Becoming a Cyborg - AI
"Coding is the closest thing we have to a SuperPower" Drew Houston founder of dropbox. He is right. In terms of enhancing your productivity and reach as an individual there is nothing that comes close to coding for enabling you to do amazing things. A good coder can automate a huge part of their work and life, and the better you get the faster and further you can go.
A little warning, make sure the effort you are putting it will be returned - (rule of thumb from XKCD)
There are a lot of repetitive tasks that can be made better through the use of code and even more things that simply can't be achieved without the use of coding.
As icing on the cake, coding teaches you a new structured way of thinking that allows other ways of tackling problems.
How do you acquire this amazing power?
Fortunately there are tons of resources out there for getting these skills and developing this power. Unless you have a specific need for a specific language or application here is the path I would recommend
A little warning, make sure the effort you are putting it will be returned - (rule of thumb from XKCD)
There are a lot of repetitive tasks that can be made better through the use of code and even more things that simply can't be achieved without the use of coding.
As icing on the cake, coding teaches you a new structured way of thinking that allows other ways of tackling problems.
How do you acquire this amazing power?
Fortunately there are tons of resources out there for getting these skills and developing this power. Unless you have a specific need for a specific language or application here is the path I would recommend
- Sign up for a online intro, my favorite is Code Combat that teaches the basic of many languages (python is the default and a good default it is) in the form of an online RTS roleplaying game. Code.org and Code Academy also offer tools. These will get you familiar with format, syntax and basic code and coding concepts, but probably won't yet get you to building useful things
- Next step is sign up for a project class from Coursera - find an intro class that is followed by an actual project of some sort. The intro will give you the fundamentals, but as I mention in my Bootcamp Post - you need a project class to level up, this will get you deep into an effort and the need to do debugging, planning and all the activities to build a real if limited piece of software will help shape and develop your skills.
- While you are doing this become familiar with Stack Overflow, this is probably the most useful site on the web for programming advice and there will be many useful things to learn that should allow you to drive your project to completion.
- After these steps you will be more advanced at coding than 90% of the population, but if you want to keep moving and need something to motivate you, look into resources like TopCoder and other coding competitions these will help you move and develop more
Good luck
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