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A Programmer Learning List (for Beginners)

My friend has a son who's graduating high school soon. He's been learning some programming and is considering it for his career. He asked me a question I hear often: what should I learn next?

When I was first learning to code, I always assumed the answer to "what should I learn next" would be a new programming technique, a new language, a new library, or something along those lines. As I've progressed through my career, and especially as I've been on the other side of the interview desk, I've changed my tune significantly. My standard response to new programmers is that, in addition to honing their coding skills and learning new languages, they should cross-train in related fields (which I'll explain below).

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Typing Resistance

I assure you, this is a post about programming, it’ll just take a few paragraphs to get there.

There’s a biological mechanism known as resistance, and it plays out in many different systems. For example, as you habitually drink more alcohol, you gain a tolerance, which prevents you from getting drunk as easily. This can be called alcohol resistance. When you habitually run high levels of insulin, your body becomes less sensitive to insulin, making you insulin resistant. When you go into a loud room, your ears adjust down the sound, making you noise resistant. And when you change enough dirty diapers, you become smell resistant.

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Kids Coding, Part 4

Previous lessons have all been focused on teaching our ten- and eight-year-olds some coding, since our six-year-old (Yakov) is still working on reading and writing in English. However, Yakov’s been home sick all week, and he asked me today to teach him some programming. So I came up with a simplified version focused solely on the GHCi prompt.

I started off with: