I want to study code, but what code, and where?

Life Technology
1

This question is mostly for freelancers, or anyone else who can help. I’ve gone from one dead-end job (teaching English) to another. I tried to teach myself web design, internet marketing, and related skills but I think I got too spread out and tried fell for the belief in passive income. I don’t see any hope of improving my situation unless I learn more valuable skills. Other than English stuff, this is my background:
I understand the basics of web coding. I’ve mostly worked with WordPress sites, and I can work within that framework, but I have only tinkered with CSS and my HTML skills aren’t up to date. I have some experience with server-side management, mostly using cPanel and WHM, but I have accessed the server via SSH for some tasks.
Not exactly coding, but marketing is still an option. I have a broad but not detailed understand of online advertising and marketing. I have used Google AdSense and FB ads for years and I’m OK at it, but I never mastered advanced techniques like A/B testing, analitics, and good sales funnels. I know SEO basics, but being creative is a struggle for me so I’ve hired others to write for me and then cleaned it up.

What does the market need today, particularly in regards to freelance work? My current job isn’t dreadful and I won’t be ready to work independently any year soon, so I’d like to learn something I can do on a project basis though Upwork or similar until I’m ready able to make a living at it.
I’m leaning towards web design because that’s what I have the most experience in. I don’t have the aesthetic sense to create nice websites on my own, but there’s a lot else I can do. Maybe I need to include learning server-side coding in that as well.
If I need to, I can start completely over learning Python if that is what is in demand now.

Secondly, what would be a good place to comprehensively learn whatever I do learn? I’ve looked into it, and there’s so MUCH information on coding courses. I can’t afford one of those well-known bootcamps. Corsera lists many free courses but I don’t want to start on one that only going to get me one step forward and stop. Google has several coding courses, but I took their AdSense and the pace was extremely slow. I want something comprehensive in at least one area that will teach me marketable skills.

Well, no one is going to read all this, but any tips would be much appreciated.

4 Likes
2

The problem with trying to learn only the marketable skills is that you’ll be competing with millions of people around the world who have the same ones and will happily work for much less than you can live on here.

If you actually want to earn a living as a programmer, you have to start from the fundamentals. Read some books (SICP in Python and The Pragmatic Programmer are good places to start), learn a language (Python is fine), and do some projects of your own – websites, games, little tools for yourself, whatever interests you. Maybe take an internship somewhere, or join an open source project, or look for a job as a project manager which is less technical but still close to the work.

Also, go to all the networking events in Taipei. You’ll meet people who might hire you in some capacity, or have work for you once you’re ready for it.

3 Likes
3

It sounds like you’ve already worked on skills that are useful for marketing agencies. Focusing on WordPress and the ability to fill a website with good content would be a good idea imo. It’s still a very marketable skill. You don’t really need a bootcamp or anything. Just practice building sites for people then with enough experience, apply for a job at an agency. Eventually, you’ll accrue enough experience to become a formidable freelancer.

4

That’s a good point. I don’t want to concentrate on only one thing. I’d like to take a broad study of something. I’m getting the idea it needs to be full-stack something, but not sure which thing as there are different “stacks” and some seem to overlap. Python keeps coming up, but I’m not sure what piece it fits into in website coding.

I’ve been building websites for over 25 years. I was afraid to go into the computer lab at university my first year, but someone convinced me to eventually. I found a service called Angelfire, which still exists, and that linked to a document of HTML codes with explanations of each. All of them at the time in only 30 pages. Remember blink script? I printed it out, read it over a weekend, and made a few websites. Then there was JavaScript, then there was client-side scripting, CSS, etc. HTML is barely recognizable now. I can work with it all, but when I have to get into the code I have to start googling stuff or just change things and see what works.
I could practice for years, but I think unless I set down and start learning in a comprehensive way, I’m not going to be a much use to a client.

5

I think you’d be surprised just how un-technically inclined most of the world still is. There’s a market for people with problems needing people with technical solutions all over the place. Most clients don’t know or care about the technology that their system is written in. Like Forumosa, is this javascript? Rust? It works, so doesn’t matter.

We’ve had several contractors in for a particular bespoke application, each has decided the tech from the previous contractor is deprecated and so started rewriting it. In the end it all got canned and the end users removed it from the team that was managing it as they had no new features implemented in two years despite them being top priority.

Everyone googles how to do what in any language, even if they are a self-certified “god”. I’d suggest something like one of the Angulars or other Javascript-based tech if you’re already familiar, Javascript is basically full-stack these days (although its a bit of a pineapple on pizza discussion)

1 Like
6

You’ve already got an interest in web stuff so wouldn’t it be JavaScript and Python to work on?
,Then add another skill like block chain Solidity or SQL databases…

7

SQL and DB is a must for web dev.

1 Like
8

As someone who is in this industry, my advice to you is if you wanna do web development to learn html, css and js. Than start building different projects. If you wanna go full stack add php and mysql. Check free code camp on youtube. After you are familiar with fundamentals, open different websites and try to use inspect element and read code and understand why it is made this way.

9

I’m a teacher, which I hate, and tbh I’m in a similar boat, except I am horrible at web stuff. I hate javascript so I have avoided it at all costs. I can’t make things pretty so that makes it hard. CSS being awful compounds this. I understand how this stuff works. I just can’t make anything that looks halfway decent.

