So you think you wanna be a programmer?

That’s great! Coding is an awesome career choice. Even better, you can have an amazing coding career without needing to pay tons of money for a college degree. You can. But you don’t have to. So, before you start going on a lavish educational shopping spree, let’s figure out if coding is something you really want to do.

First, there are a few qualities that are pretty important to being a programmer. Don’t worry, it’s nothing to do with how tall you are or how good you are at math. (I’m dreadful at math.) Successful programmers do have a few common traits though. They are:

• Patient

• Persistent

• Enjoy problem-solving

• Logical thinkers

• Resilient

If you are not all the above, you will probably not enjoy coding that much. You can practice all of the above traits to get better at them (especially the logical thinking), but if you don’t meet most of them, the truth is, you probably just won’t like coding. That’s ok. It’s not for everyone. It’s better to figure this out before you dish out the big bucks.

If you’re still reading, you’re at least a little persistent. Good for you.

Programming is a HUGE HUGE (yes huge twice) space that encompasses a lot of industries and specializations. It’s going to be difficult to find a great job once you learn how to code if you don’t know what area of coding you want a job in. You can apply for all the generic software engineer positions, but that job title can mean very different things depending on the company and the recruiter. Your best bet for succeeding quickly after learning how to code is taking a more focused approach and shooting for jobs in the specific area you prefer.

Let’s get specific.

If you like seeing the results of your work as you do it, you’re probably going to prefer a front-end specialization. This could be front-end web development, game development, mobile development, etc.

If you don’t care about seeing the direct affect your code has on something, you might prefer a back-end specialization. This could be back-end web development, data engineering, API development, machine learning, etc.

The best way to figure out what you’ll enjoy is to just start trying things. Start by figuring out if you prefer to see the direct results of your code or if you don’t really care. Now you know if you should start looking into front-end or back-end specializations.

Once you know that, just choose something that sounds interesting to you and start playing with it. I started by learning front-end web development (making a super simple website). I liked that a lot. I was only doing super basic stuff in HTML and CSS but I enjoyed it. Then I tried python and that was really hard. So I took a little break and went back to web development. Next I took a course on C++ and then one on C# and then one on game development.  I didn’t really good at any of them but I was figuring out which ones I liked better. I ended up playing around with mobile development. I really liked that so I went to college for mobile development and learned both ios and android development. I preferred doing android development so when I graduated I looked for android developer jobs specifically. And here I am, several years later, loving what I do as an android developer.

The best part of all this? You can start learning how to code and exploring different areas for free!! There are so many amazing free resources and tools. You can explore and figure out which area you enjoy the most and want to pursue a career in without paying a single cent.

Then, if you decide you want to get a degree in coding, you already know what area you want a degree in and you know that you’ll enjoy a career in that after you get your degree.

If you don’t want to spend an arm and a leg on a college degree, that’s ok too! You don’t need a degree to have an amazing coding career. There are plenty of successful self-taught programmers (no degree or anything) and there are lots of awesome coding bootcamps that are a much cheaper and faster alternative to college. Many of those bootcamps also help you get a job once you graduate.

If you’re reading this and thinking “that sounds like a lot of work when I could just go to college and figure it out then” you may not be a good programmer. I could be wrong about that. But, there’s a level of go figure it outness that is required in programming. And if you don’t want to even get your feet wet before shelling out tons of money, this is probably not the career for you.

This ended up much longer than I was expecting. But you made it to the end. Yay! If you want a list of free coding resources to help you start exploring, send me a message. I made a PDF just for you!