PyUtrecht: Teaching yourself how to code - Joris Hoendervangers¶

Tags: pun, python

(One of my summaries of the Dutch PyUtrecht meetup in Utrecht, NL).

Joris started out as a bond trader, with his MSc in financial management. So definitively no programmer by education. Bond trading meant shouting on the stock market’s floor, something that was in risk of being automated. So he moved on. In his case to Reuters, one of the two big financial information suppliers. Later he started using python and making nice prototypes, which clients loved. Now he’s a python trainer (“PythonSherpa”).

A bit of imposter syndrome was present when he was demoing some jupyter notebooks to expensive managers when he was still a python beginner. Later on as python trainer, imposter syndrome was still a thingy.

The best way to learn: learning by teaching! He had to keep learning things because he needed to explain them. And by explaining he remembered it even better.

But one thing kept worrying him: he couldn’t pass many of the standard programming interview questions like “validate this binary search algorithm”… The solution could be online courses on coursera, edx, udacity, udemy.

What he recommends is https://github.com/ossu/computer-science, an overview of free courses you need to do to theoretically pass a full computer science education. For instance the course “programming languages part a/b/c” by the university of Washington. “Algorithms” by Stanford University. “Nand2Tetris” by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: building a computer from the basic nand/or/and/nor ports up.

Also nice for learning: https://exercism.org . “Develop fluency in 74 languages”. Free, but they do need donations quickly.