So, I have done a pretty decent amount of programming in other areas. Made a few command line things, a bot, and if I make a web thing, it’s just ugly plain html. I made a WASM thing or two (ugly but totally okay games for students for online classes). Many abandoned things. I started to make an app in Flutter and Firebase, maybe you’ve heard of Flutter? I used to only do php, now I’m all Golang and Rust. I like Rust, but I guess it’s difficult to find a job that way. I don’t know what I should do. Probably make some stuff and market myself as a backend dev I guess.

I hear that a lot of people like Python. Many startups have started as Python. It’s a solid choice from what I understand. However, it’s not a great choice for scale, if a site actually gets enough traffic. I read about crazy popular sites running Python that always go down. That’s one reason I like Go for this kind of thing. Multi threading, the whole thing in a single executable file, these things make life easier. If you’re doing freelance work, I gather no one cares what language you do stuff in as long as it works.

This is a thing that I struggle with understanding too. Most of the time I feel like a huge moron, but then I talk to “normal” people and they don’t understand anything. Reading through Stack Overflow posts can make any technical person feel like an underachiever. Reading around Reddit, I’ve been surprised to read that most companies hire junior developers expecting them to be surprisingly pretty crappy programmers. Like, not even able to finish a whole site by themselves kind of crappy. Knowing the full stack well enough to put together a portfolio of completed full stack projects is probably miles ahead of many.

agreed, especially backend stuff

Many joke that PHP is garbage and not worth your time, but I’ve read that it’s lucrative. Apparently, there’s also a lot of people who do freelance work doing PHP and Javascript stuff to help people/companies customize their wordpress sites. Could even look into WooCommerce, and many startups need help with their Shopify setups. Maybe those are things to look in to? Anyway, Wordpress is definitely not going anywhere and PHP is definitely still going strong.

1 Like
10

Man, all the flak I got in the other thread for saying English teachers should learn to code. Prophetic.

1 Like
11

I didn’t get in on that thread, but in my defense I have been doing IT like stuff since I was very young, and programming off and on as a hobby for about 13 years. My programming predates my teaching.

1 Like
12

CSS is actually pretty good these days. Things have changed. Check out Tailwind for a sort of composable shorthand that’s hard to go wrong with.

1 Like
13

I could have written most of that exactly myself. I think I’m going to start with this:

I just have trouble making things look good, I’m better at evaluating user experience than building a pretty user interface. I think I’ll start going deeper into what I know rather than starting somewhere fresh, though I’m about sick to the teeth of web stuff. Python is popular and maybe I’ll get into it later on, but I don’t see the use now. There are several directions to go. It’s probably best to move laterally into AWS or other cloud integration.

2 Likes
14

I think most of us are on the same boat. Going from one dead end job to another. Unfortunately the software development industry is EXTREMELY age discriminatory from what I heard. If you are over 25, forget about applying. Essentially they want you to work hours only 18-something can possibly work (and even then only for a few years) and so they don’t want you to have responsibilities like wife, children, life, etc.

As for freelance computer science work, it seems like something that a bunch of people want to do, but only few actually get work.

15

So seems like there’s few programmers here. I know how to program in a few languages, and have done some professional it consulting in a different life, so I’ll chime in, even though it’s not my area of expertise.

Pure front end work, without design ability, is a suckers bet for freelance, unless you are super awesome at JavaScript and able to establish a niche for interactive content. Ie you’re a full fledged programmer, not a web guy. That’s because the skillset is pretty easy to pick up, there’s 8 thousand tools to automate it for you, and it’s widely outsourced, so it doesn’t pay for shit. All that, and even relatively simple somewhat static pages are delivered via content management systems now.

So, if you actually want to do web development, you need to understand that stuff - but it’s not enough, unless you want to compete with guys scrambling for pennies. At minimum, you need to add php to be able to do some dynamic backend work. That still pays pennies though.

Personally, starting from scratch, I’d learn php with an eye at applying it to aws - you can get a free Amazon account to play with aws, Alexa skills, etc. That or learn java / the Android sdk and start playing with programming some simple apps.

1 Like
16

I’ve learned python but I don’t use it at all. It’s something you have to very good at to make use of it in finance.

2 Likes
17

What?

The rest I understood, and you make a good point. So you think going from web building to aws, other practical device technologies is more valuable than learning python or similar languages? Or does one go with the other? I’m still at the starting point when we get any deeper than the server.

18

Stupid swype auto-prediction. :smiley: ‘have done some…’

You’ll need to learn some language or other for aws (they support a few) - python is a good choice for it. Open up a aws lambda account, and a Alexa dev account, and give it a go.

19

This is not true at all. It’s not your age it is what can you do and if u have got decent projects. Hours work also untrue. And no one cares if you have wife, children or stuff like that.

2 Likes
20

Both of these statements are true. I’d suggest staying away from it anyway: there are lots of lucrative paths in software that aren’t garbage, and the ones that involve garbage tend to be kind of soul-crushing, both because you’re working with (or working around) garbage tech, and because the companies and clients that use that tech tend to be doing bad projects, badly.

Anyone just starting out with the goal of getting good at software and making a career out of it should do themselves a favour and specialize in non-garbage, for a better quality of life (and equal or better money). For web stuff, Python, Golang, and (especially) Elixir are all good bets at the moment. They also have the extra advantage of being applicable to all sorts of software, not just web.

1 Like