Software Engineering

I'm looking to learn about software engineering. For now, I want to do it as a hobby. But if I really really like it then I'll potentially seek a career out of it.

To anyone out there with any sort of experience, what are the pros and cons of this field?
Also where is a good place to start and practice? any good online resources that you guys can recommend me?

 

thanks! will give this a shot!

 

@Pikachu very good suggestion, khan academy is amazing

 

I thought this is what I wanted to do as well, wasn't until I had my first class in coding that I changed my mind. Just wasn't for me, needed something more hands on. Ended up doing Civil Engineering and loved it.

 

The salaries are high and there is a lot of potential for growth. You can be constantly working on different things each week so it doesn't get too repetitive.

It is a lot of time sitting down so I recommend getting a standing desk only on for health purposes. Also try to remember to take time to look at faraway objects to avoid eye strain. Sometimes the logical problems are very difficult and you will need to be able to deal with complex systems without being overwhelmed.

I recommend starting with the Codeacademy path and learning HTML/CSS, and then Javascript:
HTML Tutorial: Learn HTML For Free | Codecademy
CSS Tutorial: Learn CSS For Free | Codecademy
JavaScript Tutorial: Learn JavaScript For Free | Codecademy

After that, learning NodeJS is recommended as it is very in demand. On Amazon you can find many eBooks on the subject so I recommend buying one of these:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=node+js+...NJ&sprefix=node+js+ebo,aps,191&ref=nb_sb_noss

Over time you'll figure out what aspects of software development you want to most pursue as there are so many different sub-fields within it that are all very interesting, but starting with NodeJS will help you get an idea of working on projects and give you good preparation for starting a career.

 

I honestly started off coding then i got into math now I'm getting back in programming my honest advice is just to learn to love computer science both the engineering and the theoretical aspects of it. Cheat-development is a fun way to learn this stuff as well

 

Here's my 2c. Self-taught soft. engineer with 5 years experience and now retired from the field. Co-founded a SaaS startup and made it to Y-combinator and then sold it.

An industry filled with sociopaths. Be prepared to sell your soul for money. Very little gratifying and fulfilling work to be done in technology nowadays.
Also, lots of your friends and family will try to get you to build their apps for them with no risk. I now charge people to pitch me their dumb-ass ideas.

Soft eng. get's really boring and you end up working alongside some of the most socially inept and prideful people you'll ever meet. CompSci and soft eng is naturally a field that attracts the type of people who don't have any other skill than being overly logical and have no humility to accept when they might be wrong because their intelligence it's all they've been praised for their entire lives. People make this career their entire personality, I find it very sad. I've met some great engineers who were also great people but as someone who is also natually logical and pragmatic, I couldn't stand dealing with these kinds of people every day. I need to interact with people with different skill sets else I feel like I'm not learning anything beyond the technicalities.

Also, the money is not even that good. FAANG pays 6 figures but it's so competitive and cult-like that it is not worth the amount of effort. You go through rounds and rounds of ass-kissing interviews to get paid a salary that you are going to spend 70% on rent, taxes, and cost of living in silicon valley or whatever gentrified piece of shit city they reside.

Don't get me wrong. Its very fun to build projects and programming is a very valuable asset I still use today for my other ventures but I realized that once you want to capitalize and scale whatever system you designed it's when it becomes a nightmare as technologies expand out and everyone has their preferred stack and flavor-of-the-week language to work with and half the API and frameworks you work with deprecate and are not well maintained. People are not meant to be in front of computers for 12 hours a day finding a memory leak or dealing with library integration problems and the other 12 dreaming about how to solve it (when i couldn't solve something i would dream of my entire codebase and wake up with the answer sometimes, NO CAP)

There's a reason senior software engineers all end up retiring and doing woodworking or gardening after they load up their banks.
Amazing skill. Shit industry.

TLDR: learn scripting/programming but stay away from the industry.

 

Thanks a lot for the recommendations.

 

I'm very grateful for the suggestions you provided.

 

You can find some Turin YouTube

 

damn i have never read something more demotivating than this