What Programmers Should Learn

I didn't study programming in college. I had been coding for five years by that point and, rather arrogantly, didn't think there was much they could teach me. Plus, I never expected my college education to be applicable to my future career, whatever it was.

I had some validation of that when listening to those who were in the upper classes complaining they had to write 50 lines of code for a final, when I wrote that much before lunch more or less every day--for fun.

However, I think this guy has done a very good job here laying out an impressive plan. It's interesting to note that a lot of these topics didn't even exist a few years ago.

I'm not 100% sold on the order of the items, but I like the emphasis on design. Programming is actually a very basic, very simple skill: it's not the language or the ability to code. I can switch between any number of languages easily. A new API or library or framework is a toy to me.

What kills me is the admin: Setting up the environment, managing code, deployment, security, and so on. These skills are also very general purpose, in my experience. There are the occasional big leaps--and I'm talking tech "occasional", so they're way more frequent than other fields, but a good grounding is almost always going to serve you well, even when the tech changes. Every now and again, you'll end up having to completely change the way you think, though. If you don't like that, you probably shouldn't be in tech.

If it is, keep in mind you don't need to enter a degree program to learn any of it.