What you can learn from a 30-year-old’s first coding interview
Going from a U.S. Navy veteran chef to a programmer
I have previously written about how I helped teenagers learn how to program. In that article, I shared some of the teaching methodologies that I found to be effective for engaging teenagers in learning to program.
In this article, I want to take a different approach and share a completely different personal experience in prepping a 30-year-old U.S. Navy veteran chef for his first coding interview.
Unlike the case of teaching a group of teenagers, the focus for teaching a grown-up is no longer being interactive or being fun. Rather, many grown-ups are goal-driven and they work hard when they really want to achieve something.
For the case of this veteran chef, the main motivation was to transition from being in a culinary arts career to a computer programming career.
However, I realized that a clear goal and motivation is not enough to easily learn programming and succeed in programming interviews. So, I wanted to share my experience with the problems I saw and some of my own solutions to those problems.
In addition, I hope this article engages other grown-ups to recourse the approaches that they have taken when first learning how to program.
