And Other Adventures in Helping Someone Learn to Code

- Suzie Grange

>> Hello.

There we go.

Welcome back everyone!

Again, I'm sorry about the snacks.

[laughter]

So our next speaker, Suzie Grange, and Suzie is going to talk to us about what it's like

to teach a friend to code in 2019.

Suzie, although she is an interesting person, she couldn't come up with any fun facts on

her own, however, I have pulled a couple out of her.

So Suzie is a musician as you will learn about in the talk and she came to New York in order

to found a startup that has like a really, really cool mission to help improve women's

health care which is a topic that is really near and dear to my heart, because I'm a woman

and she went came to New York she said I'll leave all that band stuff behind and she quickly

discovered that she was wrong and she needs to make music and now she's making music again

and she's going to tell us about that in her talk.

So let's all give it up for Suzie.

>> Thank you.

All right, hi, everybody, Day 3, JSConf, we made it.

Thank you for coming to my talk.

So this is actually my first talk so please excuse my verbal typos.

So I want to kick things off with a quick show of hands.

I say this but I can't really see y'all because it's kind of bright up here.

So here was once a junior engineer.

Trick question, friends.

And who considers themselves still to be a junior engineer right now.

Cool, well, you're in the right place and who considers themselves to be a senior engineer?

Cool.

And who considers themselves someone who knows everything there is to know about software

development?

[laughter] Oh, I saw one hand.

! Well, yeah, junior folks, as you can see from that, if you feel like you don't know

enough right now, rest assured that you probably never will, so yay for that.

So and what unites us all is that we all have to start somewhere, but that can be different

places.

Maybe you knew from the minute that you had a family PC that you knew you wanted to code.

You knew you wanted to manipulate this machine or maybe inspired by customizing your my space

profile or maybe you did computer science as a degree.

Wherever we came from, we all ended up in this crazy journey.

So last summer my friend James decided to join us and he took the brave decision to

career change to become an engineer.

So me being a mostly decent human being, I offered to help, I mean how hard can it be

in 2019 with the finest Google search results and videos and courses online?

Well, spoiler, it was hard.

Way harder than I thought or I think he even thought, to be honest.

So today I want to share ten things that I learned as I followed James on his coding

adventure.

My name is Suzie.

My pronouns are she/her, I am British, not Australian, so congrats for those of you who

guessed that in the guess the accent sweep stakes and I work on the front-end tech lead

at Maven clinic in New York City.

We partner with employers to support their employees through pregnancy, surrogacy, adoption

and return to work programs.

So that's my shameless plug for now.

Also we're hiring, so if you're interested in either of those things, please come to

talk to me later.

So my path into this is that I was self-taught or I like to call myself an accidental engineer.

See, music was always my thing.

When I picked up guitar at age 12, I kind of knew that was it for me, that was what

I wanted to do, so for the rest of my teens and early 20s, I spent most of my time playing

shows in dodgy dive bars and venues across the UK, but after playing my first show, I

think I was 14 or something, I was backing in the glory of success, I thought that the

this is the late '90s and early 20000, and I had no shortage of I inspiration.

The web was full of fonts, and let's face it questionable design choice, they were great

times.

So armed with cutting edge tools and zero experience I drag and dropped my way to creating

my first website.

But then what?

I had this thing on my computer and I knew I had to somehow get that onto the interwebs.

I heard that hosting was a thing, so I got some low-cost hosting, I think and I emailed

my band's email list and I asked if anyone knew any FTP sites.

With no skills, I had become a freaking webmaster.

It was good times.

So sadly, archive.org didn't start until 2001, so my 1999 handiwork is lost to the ether,

but rest assured it looked pretty great.

This is all that remains of it.

Eventually I graduated from publisher to front page and then definitely very illegally obtained

of DreamWeaver.

Tables and frames came and went and CSS came along and allowed me to look pretty.

But still for me coding was a hobby.

It wasn't a career if you had to do a career in computer science, you had to go and do

a degree in computer science, right, that's how it works?

So fast forward, I did a degree in music technology, I worked in retouching for a bit, I worked

in IT support for a bit.

I had something of a mid-20s crisis trying to figure out what I was doing with my life

in which I considered everything from being a lawyer to a teacher to a social worker and

then I heard about this startup scene thing that was happening in the US and that kind

of sounded like being in a band to me.

You know, it's you and a bunch of people and you're creating this product that you're trying

to put out into the world in order to be successful and famous and happy or something so I figured

maybe I don't need a degree to do this.

So I decided to learn to code properly.

So I read some books, I built some bad PHP apps and I badgered some people on Twitter

until thankfully someone gave me a chance and gave me a code.

So I taught myself Ruby, discovered SVN and git and I taught myself JavaScript and here

I am today, giving my first talk at the biggest conference in our industry, so that's weird.

[applause]

Thank you.

So just to recap, the things that I needed to do in order to become an accidental junior

developer, I pretty much needed to know HTML, some dodgy inline styles, I needed to know

how to use an FTP client and a generous smattering of GIFs, obviously.

