A way into a programming career?

Those sort of vocational day to day skills are important, for me someone having this this would be a nice bonus. However they are easy to learn, and no 2 companies will have the same way of doing stuff, and training exercises won’t really compare to to real life anyway.

What is more important is a programming brain – the core skill to turn a problem into code in a nice and clear way.

And actually in an agile pairing environment you can be fairly productive from the start without actually needing to be able to code.

Thanks for the replies.

So, my plan is to try and get into a junior dev job without doing the CodeClan course, but having it as a fall back (also can see how the first few grads of the course do by hanging back).

Therefore I need to build up my skills and a portfolio. Any suggestions for some small projects would be good….

We’ve had a number of folks come through Base 3. AFAIK, each one has gone on to a successful series of jobs in SAS and R&D.

As an update, I’m a month and a half into a job as a Java software dev 🙂

Nice – well done you. Is it working out how you expected / wanted?

Oh nice one dmorts!

Rachel (suffering cos she got back from a dev conference in Germany in the early hours of the morning. Coffee……..)

I’m impressed, I doubted that was feasible!

EDIT: not doubting the OP’s abilities, just the good sense of the industry.

Good work OP. Had read the thread with interest but had nothing to offer as I am not an IT guy. Good to know you have had some success in finding a role you want.

Good work OP – let us know when the regret starts 😉

Well it’s going ok so far, new stuff to learn everyday and finding the work enjoyable…. well maybe interesting is a better word! Working on a CRM system

I applied for the job and got asked to do a technical test. I was given a day’s notice and told it was to be in Eclipse, an IDE I’d not used before. In fact I’d not used any Java IDE as my Java coding had been online using codecademy and cyber-dojo. I had used MATLAB and Visual Studio (ages ago), so in the end managed to ok in the test….having downloaded eclipse the night before and done a bit of hasty learning. I told them this and think this may have helped by showing them I could pick things up quickly