text stringlengths 0 2.35k |
|---|
**David Valentine:** Absolutely! And Carmen, I have to say, I was chuckling when you were like "What computer is that?!" \[laughter\] But yes, yes, I got a start in the microcomputer generation world, so I started with TRS-80, and I moved over to a PC Junior, and then continued on through microcomputers and programming... |
**Carmen Andoh:** Wow...! |
**Ashley Willis:** That is hard! That is a hardcore nerd. |
**Carmen Andoh:** \[06:02\] Yeah... Total nostalgia ahoy, I'm sure, for many people. Certainly you can share what you started with when you were beginning, your first computer, in the \#GoTimeFM channel on GopherSlack. |
Okay, so let's talk a little bit about today's theme... This is Golang For Beginners. I had originally envisioned this episode to be meant to engage both non-Go-users, that listen to maybe sister podcasts on Changelog, or any Go-curious programmers out there, as well as encourage those have just started with Go and wan... |
I guess the first thing I wanted to start with is to ask - what is a beginner? What types of beginners are there? Anyone? |
**Ashley Willis:** Good question. There are beginners that know one programming language and they want to learn another; there are people that are career-transitioning, that don't know any programming... There's all kinds of beginners. |
**Jon Calhoun:** I was gonna say, there's even the curious kids who don't know what they're doing and like to break their parents' technology, which is probably some of us... \[laughter\] |
**Carmen Andoh:** Yeah. |
**Ashley Willis:** Those are my favorites. |
**David Valentine:** Absolutely. I've experienced that with one of the courses that I've published... One of the kids was literally saying "I don't have system privilege to install Go on my computer. What do I do? How do I get around that kind of a thing?" |
**Carmen Andoh:** Whoa...! \[laughs\] |
**David Valentine:** ...because his dad had bought him the course. I've actually in my program originally created a course that was in advance of the one I currently have in the marketplace, which I've since retired, that was kind of trying to get the entire beginners in Go space, where it's for people that are experie... |
Since then, I've actually specialized in making something very clear it is for absolute beginners, because I actually walk them through some of the fundamentals of computer science in learning Go, and giving them a foundation if they've never seen anything before. So I've actually learned to specialize. |
**Carmen Andoh:** And is this the course that I mentioned before, or is this a different course? |
**David Valentine:** It is exactly the course you've just mentioned, yes. That one's been in the marketplace since January of this year. It's a reboot specifically - and I've taken the other one out of the marketplace - intended for people that have never seen programming languages before, and wanna get started with th... |
**Carmen Andoh:** That's great. And just a reminder to everyone - what Dave is referring to is Udemy (Udemy.com) and it's called A Gentle Introduction to Golang for Beginners. Is that what you mean by "Gentle", the idea that you're a complete beginner, not just a beginner to Go? |
**David Valentine:** Exactly right, that is just it. What tends to happen with beginners is that they end up making assumptions about what the computer is doing underneath, and they end up almost with a heuristic knowledge, or almost some voodoo... "Why is it like that?!" Well, I prefer to try to explain tip to tail ev... |
**Ashley Willis:** \[10:09\] That is the kind of course that I value specifically as somebody who does not have a CS degree. I think I get into the weeds often, because what happens - I am my own worst enemy - is I try to learn something and I'm like "No, no, I need to know the thing before that, and then the thing bef... |
**Jon Calhoun:** I think this is one of the reasons why at times I feel like the younger you are, the easier it is to learn this stuff... Because you're more willing to just take things for granted, I think. Whereas the older you get, you're like -- I just think that it's easy, as an adult, to think "I need to figure o... |
**Carmen Andoh:** Interesting. So you think that's maybe the key, just sort of trusting whoever has shaped the content is gonna structure the content, that's how you're gonna learn, or...? |
**Jon Calhoun:** I think sometimes. One example I can give is I talked to somebody who had started a company, and when they started the company, they couldn't find a technical founder, so they basically just went and learned programming on their own... And I was talking to them about how they learned to program, and th... |
**Carmen Andoh:** That's a good point. Now, you've mentioned a little bit about kids and whatnot - I also wanted to ask a little bit what everyone's thoughts were about industry trends and educational backgrounds... Because I'm seeing that we are increasingly having people within our industry that are not formally trai... |
**Ashley Willis:** Yes. |
**Carmen Andoh:** So is there anything in terms of difference between how we teach people that are not CS degree learners? |
**Ashley Willis:** Bootcamps are predatory. Sorry, all bootcamp grads... I value you; you don't know that you're predatory... I did all of the OpenCourseWare for all of the major universities. That material was way more valuable. But it's hard when you don't know where to start; you believe that you need a classroom se... |
Some of us are not in a place where we can go get our CS degrees. That is a place of privilege... So some of us have to learn. With all of these online courses out there, there are many more opportunities to self-pace and self-teach... And not all of them are great, so it takes some time to get through them. But for me... |
