How to become a software developer and computer programmer

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invisiblewitnes

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Hi,

I am considering learning to be a software developer or computer programmer. For one thing, I want to help Catholic media such as blogging and Internet evangelizing. I do not know how to go about learning the skills or receiving the best training for the tasks. Also, I do not know how to discern if this is what God wants me to do or to focus on something else. But it seems that whatever God wants me to do, he wants me to learn skills to navigate and craft some of the Internet landscape to the shape of God’s gospel in Christ. I have minor skills, but really nothing functional. I took a Visual Basic class in high school in 2001-2. If anyone has any suggestions for good books, criteria for good schools, or prayers to offer for my further discernment, please do so. Please pray that I come into contact with the right people to help me follow this nudging I seem to be getting from God as I pray more and listen to His quiet whisper more.

God bless you all.
 
Sometimes local community colleges can offer good basic courses (In my city, many of the professors who teach at the university also teach at the ccs) and they may help you decide the specifics while also offering guiding instruction. As you move on you might be able to transfer to a 4-year college and finish it out. I do not recommend many of the online colleges, not because they are bad but because credits are unlikely to transfer.

Pick up some books on C++, html (You’ll need this for internet stuff), Java too (unless times have changed and I’m all wrong), and python. C++ and python in particular come to mind as the common ease of use languages. Do note: I am not well qualified to answer this question, but wish you luck and hope I helped anyway.
 
Ave Maria!
invisiblewitnes said:
Hi,

I am considering learning to be a software developer or computer programmer. For one thing, I want to help Catholic media such as blogging and Internet evangelizing. I do not know how to go about learning the skills or receiving the best training for the tasks. Also, I do not know how to discern if this is what God wants me to do or to focus on something else. But it seems that whatever God wants me to do, he wants me to learn skills to navigate and craft some of the Internet landscape to the shape of God’s gospel in Christ. I have minor skills, but really nothing functional. I took a Visual Basic class in high school in 2001-2. If anyone has any suggestions for good books, criteria for good schools, or prayers to offer for my further discernment, please do so. Please pray that I come into contact with the right people to help me follow this nudging I seem to be getting from God as I pray more and listen to His quiet whisper more.

God bless you all.
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I’m not a programmer either, but I think it depends on your goals. For website design, blogging, etc., it looks like most sites use PHP and MySQL, and Javascript seems to be of good use. You’ll probably get lots of different answers, but here’s a statistics chart that might give you an idea.

Frequent the Sacraments, read the lives of the saints, pray the Rosary, consecrate yourself to Our Lady, and God will handle the rest, because “We know that all things work for good for those who love God” (Rom 8:28). When you really begin to believe, practice this, and love God above all else, you’ll see Him begin to work miracles, bring you into contact with the right people, and place things in order.

For what it’s worth, I used to spend lots of time working with computers, fixing cars, tinkering with things, etc., and thought I left it all behind. Now that I’m a friar, Our Lady uses me to work on computers, fix cars, tinker with things, and a host of other things I didn’t know I could do, all for the glory of God! First things first though, work on being a saint for Our Lady and She takes care of the rest.

Our community is heavily involved in the media and internet following the example of St. Maximilian Kolbe, and an example of our blogging media site in the USA uses Wordpress (PHP/MySQL) at airmaria.com. Our main USA website for the Franciscans of the Immaculate uses Joomla at marymediatrix.com. Aside from that, we continue to build television and radio stations all over the world that require many different talents (I once had to draw up ancient DOS batch scripting skills while driving to a radio site), so you never know what Our Lady will eventually have you do.

Mary Mother of Vocations, pray for us!

In the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary,

Friar John Paul
 
Make an appointment with a counselor at either a local technical college or the nearest four year university to discuss their programs, costs, and career placement assistance offered when you complete your program.
 
w3schools.com/ is a very good site for learning web-oriented languages.

And as many people mentioned, Java is in pretty high use and demand right now. And if you value your sanity stay away from C (i.e. only look into C if you’re looking for a good challenge).
 
I am a full-time computer engineer and self-taught to boot. I would start by asking some questions.

Do you like working on computers. Not just sometimes but 8 hours a day? As a computer engineer this is what you will spending your time doing.

Are you project driven? Writing software is about creating specific apps, web sites, etc.

There are deadlines and time pressures. Can you work successfully under these circumstances?

Are you detail oriented? Are you good at math and/or technical subjects?

Do you love learning? The tech field moves fast and you always have to be updating your skills, learning new programming languages, etc.

If you answer yes to all of these questions then becoming a software developer is probably a pretty good fit. Be warned, it takes years to get really proficient at writing software. But once you master the skills it pays well and there are lots of job opportunities.

As far as getting the skills, it is possible to teach yourself. There are good online courses. However, for most people, it is probably better to get a degree at your local university or community college.

If you are primarily interested in blogging and Internet evangelizing, I would say learn how to set up a Word Press web site and start blogging, start evangelizing. You don’t need to be a computer engineer to create a nice web site. There are tons of very nice themes for purchase or free.

God Bless.
 
Elostirion said:
Sometimes local community colleges can offer good basic courses (In my city, many of the professors who teach at the university also teach at the ccs) and they may help you decide the specifics while also offering guiding instruction. As you move on you might be able to transfer to a 4-year college and finish it out. I do not recommend many of the online colleges, not because they are bad but because credits are unlikely to transfer.
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Some but not all. If you do some digging around you can find some pretty good options. 🙂 OP, Here’s an option that you may wish to look into as an online college. They do have partnerships set up with many community colleges if you even were to decide to start at one. This university offers bachelors and even certain masters degrees. (You must however have previous college experience.) Make sure to take a good look at the admission requirements.
WGU

Good luck.
 
For the Web, you will need HTML, preferably HTML5, so you might as well skip XHTML along with its quirks if you aren’t going to need it specifically (it was fun while it lasted), though I can imagine you needing to learn XML anyway. Don’t allow yourself to image that HTML is much more complicated than BB Code (stuff you use on message boards to make bold or quote) because it’s basically the same, while XML is just a bit harder. Styles are more complicated but the syntax’s easy anyway and it’s just getting the DOM right and exercising your imagination that’s hard. That one, however, can be helped by looking at 20 extensive webdesigner portfolios or something along those lines. For the record, 95% of webdesign is typography, so you might as well read up on that.

PHP is a must, though in some situations you may end up using ASP or JSP instead. Java itself isn’t really gonna get you anywhere (I learnt it ages ago myself but probably compiled no more than a single test applet) but JavaScript and JQuery are a totally different matter. Get something on modern JavaScript that’s adapted for use with modern CSS (2.1 or 3) to make your life easier. With PHP, you can’t really escape mySQL. You’re probably going to need to learn RSS. I’ve coded that thing, but I still don’t know what it is; on the other hand, you’ll need to learn it if you want a future in the field (I don’t have a future in the field, I’m just a veteran amateur).

Learn how to play with graphics, at least the basics. It helps your design, too, when you know what can and what can’t be done, especially stuff like using transparent colours or cutting images up to use them as area links or some such. Or menus.

If you take the webdesign route, read on the good practices, and try to get a gift of semantic code, non-abuse of graphical files, lean coding, and SEO. You need to understand SEO or at least the basics of how it works.

Also, everybody and his dog uses Wordpress, so you may need to learn that one too, and it’s harder than learning to code by hand, by the way. At least it is possible to make your fully own Wordpress themes if you know how to, so that it’s all essentially your own hand-made code, except replicated automatically.

GL HF!
 
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