I’ve been developing for about 15 years now. I started with web development, then started working on my degree in computer science, and I’ve spent the better part of the last 10 years developing for android. Programming has been an integral and very rewarding part of my life over the years. And I realized that I wanted to be able to share it with others.
I’ve mentioned to my wife many times over the years I could only imagine how much farther along in my career I would be had I been introduced to actual development and problem solving years before I was.
That is where my desire to start teaching programming started I believe. A hope that I can get other people started learning early and start developing skills and talents for it.
As I mentioned before, I cut my teeth on web development. I started building dynamic website with PHP and salted in some experience with frontend on jQuery. Years after PHP I started using Go(lang) for my web development. It didn’t take long to find out that Go is great for a lot of different things.
I then moved into mobile development, android specifically (I’ve also worked on three different iOS projects now, but android has the engineering idioms that I tend to agree with more). I’ve now spent years trying to tie all the parts of mobile development together with web development.
But here is the challenge, the world of web and app development are very connected.
OK, but what do you mean? Well, you need to know about web servers, app servers, backend frameworks, frontend frameworks (which change as often as you should be changing your socks), and deployments, or how to glue all of these pieces together.
In short, there is just so much that you need to learn, beyond the syntax and logical thinking to get something that works and is able to show off to your friends an family.
I never really thought of myself as a game developer. It mostly wasn’t the type of development I was really interested in. But, after years of app development, I started dabbling in game development and I was shocked I really liked it. It was almost like learning to program all over again.
And whats more, although it can be challenging, it doesn’t have a large web of connections that you have to start navigating as a beginner. You have your code before you, you can run your game, and you’re seeing what you’ve built. All without spinning up a server or anything of the sorts.
If this sounds like something you’re interested in, I hope that you’ll follow along.