Here’s part two about becoming a software developer. In the first part I told you about useful resources that will help you learn and once you’re working as a developer, those same resources will help you finish your projects.
By now, you should also have a few basic computer skills. Yet if you expect me to start talking about programming languages then no, not in this part. Because, as I said before, programming languages are not important. They are just tools and a good developer can use any tools he likes, even though it sometimes takes a short moment to get accustomed to the new tools.
To become a developer, you need to understand logic and you need to be able to visualize what your project will look like. And unfortunately, not everyone is born with these two abilities, although you can train to improve both abilities.
Having a mathematical background will help, since Math requires good logic. But there are other ways to train yourself.
To train your logic I would advise to learn to play Chess, Checkers or Go. Just these simple board games that require you to think ahead and outsmart your opponent. Especially Chess is a good game because you have various different pieces, each with different values, that you have to deploy over the ‘battlefield’ of 8×8 squares to capture the King of your opponent. Shredder Chess is a good chess engine that you can play online for free or on your mobile phone or tablet. And the various pieces will force you to think more strategically.
And although a game like Stratego and other games also requires strategic insights, the advantage of Chess is that the game starts with no hidden secrets for both players. Each player knows where the pieces of the opponents are and there’s no luck involved. Then again, if your opponent makes a mistake, you could consider that lucky, but it’s just a mistake by your opponent.
Learning Chess means that you have to think ahead in the game. Each move needs to be calculated. How will your opponent respond? And what will you do next. Good chess players can see a dozen or more moves ahead in the game, calculating which moves will win or lose. And to win, you must think further ahead than your opponent.
This is why training against a computer is a good way to improve your brains. Chess engines will use databases for the opening and the end game which will allow them to play strong, but in-between they have to think just like humans, and they generally calculate just up to a few moves ahead. It should not be difficult to think further ahead of the lower levels. And to improve, you should start playing against higher and higher levels until you win about half the games you play.
Next to learning strategy, logic and thinking ahead, you need to learn to visualize. For this, the best thing to do is to read. And since programming requires a good knowledge of the English language I would advise you to read a lot of English Science/Fiction literature. The stories of Conan the Barbarian, Tarzan or even the Dragonlance series are very good reading material. But if you don’t like this genre, start reading other stories where you can imagine how the main character is walking around in the environment set inside the book. Turn the words into a movie inside your head, visualize what is going on.
If that is a bit difficult, then read a book that has also been made into a movie. Movies like “the Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings” were made on books written by Tolkien and make very good reading material. The movie follows the books reasonably close too, so visualizing it becomes easier. Other books would be the series “A song of Ice and Fire” which is used for “Game of Thrones” or “the Southern Vampire Mysteries” which resulted in the series “True Blood“. The movies should help you to visualize these worlds that are described inside the books.
Another way to learn how to visualize is through role-playing games and preferably those tabletop games with dice. Dungeons & Dragons is such a game but GURPS is my favorite. GURPS is less about superpowers and more adjustable to different worlds and settings. In GURPS, you can play a time-traveller who goes back to WWII with the mission to take down the Nazi’s in 1940 to prevent some disaster in the future. Or you are a time-travelling wildlife photographer being sent to the Age of Dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, filming how these dinosaurs came to their ends. Or maybe you’re just a Civil War-era cowboy fighting some Alien invaders. Then again, in GURPS you can also just be a dungeon crawler, bashing monsters and gathering loot.
Thing is, you need things that will require you to visualize what things will look like inside your head. This is important, since you will be working on various projects in the future and you will need to think ahead to know what it will look like once it is done!
As a developer, you have to understand the whole process starting with a good idea that you want to work out to finishing it completely and providing it to those who can use it. If you’re a carpenter, you might decide to build some chairs and a table and visualize how it should look like while the wood is still part of a tree. Once you are done, it is likely that it won’t look like what you visualized at the start, but that’s basically because you will keep changing your mind during the whole process.
However, if you made this for a customer then it should closely match what you agreed upon with this customer, since he expects that you deliver what you have suggested to him. You might have made drawings and descriptions so your customer will expect your project to match this. Then again, even clients can change their minds and together you could agree on changing some of the details. But in general, you start each process visualizing what you are going to make and think ahead about all the steps that need to be taken to turn the idea into a final product.
Without visualization, the whole process of building your project will be awfully slow and full with challenges. (Developers don’t talk about problems! We call it challenges, since problems are things that need to be solved and solving problems is a challenge!)
So, learn to use logic, learn to visualize things.