So accidentally becoming a developer wasn't really that uncommon back then.

Maybe as I said earlier, people started tinkering on MySpace profiles or maybe.

Interactivity was pretty much copy and pasting a Java applet or maybe a Marquee if you were

particularly creative.

So here we are in 2019, meet my friend James.

We actually made music together.

But that's a story for another time.

But he had a real job in construction so he was basically building skyscrapers and swinging

off bridges and doing you know, real work but he also produced videos and animations

and sound design video games, so a talented guy in general.

So last summer he decided he wanted to learn to code.

So me being self-taught and having mostly learned through a baptism of fire was OK,

how hard can it be?

What do you need to know.

And to recap I got my first job knowing HTML, CSS, really bad PHP and that was kind of it.

Source control?

I probably thought that was a foodstuff.

So this is what it turns out James had to learn.

So he got the classics of HTML and CSS but in addition to that you have to know about

Sass and Less and CSS in JS and how to fight in Twitter about CSS in JS, JavaScript, obviously,

React and Angular and Vue and whatever the cool kids are using right now and let's face

it there have probably been 3 JavaScript frames come out in the time that it's got me to this

time in my talk.

Git, and databases and APIs and be a good citizen of the web and accessibility.

If you want to get an interview, you into need to know about algorithm data structures,

cross-browser testing and whatever everyone is talking about in Hacker News this week,

too.

So that brings me to thing No. 1 on my list and that that is is that the barrier for entry

is way higher now, like, damn.

So what are some ways folks get into engineering these days?

Well, seeing that you know Matrix star downloading information into your brain is not an option

yet, CS degree.

Fantastic, cost you many bags of money and take you four years but you'll be able to

contribute as a junior engineer pretty early on, or you can do the boot camp path which

will cost you some bags of money and take you 12, 14 weeks and you'll be out being able

to contribute again or you can do my path which was the self taught path, which could

cost you nothing to some amount depending on how much you put into it and it could take

you any amount of time.

Which thinking about these things brought me to thing No. 2 is that coding isn't that

open to all when you think about it.

I'm not sure if you remember the code year initiative that happened I think it was around

2012 by things like then-mayor of New York, Bloomberg touted that he was going to learn

coding and if he could learn it anybody could do it.

It's open to all.

Why would you not want to do this.

That's all well and good, but you need to remember that not everyone grows up access

to a computer.

Not everyone can spend 12 to 20K on tuition fees plus living expenses and loss of earnings.

Not everyone is able to work a job or two or three and spend their time outside of work

learning to code.

There are some great initiatives out there, there are loans out there, but it's still

a huge commitment and there's no guarantee of how soon, if at all, you'll get a job.

So nevertheless, James chose the boot camp path and why would you not?

It promises a pretty amazing return on investment.

It if you go from zero to being a developer in 12 weeks, you can according to some of

these boot campsites have a 70X salary increase.

Sox of them even have money-back guarantees.

But again to get into top-tier boot camps a lot of them require you to have a lot of

knowledge in order to get into a camp that teaches you to learn code.

So that was weird.

So his school gave a few resources there but he decided he wanted to do a thorough job

and figure out how he could best learn with the resources available to him.

Which brings me to thing 3 is there are so many resources out there.

When I started there was books and trying things and failing and that was kind of it.

But now there's so many things out there, which is great, right?

There are so many choices but how do you know which one is best for you?

How do you know which learning style is best for you?

Where should you start?

Should you pay for one?

Trying to figure out where these things start and which one works for you.

Nevertheless, James started with Code Academy.

It's a great browser-based IDE which gives you hints.

It's really cool.

So his boot camp was going to involve Ruby.

So he did some code academy resources, eventually he could write methods and he could do simple

algorithms in his browser.

He could Fibonacci, he could do Fizzbuzz, awesome, so I was feeling like a mental bad

JavaScript.

So I decided it would be a good idea for him to install Ruby locally.

He went on this site and it had a bunch of commands with a dollar sign in front.

What even is that?

So I replied oh, yeah, that just means you have to run those in your terminal, simple.

So he was like, yeah, but what does that even mean?

What even is run?

So for some reason that question hit me, not because I couldn't tell him to open up the

terminal app to copy and paste that website and hit return and that would do what he wanted

but I guess at that point I realized how much learning to code involved.

Short of run something you were just telling but even then, what does the dollar sign mean

and how do I explain those two fairly simple seeming things without explaining kind of

everything in computer science so at that point it dawned on me that this journey he

was about to take was huge.

He conquered Fizzbuzz and algorithms but he didn't know how that runs on a server or even

what a server was, all of these things that I, as I turns out kind of had forgotten were

not part of the common vernacular for nondevelopers.

Which brings me to point 4.

Coding is kind of this giant game of joining the dots, but you don't know what the dots

are, and as soon as you join one dot, another 1 or 3 or 12 more start coming into view.