I have a lot of experience with both the good and bad sides of coding bootcamps. Lambda School/BloomTech’s model is horrifying.

The “American Dream as a Service” as a slogan is gross but fitting. The promise of economic mobility for everyone, that instead screws you over when you need it most.

25 tips for new programmers (a thread)

👩‍💻 1. Write down your reason for learning to code. Keep track of it reason; programming is hard, and you will get frustrated sometimes. It will be essential to keep that reason in mind to stick with it. You could put a sticky note on your computer or a note on your home screen.

I posted my first blog post three years ago today.

I got 37 readers on my first blog post, and I was super excited because it was way more than I expected!

Now, blogging has changed my life and my career.

🧵 I started off by challenging myself to learn one new technology each week, build something with it, and then blog about it.

It was way too much work, but if you want to read my really hot-take-y blog posts from three years ago, they're still up.

dev.to/aspittel/how-i…

If you're looking to learn CSS or get better with it, here are some of my favorite resources 👇🏻 If you are brand new, I wrote this post:

dev.to/aspittel/css-f…

I also love Codecademy:
codecademy.com/learn/learn-css

This CSS tricks list of resources is amazing too: css-tricks.com/where-do-you-l…

They also have a list of their beginner-friendly posts:

css-tricks.com/guides/beginne…

Creating art with code is a really fun way to learn and challenge your skills.

Here's a thread if you want to get started with it 🎨 First, check out the awesome things people are making on @glitch and @CodePen. People create amazing things, get inspiration from them! You can also fork people's code, add to it, break it, etc.

So, I've interviewed a bunch of software engineers, done some interviews myself, and teach my students about interviewing.

Here's a thread of advice 👇🏻 Interviewing looks different everywhere. Things you may encounter:

1) Behavioral interview questions such as: "What are your career goals"

2) Technical questions like: "Pretend I know nothing about React, explain it to me from 0" or "What is a float in CSS"

If your goal is to start building developer content in 2020, here's a thread of advice for you 👇 Start small and don't focus on perfection. Write a super rough draft that's just your thoughts on paper. Video yourself giving advice on a topic you're passionate about. Sit down with a friend and chat about a dev topic and record it. You can always edit later.

If you're goal is to learn how to code in 2020, here's a thread of advice for you 👇🏻 Make it fun at first. Play with demos on @CodePen and @glitch and check out what code people are writing to create stuff on there.

Do some high quality, free tutorials, like @freeCodeCamp and @Codecademy.

Build some fun projects, things that appeal to you or games.

Knowing intermediate JavaScript concepts like the call stack, context, scope, the prototype chain, higher order functions, async programming, and the event loop is invaluable and will help with learning frameworks.

The fundamentals won't change even if the ecosystem does. Going to thread resources for learning all of these here.

Call stack:
The JS Call Stack Explained In 9 Minutes
by Colt Steele:

@MozDevNet guide - developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glo…

Understanding the JavaScript call stack
by @charliecodes medium.freecodecamp.org/understanding-…