Beginners and experts (Batchelder blog post)

[leam hall]

On Sat, Sep 23, 2017 at 5:26 PM, Ned Batchelder <ned at nedbatchelder.com>
wrote:

> On 9/23/17 2:52 PM, Leam Hall wrote:
>
>> On 09/23/2017 02:40 PM, Terry Reedy wrote:
>>
>>> https://nedbatchelder.com//blog/201709/beginners_and_experts.html
>>>
>>> Great post.
>>>
>>
>> Yup. Thanks for the link. I often have that "I bet <great programmer
>> Fred> doesn't get frustrated." thing going. Nice to know Ned bangs his head
>> now and again.  :P
>>
>>
> "Ow!" --me


Hehe...I've been trying to figure out how to phrase a question. Knowing I'm
not the only one who gets frustrated really helps.

I'm trying to learn to be a programmer. I can look at a book and read basic
code in a few languages but it would be unfair to hire myself out as a
programmer. I'm just not yet worth what it costs to pay my bills.

To move forward takes a plan and time bound goals. At least for us old
folks; we only have so much time left. I want to avoid retirement and just
work well until I keel over.

I don't come from a CS background but as a Linux sysadmin. My current push
is OOP. Grady Booch's book on Analysis and Design is great and I've got the
GoF for right after that. I've been doing more testing but need to write
more tests. Writing code and starting to work with others on that code as
well.

The question is, what should a person "know" when hiring out as a
programmer? What is 'know" and what should be "known"? Specifically with
Python.

Thanks!

Leam