Advice from Desmond

Here’s another perspective.

Andrew’s friend Desmond (not his real name) has taught people to code before. This is the advice Desmond has given out to other people.

This advice is somewhat focused on gaming specifically, but applies pretty well to other areas as well.

A Word of Caution

As of 2020, Desmond has stopped teaching people to code, and no longer helps get people into the software development industry. He views the current state of the whole tech industry as terrible and toxic, and doesn’t want to encourage anyone else to enter it.

So take that grain of salt along with all the other advice here.

Desmond’s Advice

Write code every day. It’s like lifting weights: building cool things is cool, but building anything is what’s important.

Do the NodeSchool workshops: https://nodeschool.io

Don’t study calculus; it is a waste of time. Do study linear algebra.

Set goals

Set goals. Here are my goals for you:

Within 1 week

• Have a GitHub profile and follow me on GitHub
• Get a cloud account (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
  • DO NOT go over the free tier limits on the cloud providers or they will charge you serious money!
• Learn how to create a cheap server, ssh in to it, and get some code to run there

Within 1 month

• Find 20 people you think are interesting on GitHub, follow them, and check your activity stream on GitHub every day
• Think of three cool things to build

Within 3 months

• Have pushed programs in 5 different languages
  • One toy language (Lua, io, Julia, something weird)
  • Python
  • Node.js
  • Objective C
  • Golang
• Make a web app of some kind using Bootstrap
  • Maybe do a GitHub Page for yourself
• Have implemented several algorithms
  • Quicksort
  • Algorithm L for lexicographic combinations
  • Some cool algorithm of your choice
• Have implemented a few data structures
  • Binary tree
  • Linked list
  • Hash table
• Have basic user experience with two Linux distros
  • Ubuntu
  • RedHat or CentOS
• Install and use (for anything) MySQL and Redis on some server somewhere

There are plenty of places online to learn about algorithms and data structures.

Start attending tech talks and meetups. Only free ones: basically, only go to free events, but go to as many as possible.

Consider going to hackathons even though they’re often lame.

Consider going to Code for America events or Open Oakland or something just to get exposed to people actually doing things in the real world. This way you can see what that means and what they’re doing (volunteering, of a sort). It’s a good way to learn what people struggle with, what their needs are, and what the level of people out in the wild is. This is about exposure and meeting people.

Within 6 months

Get pull requests merged into 3 open source projects. They don’t have to be big, popular, awesome projects; anything will do. Make a change to software you use or think is cool.

This is a way to learn to be a member of an open source community.

I suggest you look at WebGL and games, specifically:

• voxel.js
• stackgl
• Shader School

For example, if you’re using voxel.js: Make a game with voxel.js. Attend some kind of voxel.js meetup. (They have training events and stuff.)

Write code that operates over a network. For example, an Objective C app that hits a local REST API to get data.

Learn how to get on IRC to ask questions about this stuff.

Have been tortured by the following build tools:

• SCons
• GNU make
• Rake

Within 8 months

Think about having a cool personal website.