Here's what I did when was in my late teens & early 20s, and taught myself.
1. Copy famous artworks that you admire -- even just drawing in a notebook is great, to start.
2. Once you can copy art that you really like, start adding your own flair to things, develop a personal style
3. Experiment more & more
Just like with programming -- there are a ton of great books about how to paint, how to mix colors, etc.
You can buy books and work through them, whatever is most fun.
There are 2 key points, though:
* The only way to get better is by painting... you'll have to paint a lot
* You'll want to paint a lot +only+ if you're having fun.
So don't worry too much. Just grab some paints and enjoy yourself. It's a great hobby.
And try everything you can -- watercolor, oil, gouache, ink brush, encaustic, using the palette knife only, mixing with collage, pastels, all will teach you something. Just be consistent, and you will get good.
> The only way to get better is by painting... you'll have to paint a lot
As with any creative skill, especially the ones that involve fine motoric skills, one cannot skip the practice. The advice I once read about learning how to draw applies in some way to all of them:
"Every artist has at least a thousand bad drawings in them. It is best to get these out as quickly as possible."
I transitioned into software development in my late 20's, and am very happy with the decision. I went back to school at ~27, and graduated just a few months short of 30.
34 is definitely not too old. While in school, I had classmates ranging in age from early 20s to late 40s. Everyone I graduated with is now employed and doing well. (Including those who started a decade later than either of us.)
Getting a 2nd Bachelor's degree in Computer Science worked for me. It only took 2 years, because I had a prior bachelor's degree, and it sounds like you'd be in the same situation.
Employers have generally been respectful of my prior experience as well (it was business focused, project management), so I don't think having worked in a different field is a bad thing at all.
Moreover, I work with plenty of software developers who started off in other scientific fields and made a transition to software more organically -- so it certainly can be done.
Ultimately, if you can pass programming interviews, you will be able to get a software dev job. It will be challenging, but you'll be happy you invested the time. Wishing you the best of luck!
Last time I traveled internationally (~10 years ago), I had to buy a separate international cell phone.
Not for privacy reasons -- but instead because my US-based phone wouldn't work in some of the other countries I'd be in. (At the protocol level, I suppose.)
Assuming it's not prohibitively expensive, why not do the same thing, now?
I agree that this is a troubling policy. But it seems simple to get around, if you were interested in doing so. It's also possible that this suggestion is naive, and feel free to let me know why, if so. =)
Had a look at the Harvard option and it looks like you need to attend some of the courses on site as part of earning the degree, so it's not 100% online if I read it correctly.
There's a short compilation of his essays called "Writings" that is a great place to start, for anyone interested. Most essays are < 15 pages long, IIRC.
Very simple, elegant arguments, with little fluff. One of the few philosophers I know whose writing is absent the usual obscurantist cruft.
I've read some of his more famous articles (i.e. - "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"), but I remember them being very political. Sort of an art-historical and aesthetic-theory application of Marx.
Which, personally, I enjoyed. But was surprised to see Benjamin's work referenced in that context. Could be that I'm missing something, or mis-remembering, though. This was years ago, now. =)
One positive thing about being in a fraternity -- it provides experience in dealing with and resolving conflict in a large organization.
For better or worse, navigating the internal politics of a clique such as a college fraternity is often similar to what many people later experience in the wilds of the corporate world.
You also get a lot of practice meeting & building rapport with a wide variety of peers (both male and female), if your fraternity socializes frequently.
These 'soft' social skills are just as much of a factor in determining salary as technical ones. And for all their warts and downsides, fraternities do provide you with good practice. Of course, you need to be wealthy enough to pay the dues, etc...
However -- more time socializing means less time for studying. So GPA goes down, but interpersonal skills go up. These new interpersonal skills pay off dividends later, though.
It's not that it's hard to learn this stuff. More so, it's tiresome and hard to care after watching the JS community re-inventing the same wheel(s), repeatedly.
Personally, I'd rather see the JS community solve a wider variety of problems.. instead of the same ones, over and over.
The amount of talent focused on building JS tools really is incredible. But it seems like the tools that generate the most hype always do the _same_ things, just in a shinier newer package. Which is frustrating.
I wasn't around at the time, but reading about programming languages past -- it seems like these are the same kinds of problems that fractured Lisp, back in the day.
The problem is this: It's fun, exciting, and relatively simple to roll your own X. So everyone does it. That's good. But too much fractures the community, instead of uniting it. Which.. may be more harmful than helpful, in the long-run. Time will tell. But the strongest & most productive communities typically converge on 'best-practices', once a problem is solved well enough. JS doesn't seem to do that. (At least not yet.)
