dear anyone looking to teach kids programming (especially organizations):

- please be realistic. teach things your students can use. how to debug, how to solve realistic, real-world problems. not how to make a turtle draw a circle, that's not programming.

- please don't have blocks. just don't. they hurt.

- focus on your content instead of putting up posters on the wall with celebrities talking about the importance of programming

- don't call it 'code,' call it 'program.' do you know how different muggles think they are?

- please teach in a logical order. too many times have I seen commands --> functions --> variables/variable types --> then back to functions and return types.

- don't set an appropriate "age" to do it. please. its enough for people to learn to program, but to be told they're too "old" for a course? I can't tell you how many forgetful seniors and special needs students have been insulted. and don't even get me started on being too young. knowledge is knowledge, skill is skill, ability is ability.

- teach concepts with programming. don't separate them. they work better when they're taught together.

- understanding is more important than style. for beginners, fuck style. all of your program could be all on one line for fucks sake. I've had teachers chose style > functionality, because, fuck working programs, right?

- let your content speak for itself. this is not the place for celebrity endorsements.

- give resources for after a lesson is complete. when a beginner is finished, recommend more resources. you're never done learning.

most of these were things code.org did wrong. fuck them. I was in a constructive criticism mood today…

Hello World! First post here. I'm literally done with frontend stuff. I want to design code, not to code design. Unless it's Processing. I find it cute. So.. I have a somewhat handy grasp on C++ because of a class in electronics course, Python seems quite easy to catch. I'm totally new to programming. I'd like to get into software, game development and android development (but I would like to do things cross-platform).
Which paths, resources, languages, useful books, videos, or just anything would you recommend?

To be fair, I have no coding friends so mentorship or simply finding code buddies would be great. 💜

! Rant
Anyone self taught in python that could recommend resources for a complete beginner

As much as I love developing I have been also enjoying pentesting a lot lately.

So if you have any resources for a beginner to share please link them in the comments :)

!RANT

Bet the diff between a beginner developer and an intermediate developer is where to get code snippets either from old codebases or remote resources.

I really want to learn Go, but I'm not sure where to start! devRanters who are also Gophers, what tools/resources do you recommend for a beginner?

!rant
TL;DR: Can anyone recommend or point at any resources which deal with best practices and software design for non-beginners?

I started out as a self-taught programmer 7 years ago when I was 15, now I'm computer science student at a university.
I'd consider myself pretty experienced when it comes to designing software as I already made lots of projects, from small things which can be done in a week, to a project which i worked on for more than a year. I don't have any problems with coming up with concepts for complex things. To give you an example I recently wrote a cache system for an android app I'm working on in my free time which can cache everything from REST responses to images on persistent storage combined with a memcache for even faster access to often accessed stuff all in a heavily multithreaded environment. I'd consider the system as solid. It uses a request pattern where everthing which needs to be done is represented by a CacheTask object which can be commited and all responses are packed into CacheResponse objects.

Now that you know what i mean by "non-beginner" lets get on to the problem:

In the last weeks I developed the feeling that I need to learn more. I need to learn more about designing and creating solid systems. The design phase is the most important part during development and I want to get it right for a lot bigger systems.
I already read a lot how other big systems are designed (android activity system and other things with the same scope) but I feel like I need to read something which deals with these things in a more general way.

Do you guys have any recommended readings on software design and best practices?

Codecademy is a great resource for beginners!

Recently I’ve been super interested in learning more about blockchain and ethereum.

Anybody got any good beginner resources or projects? I like doing projects w new technologies bc I learn a lot better by doing. Thanks!

!Rant

So I started programming with ROR, because I was bored and wanted something to do. A couple months later a decent grasp of the basics, I've recently been thinking about switching over to JavaScript because I feel like the community is bigger and there are a lot more resources out there for things such as mobile development and server side support. As much as I love Ruby's elegancy and ease of use, my heart lies with Mobile when it comes to software development (games will always take precedence though!) And I feel like JavaScript would be more the way to go in terms of a more "full stack" experience. What do you guys think? Should I stick with Ruby or should I set my sights slightly higher? Oh the questions us beginner devs have hahah

Any of you got good CTF websites or equivalent learning resources for beginner ? Looking for students.