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Comment by adamgordonbell | Hacker News Reader

This is the story of how Rick Wolter learned to program in prison and ultimately became a professional iOS developer.

I figure any story that involves smuggling a python interpreter into prison on a USB stick seems like it might interest people here.

But I think its also an important story because it’s about how software development can be life changing and lift people up out of hard situations.

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Oh, also Rick has some of the most practical advice on learning programming, and transition to a professional dev that I've seen.

     I know it’s not popular to just talk about grinding, the overwork culture is not popular. I get that, this is a different space. You want this shit? You got to grind. You’re going to have to do it on the weekends, you’re going to have to lock in. I’m sure someone’s going to be like, “Oh, no you don’t. I don’t have to. don’t put that pressure on them,” that’s fine. But to me, when you come from a background, especially if you’re a felon, but even if you’re not a felon, you don’t have a college that’s going to give you any kind of signal.

    Everyone talks about the college debt but your local community college isn’t that expensive. And then, that way, maybe you could just cut your work down to 10, 20 hours and then spend the rest of time coding.

    You focus on fundamentals first. Data structures, control flow, that kind of thing and stick to that for a short period of time. Maybe a month, month and a half, just do that basic stuff. It’s not popular, people want to see things on their screen, they want to say they built a thing but you’ve got to get those fundamentals first and there’s so many free options, Coursera, freeCodeCamp. And then, once you get some fundamentals, then you can decide on the platform.

    And once you pick your platform, just focus and stick to it. If you’re building Ruby on Rails, do that every day but make sure you’re building it. Hands on the keyboard, watch a tutorial then do the tutorial again but change some things then try to recreate what you built in the tutorial while not looking, that kind of thing. Because that’s the main thing is getting your skills up.

I have tried to summarize my advice as a mid career person who switched to programming. iOS. Rick has done so more perfectly than I have ever been able to. I highly endorse his comments here.

This is solid advice for anyone coming here without a degree. I say that because it mostly summarizes what I feel made me successful.

So I was talking to a cop, because I do in fact talk to cops all the time, talked about prison, like convicts pretending to be sick for a bit, I told him that's like their vacation. Then escape came up, Marshal Service came up. I told him, dude rather stay right in my cell than being hunted by the Marshal Service.

Dude like Wyatt Earp? The only escape from Wyatt Earp, the only safe harbor, the real place you can go, is stay right where you are, in your cell.

So this is a sick hack, that's exactly what this forum is about.

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