

Ask HN: Becoming a programmer again - markanto

Hi HN<p>I started my career as a programmer and did quite well at that. I never wanted to get into management but in due course of time, I was forced to. Now I am out of touch with programming for almost 4 years. I wanted to get into hardcore development again - like I want to build frameworks and such stuff. I am faced with enormous inertia and dont know where to start. I am basically a Java programmer. Any tips and suggestions how to go about this ?
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shorbaji
I have been thru the same a few months ago. Let me tell you what worked for
me.

Start by picking a language. Which one you choose will depend on why you want
to be a programmer. My goal is to develop a web app for a startup so I looked
at popular languages with popular frameworks. I chose Django/Python over Ruby
on Rails.

Playing with a framework gave me some quick returns for minimal effort. So the
rewards kept me going.

Quickly though you realize that you need language expertise. That's when I hit
the books, sought assignments and problems (e.g. Project Euler).

One last tip, set some mini-projects with limited scope as goals - one after
the other. Make sure their complexity increases. This will serve as a ramp up,
but also the sense of completing a project becomes a sort of self-reward. The
projects may also server as a portfolio.

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mahmud
Pick up clojure and scratch small itches with it. Clojure is still fairly
obscure and it doesn't have that many libraries; this will force you to write
your own. Tool-making is the most fun kind of programming, and fun will keep
you going.

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yannis
Programming is like riding a bicycle, you never really forget it, but you need
to warm-up a bit if you haven't used one for a long time. There are some good
suggestions above. I would go with Ruby on Rails.

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seasoup
Well, you could grab a book and work through it. Or, alternatively and even
better, find a personal project to do and do it.

