Designer and front end developer Charlie Gleason and developer David Routen are both on Heroku's marketing team, and both of them transitioned into the world of programming from disparate career paths. For them, moving into tech was about following their passion for creative problem solving. They did so by first creating a plan for what they needed to learn. After viewing several job postings, they got a sense of what skills each potential employer required, and then set about to learn them. Fundamentally, they believe that a strong grasp of the building blocks of the web, like HTML and CSS, plus at least one other higher level language (JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Python), is a great way to get started. There are many free resources to learn programming on the web, but there are also more structured courses which you can pay for.

In order to practice those skills, they recommend speaking to members of your community who need basic web work done, and asking if you can volunteer there in exchange for putting the work in your portfolio or CV. This will show potential employers an idea of who you are and what you're capable of. Even if programming isn't your thing, there are loads of other roles as well, such as data scientists, project management, or software quality assurance. As well, following people in the industry—either through their blog, Twitter, or local meetups—is a great way to network and hear about additional opportunities.

Links from this episode

• Adobe Creative Suite
• Figma
• Sketch
• Airbnb.io
• Facebook Open Source
• Codecademy
• Udacity
• edX
• Udemy
• Google Web Fundamentals
• Pluralsight
• A link to 'Learn how to program' in a search engine