The Mentor
Jacksonville, FL
Male, 31
I have been in the IT industry for 8 years. I started as a Desktop Specialist and worked my way into a developer role. I have worked in both small start-ups and larger enterprise companies. I have primarily focused my career on the Microsoft stack including C# and SQL. I have experience working the full stack from the back-end data access to the front-end user presentation on websites using HTML and Javascript.
Great question, I too have children which I would love to get into programming. My oldest is 11 and I have been working with him off and on. I am finding no matter how much he wants to learn and I want him to learn sometimes their young minds still have a hard time grasping the concepts. With that said stay patient as this will take work on your part and theirs and it may not always be fun. I have a few great resources I can provide you with.
Developer Mind Test, this link explains how everyone is not cutout to program despite popuar belief. This link is not to discourage but the simple test described on this site was very interesting... Read More +
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I can only speak from my location and my experiences. I currently do not know any out of work developers in my city. I am sure there are some out there but depending on your technology and skill set you can find jobs really easy. Finding a good developer is really hard, I have hired a few myself and it has taken over 30 resumes / interviews to find ones I felt were capable. I hear from other companies that I get hired by that they have the same experience.
My advise would be, pick an area and master it as much as possible, make sure you understand the language and can speak to it. Get some good projects under your belt, and like... Read More +
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This is from my own personal experience. I never recieved calls from recuiters while working in a normal IT position. The moment I put the keyword "C#" on my resume the calls do not stop coming in. I get at least 3 emails a day and 4 calls a week and I am not even on the market. With that said, using the Microsoft stack has been the path I have chosen. I feel it is rather safe as it has been around for a "long time" and Microsoft's languages always seem to have high pay. I would go with C# over VB.net, its a personal preference but I honestly find more jobs for C# and if you can read/write C# you can "understand" a few other languages. With... Read More +
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It is true there are plenty of tools out there to help you view the source code to various types of applications but there are also way to obfuscate them as well. Javascript for example is sent to the users browser and the source code is technically easily available, but if the developer used a minimizer for the production build you would have a really difficult time understanding what is happening as it replaces understandable variable, function, etc. names with single or a small group of letters to save file size to so it is faster to download. This also makes it extremely hard to work with which is why we only do it for production. Here... Read More +
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Claims Adjuster
What happens when NEITHER driver is at fault?
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Good question, I myself have thought about trying these sort of programs out but everything I read on them was pretty negative. Unless you have a brain that immediately absorbs information that is then reusable any point in the future I would discourage this approach.
Having experience in various areas of the IT field I can honestly say I do not believe the average person would be able to retain much out of the bootcamp. There is so much to learn in any area of IT and with it constantly changing I would say just good "old fashion" online research is your best bet. There is just too much to learn on any given topic especially... Read More +
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Good coding practices are what impress me the most. Good use of naming conventions, design patterns , OOP priciples, and the various other principles like SOLID and DRY are what catch my eye.
Aside from coding style, functionality wise my latest 'wow' moment was when I started at my current job. They have created a nice set of reusable controls to help keep everything looking consistent, their site structure is completely metadata driven and configurable.
I am also a big fan of code that dynamically does something. It takes a different mind set when you have to step outside your direct thoughts and think about something... Read More +
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I was initially introduced to programming when I was 15 years old. I wanted to create applications for AOL 3.0 so I picked up a copy of Visual Studio 6 and spent a lot of time in the developer chat rooms trying to learn, I was able to create a few different applications. Later on I met someone who had created a personal site and I thought that was cool so I picked up a book on HTML and created one of my own. Around this time I had already decided I liked writing code, the ability to create something useful and specific to my need attracted me.
I had wanted to work as a developer since I was younger but due to lack of school and experience... Read More +
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