I changed careers more than once between 20 and 30. To/from radically different fields.
Besides that, your skill-set as a programmer is _much_ more than your choice of language/web framework.
You have skills in:
- Building things
- Decomposing and solving abstract problems
- etc..
And don't let a perceived lack of math skills intimidate you. This stuff is learnable, with effort and time. ML is most-decidedly not magic. You can learn it, if you have an interest.[1]
That said, if programming is losing its luster, but you still enjoy software -- try product/project management. Good pay, and it's a very social job where your tech skills will be valued.
If you want something dramatically different -- the sky's the limit. At 20, you could switch to Business, Law, Medicine, Journalism, Banking, whatever. Biggest lesson I've learned: don't be afraid to try. Good luck!
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[1] (For context, I started studying math much later than you (~27), and have worked on ML in a research lab, since then. But when I was 20, I barely passed college algebra... Point is, you have time and can learn if you want.)
> That said, if programming is losing its luster, but you still enjoy software -- try product/project management. Good pay, and it's a very social job where your tech skills will be valued.
Do you have an opinion on how much of product management is politics and posturing, and how much is actually building good products? For example, one doesn't have to look very far to find substandard software and features on hundreds of highly trafficked sites or commercial products, yet I'm under the impression that getting a job where one would have the authority to fix these things would be next to impossible. (And yes, I absolutely understand that decisions are, or at least should be, first and foremost economic decisions, and subject to competing priorities. For example, just look at the positive cultural change Microsoft has undergone relatively recently, they are a good example of a company who has changed in respect to what I'm talking about.)
So, I worked as a PM for about 3.5 years, in total. That was in the past, and now I work as a developer (not a manager anymore).
My guess is that a lot of this depends on the organization, and product/projects.
But as an opinion...
The politics/posturing & social aspects of the job are integral to shipping products, making positive incremental changes, and "getting things done".
As a PM, I definitely was not the boss. (Even though the success of the project was ultimately my responsibility.)
This meant I had to lead, persuade, and _negotiate_ very effectively -- always arguing what's best for the product, or the end-user.
So I guess I'd say that these sorts of politics aren't separate from building a good product. They're sort of the process for getting things
done.
But again, that's limited & personal experience. My companies were relatively small (20 - 50 people). In essence, I was figuring things out as I went along. (These were small businesses, and we all were.) Big organizations with lots of really established process may be different.
That's a very long story... But here's the essence.
I got a degree totally unrelated to CS. (Think "arts". Decent school. Top 50. But not prestigious.) Bounced around at not-great jobs for awhile, living in NYC and barely making ends meet.
Then I managed to get a job at an online media startup (essentially a management role), which was a very lucky break.
That got me into software, and I was able to use that experience to move into product/project management. I did that for a few years at some boutique companies, working crazy hours but learning a lot.
Then I decided to go back to school and study CS (starting at undergrad level again)... so I spent a few years re-learning everything from the ground up. That includes all the math, stats, etc... that you'd expect from a typical undergrad engineering program. It took awhile to finish, and was frustrating at times, but it was worth it.
Fast forward a few years... and now I work as software engineer. I focused on ML during my studies, and again (with lots of luck) managed to get a job at an R&D lab doing machine learning, during my final year in school.
I've since moved and now work at a company that does low-level OS-type work. (Which I actually enjoy more than ML.)
It's been a wild ride, but it's been fun.
Non-linear paths like this rarely get mentioned, but I met dozens of people with similar stories when I went back to school. It's hard, but can definitely be done.
inspiring story. thank you. i have a technical BA but have done similar hopping around new york etc. since then and have been self-teaching cs trying to figure out a path that will work for me. how did you jump into a management/product? did you read up on those skills or are you a good at selling yourself?
how did you make the decision to go back to school?
i'm most interested in how you were able to commit to giving up art.
1. Copy famous artworks that you admire -- even just drawing in a notebook is great, to start.
2. Once you can copy art that you really like, start adding your own flair to things, develop a personal style
3. Experiment more & more
Just like with programming -- there are a ton of great books about how to paint, how to mix colors, etc.
You can buy books and work through them, whatever is most fun.
There are 2 key points, though:
So don't worry too much. Just grab some paints and enjoy yourself. It's a great hobby.And try everything you can -- watercolor, oil, gouache, ink brush, encaustic, using the palette knife only, mixing with collage, pastels, all will teach you something. Just be consistent, and you will get good.