Review of One Month: Programming for Non-Programmers
You use them every day, and depend on them for most of your daily activities. The content they hold has democratized our everyday lives, enabled us to communicate instantly, and keeps us connected with the larger world. They are the seemingly infinite amount of websites on the internet.
But can you really say you understand them in function? Are you curious to know the basic underlying technologies that they are built and run on? I was, and I have spent the past few months looking at online courses that guide and teach you about the different technologies. After finding One Month Programming for Non-Programmers, I created a solid base of knowledge about design, programming, implementation, and communication that are critical to good wed development.
I dove into the course right away, and was expecting to start coding. However, that doesn’t come until the ideas are hammered out between the different stakeholders in a site or application. The biggest takeaway was how important it is to properly draft the desired function, working with people that will help make it a reality, and think about how people will use it. If you are going to create something for personal use like a blog, that’s simple. Want to build something for others like an e-commerce site? Not so much. I plan on taking One Month’s class on Product Management immediately, to give me a deeper dive into how to make something work in the way you envision, and what questions need to be asked before you pour money into building something.
The next portion focused on the underlying technologies and languages that power most of the things we know and need (but maybe not always love). I learnt a great deal about the evolution and history of programming from the mid-20th century to the present, and it’s incredible how much innovation and change there has been. Languages themselves are used for different purposes, and come in levels of differing proximity to machine languages. I am personally interested in learning more about Javascript, because I have read about how it’s taking more of a role in development, while others like PHP are steadily diminishing in some uses (at least for new sites). Again, I would like to take the One Month class, but I am also looking at free resources to learn more, and understand the language. Frameworks seem to be a new buzzword, but I’ve learned that it’s more like buying a ready-made cake than actually baking it. In order to be able to bake myself, I plan on buying Jon Duckett’s book on Javascript, which followed his previous book on HTML&CSS , an easy, yet informative way to learn.
My goal now is to make a personal page for myself, one that is built by me for me. It’ll be a place where I can peace together my thoughts, post random crap, and setup an RSS feed to easily share and digest news. I am thinking wordpress.com to start, and see where that takes me. I really want to be able to do some basic things right now, and build from there. Eventually, I would like to get some work experience (gotta pad that resume), and be able to look for some professional uses of skills specifically designing and coding.
I would HIGHLY recommend this class for people reading this that are interested. I found it to be so great because it made things that can be complex easily digestible. Great activities like code along, and simplified examples for all the neophytes out there that are scared away by complicated jargon. Don’t be scared homie.
