Basic Concept Series

Hey Chris,

I wanted to introduce you to my friend Jake. I met Jake through AmeriCorps, and we’ve been working in non-profits in Pittsburgh together for about four years now.

The other day, Jake heard that I was about to start a coding bootcamp, and expressed some interest, so I told him I would meet up with him and tell him what I knew.

Here’s his situation: Jake has never done any programming before. He has, however done programming adjecent stuff. Like me, he has a history with tabletop roleplaying games, which contain a lot of variables and operations on saved statistics. He’s also pretty into video games and has even done some modding, which of course is actually programming, though it’s pretty far abstracted away from a language.

I recommended that if he was going to apply to a bootcamp, he spend a few months doing some research and studying a few things first and apply for a coding bootcamp for the fall. That gives him some time to figure out if he wants to do it, find a bootcamp he likes, ask some people who know more about it than me some questions, and learn some basics. The prework my bootcamp sent me has convinced me that if you are a complete beginner, a few months is enough time to prepare, and less than that is not. You probably could do it, but you don’t want to start from 0 a few weeks before your bootcamp starts.

So in this series, I plan on laying out a few different concepts and tools to learn programming if you are just starting out and want to get somewhere around the level I will hopefully be at when I start my bootcamp in a month.

If you actually use the tools I’m mentioning here, than the concepts I lay out will be redundant. I am brushing up on the basics now anyway, and just providing links would be boring for me and reenforce my learning less, so I’m very happy go over some basic JS and HTML here. What are friends with blogs for?

• Dave