Isaac Lyman - Your First Year in Code: A complete guide for new & aspiring developers

Im a self-taught programmer.

By that I mean a lot of different people taught me to code. Mostly strangers. When I was in middle school, I found an ebook called C++ For Dummies that my brother had bought. I read it until the chapter on pointers, where I got confused and gave up. Then a few months later I did it again. I read the first several chapters of that book over and over until I practically knew them by heart. I wrote a Fahrenheit-to-Celsius converter. I started thinking about classes and objects. I was so curious.

Part of that curiosity stemmed from the fact that I identified with code. Computer programming was nerdy, and I was a nerd. I mean, I had friends who wore Naruto headbands and played Yu-Gi-Oh! in the cafeteria, and I wasnt quite that nerdy. But by my senior year of high school I was president of the computer support team and co-president of the speech and debate team, so that should tell you what kind of kid I was. Code was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to play with.

Anyway, I learned Python a year or two after I first picked up that C++ book, and then a bit of HTML, and then Visual Basic, and before long I had filled up a folder on my familys computer with ebooks and CHM files (an old form of hyperlinked documentation) that all had ridiculous titles like Learn PHP in 24 Hours. I had even written a couple of programs on my TI-84 calculator to save time on calculus homework. But I had also written off computer programming as an unrealistic career ambition. Back then coding just seemed like a fun hobby for a kid who didnt get out much. I had no way of knowing that over the next decade Silicon Valley would explode with tech startups, web developers would command salaries comparable to corporate lawyers, cell phone apps would become a 100 billion dollar market, and nerds would take over the world.

So I set a more attainable career goal: become a business lawyer, then a politician. And thatd be the whole story if I hadnt run out of money during my sophomore year of college. After a disappointing job search, I managed to land a position as a technical support agent, fixing printers and upgrading operating systems in a cubicle on the outskirts of campus. And on the days when all the computers were working and the printers were attending to their queues, I was learning JavaScript. The first version of my personal website, isaaclyman.com, was built almost entirely during downtime on that job. And I have that first website to thank for the career I have now.

I love this career, and Im happy to report that Ive been cured of all my former political ambitions. Im now a senior software engineer at a billion-dollar company that helps hospitals save lives through cutting-edge healthcare analytics. I didnt know it was possible to have this much fun at work. But coding is fun, and I think thats the first thing I want to say about it: for all the negatives in this field of work (and there are a few), I still get a thrill whenever I write a clever piece of code.

Looking back on my career, its clear that Ive had an extraordinary amount of privilege on my side. Tech is full of gatekeepers, unwritten rules, poor documentation, and unacknowledged bias. Sometimes it seems that everywhere you look, theres someone else telling you youre not a real developer unless youre exactly like them. Many talented programmers have been squeezed out by these institutional problems. It will take a generations combined efforts to fix them, but in the meantime, I hope this book can make a difference. In its pages are the encouraging and persistent voices of your colleagues, telling you that you can do this, youre smart enough, others have been where you are, and were all in it together. My co-authors and I have done our best to write the tech industrys unwritten rules, call attention to its blind spots, share the knowledge we wish wed had years ago, and open the gates.

I hope this book is useful to you. If you have questions about anything you read here or just want to say hello, you can drop me a line on Twitter (@isaacdlyman).

Good luck!

Isaac Lyman