To help give you guys a better understanding about coding and how it looks in the real world, I have asked one of my professors, Ryan Solida. He has his own business that builds programs and applications for clients. So, I asked him a few questions about what it’s like and how he got started.
Interview Questions
1.What got you interested in Coding?
“The first time I got interested in coding was when I was in early high school and we had a small (meaning one machine) robotics lab where I saw that you could write a few lines of “code” and have a robot arm pick up a ball and do the same motion over and over without having to control it manually. I spent hours just trying to perfect the smallest movements with zero actual real world outcomes. That’s when I knew I was into it.”
2.How long have you been Coding and what has been your hardest challenge along the way?
“For the type of coding I’m doing now, I’d say I’ve been doing it for 15 years or so. The hardest challenge is getting past the fear of new things or feeling like you don’t know enough. In our world, it’s very easy to feel intimidated by tools or technologies that you haven’t used before and it can feel like you’ll never understand it. But then you dig in and realize it wasn’t nearly as complicated as it looked (sometimes). This is a constant challenge because the field continues to move so fast and won’t stop.”
3.What was the best thing you did to learn when you were getting started with programming?
“I took on paid projects that I didn’t exactly know how to do. If I knew 80% of how to do something, I knew I could figure out the other 20%. That pressure to learn or improvise still keeps me going today.”
4.What would you suggest for beginners who don’t know how to start?
“Find a project that you’d want to know how to build and build it. It’s so easy to get lost looking down into the abyss of “programming” and have zero idea what the next right step is. To learn an instrument, you play songs you know until you get the skills to move onto something else. Same thing here. Just build things that already exist for the sake of understanding how they may have done it.”
5.When was the first time you realized you wanted to do this as a career?
“I knew I wanted to do this as a career and, in particular, that I wanted to do this independently when I had picked up some paid website projects that I was working on in my dorm room. I loved that I could work from wherever, whenever and really enjoyed (and still do) the people side of working in code.”
6.What is the best way for you to get past frustrating times when you can’t get the code to work how you want to?
“Almost always, just stepping away and doing something else to get your brain off of the problem will help alleviate the immediate brain hurt. Past that, don’t feel committed to any single particular way of getting something done. Sometimes, you just need to take a step back and go a slightly different direction. Throwing things helps too.”
As you can see, it is a long process that can be frustrating at times. But there is a lot of learning that takes place in this field. It is also very humbling because you realize you don’t know absolutely everything in the world. But the outcome of making some out of nothing is a fun journey that I personally look forward as I continue my career.
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