emrickgj

This man asks the real questions. (Tabs)

Are you worried at all about the EU potentially "banning memes", many that are shared or documented by your website?

Exactly. However, if you are going to a boot camp I believe you're expectation is that you will be good at or it, or at least good enough professionally.

I don't think learning new libraries hurts you, helps your agility and exposes you to more patterns/ways of thinking.

Just don't go in expecting that it'll be the go-to library 2-5 years from now.

I started coding in highschool for fun, and ended up getting a degree and turning it into a career.

My recommendation is finding something you want to make and are passionate about. For me it was a game in highschool, in college it was more about social applications that helped people (I made a phone app/website to help raise money for hungry families/foodbanks in my area and we raised about 30,000 lbs of food in one week!).

Once you have an idea, it's hard. You can use plural sight to learn some of the basics, or you can do what I did and simply pick up a book/google. There is a STEEP learning curve, but once you get over it you will find it much easier.

So when I came up with my game idea, I wanted to know what language I should learn that would be applicable for future projects/jobs if I wanted to pursue them. The most common languages about 6 years ago I heard of were Java and C++, so I learned both starting with C++.

So about 5 months later of coding 2-4 hours a day I made a game engine in Java, and had a full featured platformer. From there I wanted to make a website, but had no idea how. Googled "What coding languages can you use to build a website". Heard about Javascript, HTML, CSS, PHP.

Learned HTML + CSS first and created a template. Then learned some javascript to create some working buttons/redirects on the page, and also added some flashiness. Then I learned PHP which was hard, but eventually I got the pages generating/loading based on the user data for the page. Then I found out I needed MySQL, so I learned MySQL and got into that language. Added it to the site so I had a working backend. Thought about my next project, hit google, learned some languages (or used some I already knew) and repeated the process over and over until I got good at learning and figuring things out. Eventually you'll find adapting to new technologies/scenarios a lot easier.

Another thing I did that helped tremendously was coding problems. You can buy a book that gives you some or use something like UvaOnlineJudge (can't remember the URL) but they give you a series of problems, inputs, and expected outputs. Then you have to code a solution to get those outputs based on the inputs. Lot's of fun imo.