I spoke with one of our senior software developers at work yesterday. I told her I’ve been studying at home to learn a tech stack to prepare myself for applying for DevOps roles, and that one of the things I’m learning is Python. I asked her for feedback and/or suggestions. She’s been coding a long time and is one of our top developers. She has a degree in computer science as well.
She said three things to me:
- Python is a great language to start out with. Not only because DevOps uses it, but because it will help me to learn some fundamentals so if I decided to pick up other languages later, doing that won’t be as difficult as starting from scratch with a language that is more abstract.
- Don’t just read a book and don’t just copy and past exercises from whatever materials you are using. Actually type out your source code. You will learn more that way, and it will force you to be mindful of syntax and proper format.
- Comment your code. It’s a good habit in general, but also especially helpful when you are starting out because it forces you to think through the logic. Use comments for things like “pseudo-code” which is basically writing out in your own words what the section of code you are commenting is supposed to do.
This was encouraging to hear because everything she said is exactly what I’m doing already. That tells me my instincts are on point.