Ask HN: What advice would you give to a self-learn programmer just starting out?
* Assuming you are a good coder, your biggest problem will be convincing others of that with neither work experience nor academic credentials. Smart employers won&#x27;t care, and will ask you to do some small piece of take home work to establish your abilities. Shitty employers will ask you about bigO notation, and silently wonder how you ever tied your own shoe laces every morning without an Ivy League degree (often, I believe, because that&#x27;s what they went to college to learn).<p>* Build stuff you can show people.<p>* Don&#x27;t get caught up in formal learning systems such as courses, lectures and classes. They are incredibly useful, yes, and certainly you should use them, but many people cling to them because they are easier than actually teaching yourself to code, and provide sense of security and accomplishment. When I point out to people that they haven&#x27;t been actually coding, I&#x27;ll often be told, &#x27;well, this is how I learn,&#x27; and then they go on to show me how little they did.<p>* Don&#x27;t fetishize the libraries and tools you are learning now. You will throw away many toolsets in your life: get used to learning new things as a permanent part of your job. I had one coworker who came through a bootcamp, and he tried just about anything to get us to add jquery to our dependencies, because he&#x27;d spent so much effort on it and felt so comfortable with it. He was more comfortable adding the entire jquery module to our app than bothering looking up the argument structure of the already included helper method from lodash: not because he was lazy, but because he was scared of the trouble involve in learning something. Neither you nor he can afford that.