Learning to Code Over 40

I did not get super-serious about learning to code until I myself was in the 40+ set.

Allow me to share with you some hard-won wisdom:

1. DO NOT BE A HELP VAMPIRE

Don't know what a "help vampire" is? Google it. For at least the first year that you are learning this stuff, there are absolutely no questions or conundrums you will encounter that have not already been solved and documented in at least eight places. Unless you are trying to learn some brand spankin' new language or framework that just came out last year, the answers are already there somewhere for you to google. Do NOT add to the pile of stupid, poorly researched questions that have already been answered. You will only serve to discourage those who are willing to provide their time and talent to places like stackoverflow. Ultimately, you are shooting yourself in the foot. Train yourself to dig in and research the crap out of every corner of the internet when you encounter a sticky problem - apparently that is what real developers do. Welcome to the new normal.

2. DO NOT CODE ALONE

OK, obviously you are going to have to code all by yourself to get through the first few dozen tutorials in order to get a baseline understanding (unless you are starting down this road with a coding buddy, which I wish to heck I had!). What I mean, however, is that there is going to be a point where your mind has been expanded by this stuff, and you are champing at the bit to do more than just tutorials. It is a really, really bad idea to continue on all alone at this point. What you are going to end up doing is spend months reinventing the wheel to create nothing but irrelevant, low quality crap. If I sound bitter it is because I myself have wasted several months getting all wrapped up in projects I dreamed up and planned on my own, while all that time and energy could have gone to working with other people and learning the proper things like what good design actually is, what quality code actually is, and how things like Github work. Don't waste your time. Hook up with an opensource project when you are ready to actually start building new stuff.

3. IF IT DIDN'T HAPPEN ON GITHUB, IT DIDN'T HAPPEN

Most likely, the first five questions of any tech interview that you might go to sometime down the road are going to be questions about Github. Github is where your work will be expected to be stored. Github is how the quality of your code will be assessed. If you don't know Github, you don't know squat. If your code is not on Github, nobody is going to bother looking. Again, learn to code as part of a group of remote devs; this will force you to become very github-capable.