. It wasn't cost effective for us as the cost of the lead was too high compared to the amount we received for the service we offer, but in many industries they can be very useful. We found ours by a google search, ideally you'd want one focusing on the same markets you want to penetrate.

[Rick91]

Id get some strategies for how you'd get work on upwork and then execute them and see what works. I imagine once the balls rolling things get easier. Network where you can and see what comes up.

I don't think the Indian/pinay situation is quite as bad as people make out. I'v never seen anyone with $3 hourly rate on there $10 was the lowest I saw I'm sure there are many willing to go lower but I'm hoping not as extreme as that or if so not that common. Anyone who's budget is that you should stay away from period.

I think the main reason it seems so bad as before Indians started under cutting everyone coding was a very lucrative thing to get into. It's not what it used to be but it's far from bad I wish I had gotten stuck into it younger.

[geekindex]

Woooh... missed a quite interesting thread, that revealed Calamansi is quite old... ;-)

No, kidding aside. Learning to code isn't that difficult. Learning to code efficiently is.

How to best and most efficiently sort and transmit data (this is the crucial part in a mobile world..)? How to plan an app/site, that it is future proof and might be expanded / altered easily? How to make sure to delete every bit of memory you don't need anymore?

If going fulltime to learn, you will reach intermediate level quite fast within one to two months. But like Clamansi or JJ pointed out, understanding the principles underneath the sheer programming is the crucial part to become succesful.

And I agree - coding has got nothing to do with creativity. You don't have to design in an artsy sense. You have to design in a sheer efficiency sense...

[calamansi]

(03-30-2016, 06:06 PM)geekindex Wrote: Woooh... missed a quite interesting thread, that revealed Calamansi is quite old... ;-)

LOL. You're only as old as who you feel. Oops. I meant 'how' you feel.

[calamansi]

(03-30-2016, 06:06 PM)geekindex Wrote: And I agree - coding has got nothing to do with creativity. You don't have to design in an artsy sense. You have to design in a sheer efficiency sense...

Just look at the internet over the past 20 years. It was downright ugly until just a few years ago. I know that technology has improved, allowing better graphics, much more bandwidth and so on, but I'm talking about the design part itself. It wasn't until just a few years ago that websites started to LOOK great (regardless of tech). Look at any page that was made 10 years ago. So many ugly sites but they weren't ugly just because they were limited by the technology. It was the layouts and color schemes that made them look horrible. That's all the proof you need to realize that the average programmer doesn't care about (or can't) design very well. LOL. It's only recently that firms started hiring designers in addition to developers to focus on making the site look great by choosing the right layouts, fonts and colors. But for the most part, while there is a lot of overlap, design and development are still two skills that one individual is rarely very proficient at. People tend to be great at one or the other, not both.

Surely, the most successful web devs are exceptionally good at both skills, or great at one and outsource the other.

[Rick91]

On the learntocode academy YouTube channel he says developers get paid more on average and there's more work in development compared to design. He also specified remote work.

He's got a great vid on there going through why you should get into it and what skills in what order you should learn if you want to make a career out of it. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pB0WvcxTbCA

Overall I found it extremely tedious learning from his vids though.

I'm about to try the JavaScriptissexy recommended method of reading the theory book, doing the coding exercises within it followed by supplementing it on code academy which you should be able to do easily without looking at the hints.

[geekindex]

(04-01-2016, 07:42 AM)calamansi Wrote: Just look at the internet over the past 20 years. It was downright ugly until just a few years ago. I know that technology has improved, allowing better graphics, much more bandwidth and so on, but I'm talking about the design part itself. It wasn't until just a few years ago that websites started to LOOK great (regardless of tech). Look at any page that was made 10 years ago. So many ugly sites but they weren't ugly just because they were limited by the technology. It was the layouts and color schemes that made them look horrible. That's all the proof you need to realize that the average programmer doesn't care about (or can't) design very well. LOL. It's only recently that firms started hiring designers in addition to developers to focus on making the site look great by choosing the right layouts, fonts and colors. But for the most part, while there is a lot of overlap, design and development are still two skills that one individual is rarely very proficient at. People tend to be great at one or the other, not both.

Surely, the most successful web devs are exceptionally good at both skills, or great at one and outsource the other.

I would disagree with that opinion in most points. Yes, there were ugly sites around. And still are. And, you may not believe it, most of these (professional) sites were designed by designers. A good company always has designers as well as techs sitting at the same table. This has not changed in the last ten years and was a standard even then.

The problem some years ago was, that HTML and CSS were way too limited in their capabilities to display content in a creative way. In the early days you needed tables and sliced graphics. There wasn't even any CSS in the start. Later on you got hold of DIVs and could start to work responsively. Down the line using webfonts got easier - and released you from the stress to know the system-fonts installed on any computer. But dumb people being stuck with IE 5 made it impossible over years to design straight forward as it would have been possible, but limited you to what you actually could achieve with workarounds for IE...

And today we've got Flexbox - which is crucial, because todays challenge is to design for a zillion different screens at the same time. Little hint for those of you who do it: There are two units for CSS, that make it drop-dead-simple to display elements in regard to the acutal view-size of the window: vh & vw. Saves you scripts, headaches, and workarounds... ;-)

Am working on a template for a site right now, and I must say, that I can today achieve design-aspects with a few lines of code (or rather declarations), which I could not dream of five years ago. There was a technological evolution towards HTML5 and CSS3. And even further - see simpless. The basic design principles haven't changed a yota. The ways to achieve them have. And the taste of the users.

Way to long - thx for reading anyway ;-)

[Jesssmart]

Yes, it's possible but all depends whether your brain works well. Coding gives you the power to not only enjoy other people's projects, but also to say "I can do that!" and build your own passions. 
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