**Carmen Andoh:** Jon and Dave, can you tell us a little bit about your personal journeys, both as beginners, but just beginners to Go, how you leveled up there? |
**David Valentine:** Absolutely. I'll jump in there first. Go is -- gosh, my eighth, ninth, tenth (I'm not even sure anymore) computer language, and obviously having a background in computer science and having done a lot of things with it... Python is another one of the language that I do a lot with, because I also tea... |
\[14:02\] With Go, to be honest, it sort of came about for me from market research, because I became curious about what I should make my next great course on. And then I found this amazing computer language that really is a next-generation computer language... Because almost any other language that we may even consider... |
I realized that - here was a language that back in the day when I learned C for the first time, very much smelled like, tasted like, acted like C, exposed some of those fundamental computer bits, but had grown into being so much more than a system-based language. So I literally fell in love with it. |
Then because I had intended to develop a course on it -- what I really try to do in all the courses that I teach is I try to develop a roadmap so that my students aren't depending on me. With the internet there is this amazing amount of material out there, but it's not curated in a meaningful way... And that is maybe t... |
It's that very beginning. That beginning is so hard for people that don't have any experience, so giving them that ignition, even that permission to break things and experiment with things, and to think about things as they're coding and developing their exercises and so on - it gets them that little bit of traction wi... |
**Carmen Andoh:** That's great! I think that's also a really good companion or complementary to what Jon does... Which is - okay, you have an ignition, you know the basics and the foundations; the next thing you've gotta do is... \[laughs\] Gophercises! Right, Jon? Tell us a little bit about that. |
**Jon Calhoun:** Yeah, so... Basically, whenever I learned, what I generally found was that it didn't matter if I was coding the prettiest code, or anything; it generally came down to if I coded a lot, I learned a lot. And if I didn't build things, I sort of just stopped learning. And I think a lot of times I've talked... |
\[17:53\] So Gophercises was kind of me saying -- you know, if I was starting over and I just wanted some random exercises to build, that weren't completely boring, but would challenge me, would teach me to read the docs, to look at different APIs in the standard library, to do stuff like that, what would they look lik... |
**Ashley Willis:** I think that that's so valuable as well, because - I tweeted about this recently... When I was learning to code, I was already pretty well established in tech on Twitter; so I'm like "How should I start?" "Just build something!" "Build what?" "Something." "What? Where do I start? How do I start? What... |
**Jon Calhoun:** And that's really frustrating. |
**Ashley Willis:** So frustrating... Like, build a to-do app. Tell me something, tell me where to start. I feel like really experienced programmers - that's their go-to advice. "Well, just go build something." |
**David Valentine:** Actually, the other advice that I'd add to that though... I mean, if you've got a project, build it. But don't just build it just once, build it three times. \[laughs\] |
**Carmen Andoh:** Huh... |
**David Valentine:** Because the first time you build it, you're gonna commit all the sins and you're gonna build the wrong thing. It's not gonna meet the needs that you're looking to address with it, it's not gonna work well. You're gonna think "Ugh, that was horrific..." |
The second time it will probably function and achieve what you want it to achieve in terms of the end results of the things that you're building, but you're gonna think "Ugh, that is some ugly, awful, evil code." There are monsters working inside that that you hate. And the third time, you're in a position where you ca... |
So if I were to add any advice with that, once you do find that something, whatever that is, if that's reproducing someone's example or finding anything that inspires you to build something, build it three times. |
**Ashley Willis:** Wow... I love that advice. |
**Carmen Andoh:** Me too. I heard once that if you want to become a great writer, don't read 100 books; just read one book 100 times. I think this is kind of in the same vein, Dave, in that this gives you the chance to revisit a thing at different stages - which is reality - in terms of maintaining a piece of software ... |
**Jon Calhoun:** Just to add something to that - I know some people get bored doing that, or I should say some people seem like they do; even if you don't build the exact same thing, I think building similar things probably would go in line with what Dave is saying... Because I'll see people take a course, and they'll ... |
**Carmen Andoh:** Yes, John. And I think that learning is repetition, right? If you learn anything, you're gonna need to repeat it in order to make it go to long-term memory. But I think that that's also a great approach. |
**Break:** \[21:36\] |
**Carmen Andoh:** Well, I wanna segue into instead of maybe talking more about how we learn and approaches to learning, let's talk about learning in Go. We kind of touched on that, about the starting point and foundations and computer science fundamentals in your Udemy course, Dave, but... How do you teach beginners Go... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.