Episode 1 - How to Hello World

Welcome back to the toolbox! In this episode we dive into how we first dove in, and discuss how to get started learning to program.

1:04 – “Sharpening the Tools” – What’s Everyone Learning This Week?

Felix Gray computer glasses filter out blue light that causes eye strain. Redshift is an open source package that can adjust your computer screen to help reduce strain. Take care of your peepers!

12:28 – “Opening the Toolbox”

This week we will look back on how we first learned to “hello world”. We knew we were interested in learning more about software development. But how to get started? Which resources are the best and the most cost-effective? Which ones match your personal learning style?

Some of our favorite learning links mentioned:

100 Days of Code – this started as a blog post about a personal challenge for coding for 100 days in a row, and people started following along, watching the GitHub repo, and hashtagging about their own progress on Twitter.

Codecademy – (free and paid) some great tutorials on a variety of web topics.

Udemy – (paid per course) a ton of popular video courses on a variety of topics. Tip: don’t think you have to pay full price for these courses, they have very frequent sales knocking things down to $10-15.

FreeCodeCamp – (free) a non-profit, open source community for learning full-stack JavaScript programming with a structured curriculum of lessons, challenges, and projects.

Stack Overflow – (free) this is a popular industry forum for asking programming questions. When you start googling questions about code, you will see this site come up over and over. Get to know this site, you’re going to become good friends.

Mozilla Developer Network – (free) an excellent professional resource about all things front-end, from the folks behind Firefox.

Viking Code School – Prep Work – VCS is a (paid) online bootcamp, but they have (free) prep work which provides some great structure for getting started.

Treehouse – (paid) video courses on a variety of topics. They currently offer a 7 day free trial and then a monthly subscription after that.

Udacity Nanodegrees – (paid) structured, focused courses offering credentials in a number of tech topics.

Learning How to Learn – (free) a course from the University of California about how our brains tackle tough subjects, and how we can turn that knowledge into learning strategies.

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We want to thank everyone who is checking out our new podcast, and hope you’ll find it entertaining and helpful as we continue to record new content. Please bear with us as we get things started!

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