How to become a professional programmer

By Tyler Church

Pain and Suffering:

A novel approach to bashing
your head against the wall

By Tyler Church

Slides: https://suffering.tyler.church

3 Acts

1. How to code
2. How to eat
3. How not to code

But first, some context.

Who are you? (the audience)

You want to learn more about how to become a professional computer programmer.

You might not know how to code yet (and that's okay!)

Ask me questions!

Who the heck is this guy?

I write code

And people pay me for it

Things I've built

Unfortunately almost everything is under NDA... But at a high level:

• Web apps for running businesses better (data analytics, automation, etc.)
• Mobile apps (concert tickets, marketplace, etc.)
• Cloud automation, etc.
• Games (physical esports, lots of tiny hobby games, etc.)

Act 1

Learning to code

Coding is fun

Pick a language that's friendly for beginners

• Python
• JavaScript

Pick small projects

That you can (hopefully) see through to completion

Break everything into small pieces

• How do I take input from the user?
• How do make a random number?
• How do I compare two values?

And then put the small pieces together

Like writing a recipe.

Remember: Computers are very literal

They do exactly what you tell them to do.

You're going to struggle!

And that's okay!

Learning to cope

Be better than everyone else by reading books

Read other people's code

There's a lot of it

Expect that this will take time

A short personal story

It took me 5 years to become barely competent.

I wanted to make games like this:

But instead my games looked like this:

It takes about 10 years

So make peace with the brick wall

Act 2

But we have to eat

Learning is great but...

Coding for money is better

70% of paid programmers are happy

So clearly you want to be part of the 70%!

There are a lot of programming languages

Nearly 700 listed on Wikipedia as of 2024-01-31.

So which one should you pick?

My recommendations by area of interest

• Games - C++ and Lua
• Web development - JavaScript and SQL
• Data science - Python and R
• Embedded - C
• Fortune 500 - Java or C#
• iOS apps - Swift
• Android apps - Kotlin

Or, learn what pays well

Act 3

There's more to life than writing code

Learn to write English well

• Read widely
• Write concisely
• Write precisely

But you will spend most of your day in meetings

(I'm sorry)

Learn to debug well

• The computer runs your code, not the ideas in your head
• All your assumptions are wrong
• Ask questions
• Prove things one by one

Get a rubber duck

No, really.

Get a rubber duck!

It's a debugging super power

Questions?