Ask HN: How long did it take you to become a programmer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How long did it take you to become a programmer?

12 pointsFahadUddin928 comments

How long did it take you to reach the level when you said, ok now if someone gives me any kind of idea, I am able to build it.

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Answer: ∞

TLDR: After about 1 year on-the-job experience at a modern company you'll be able to build most products. For ex: I built https://wakatime.com solely by myself (over 6yrs since 2013) after graduating with a C.S. degree and working about 1yr professionally.

Long Explanation: I've been programming for 20 years and there's an infinite amount of complexity to programming, application development, hardware embedded systems programming, services architecture, distributed systems, infrastructure automation, data processing & pipelining, machine learning, animation & graphics, protocols & standards, computer science algorithms, etc. No one programmer can build every idea out there.

1 year: simple demos and games

3 years: released first shareware

8 years: first job, narrow knowledge, good at C

15 years: competent to do a middling job anywhere in a BigCo

20 years: probably at the level you're asking about

30 years: lo I am become as a god, conjuring living universes by the Logos

I set a goal in November 2013 to become a professional developer in 5 years. Became a developer in June 2015. The first few months were figuring out what to learn but once I learned what the market wanted in my local area, I went about learning that particular language and framework. In my case that was Ruby on Rails. Now I'm trying to become a more rounded Full Stack dev.

1 year: Able to make basic crud apps, use Jquery, css, 2 year: Much more comfortable with Rails, unix, CI and everything that goes with it 3 year: Comfortable using services such as Elasticsearch, learning new languages etc. 4 year - now: Currently learning Docker but make a list at the start of every year of the things I want to learn.

I make a list every year of what I want to learn and just do it.

Current list looks like this:

[x] Rails Performance by Nate B

[ ] Teach Yourself Computer Science

[x] Design for Hackers book

[x] ES6 by Wes Bos

[ ] learn docker https://diveintodocker.com/ref-gorails#enroll

[x] Javascript course 30 days (Wes Bos)

[x] Css grid course (Wes Bos)

[x] Css flex course (Wes Bos)

[ ] Scala - build list of resources first

[ ] Javascript the weird parts (udemy)

Is idea a static website or a self driving car? I've been a programmer since 10 print [1] in the 80s, but I still can't implement all I want, I can make a living out of it though.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/10-Print-Chr-205-5-Rnd/dp/026201846...

Went to university for 4 years, learned some basics and lots of mathematics and theoretical stuff. I could tell you how an operating system works, how data is transferred between networks down to the physical layer, calculate the best and worst case performance of an algorithm, but if you asked me to write a simple program I would not have been able to do it.

Then I got a trainee job, had someone mentor and teach me, and within a month I was building my own server applications and web interfaces.

But the longer I'm at this, the more I realize how much I just don't know and how much there is to learn. It's hard to pinpoint an exact moment where I would say "yep, I'm a true programmer now" and I'm sure I haven't even reached that point yet by a long shot. But as long as I keep learning (and collecting green squares on GitHub), I'm satisfied with my work.

Going by the body text of your question, I guess 4 years. I first started coding web pages with free hosts like Geocities and Angelfire. 2 years later I dove into PHP which compared to HMTL and CSS looked very foreign to me at the time, having no prior experience with procedural languages.

However, I have gotten accustomed to that as well, to build websites with dynamically generated web pages, and query strings and forms to fetch data from databases. This was still non-OOP and without frameworks, but it worked for me.

My first ever paid web development job was for a freelance client who needed a simple intranet application for private auctions. He seemed fine with my knowledge of PHP and MySQL, and was able to get the job fine in the entire month that it took.

Started working on a project about three weeks after I began learning the basics of Python. I reached the level specified after about a year. I'm self-taught, so I'd guess that I learned more quickly and less efficiently.

Ten years of self-taught tinkering before I took a job. No other formal training.

I wasn't particularly better after 10 years than I was after 5, so it was more a matter of taking the job than building my skillset after some point.

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