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General Discussion

How long till i can become a developer?

Hello there,

I was wondering if anyone could tell me how long roughly it will take before i could be a good developer? That is if I spend 40 hours a week learning and I have very basic knowledge of MATLAB and C++, and a bit of HTML.

2 Answers

Hello Hesam,

Just to give my 0.02$, I guess you will be getting pretty vague answers here. It all depends on how good you want to become, the scope and the depth of the projects you want to accomplish, etc. You will be constantly acquiring new knowledge, upgrading to new technologies and finding new things to implement and deploy in your projects...

... so it can take a life-time!

Say you want to set up a web-page... in two or three weeks you will absorb the knowledge on the beginner track. But then, you will think of adding some interactivity to it, or wanting to simplify your life with things like wordpress to help with maintenance and upgrades, or refine the graphics and looks of it...

... and then you will want to manage the web hosting, availability on different platforms, and say add databases to it, or wanting to add e-commerce to the page, etc.. hum... it looks like you'll need to become a full-stack developer! And what technologies and tools to use? Maybe you want to fully optimize things, so you'll need to learn several languages and frameworks to work on and exploit their kudos and know their limitations...

... and maybe you will also become InfoSec conscious and will want to protect your project, add security and encryption features, ensure you properly sanitize your coding... and while you are at it, maybe thousands of questions will arise, for example on cryptograpy that you will want to check, or give a try on pen-testing to see if you and/or your web-hosting provider have done your job properly...

... and so forth!

Just enjoy the ride!

I'd say 6 to 12 months of full time work.

Check out: http://joshuakemp.blogspot.com/2013/11/how-blacksmith-learned-to-code-and-9.html

Thank you very much James, you just made my day. I will spend on average 30 hours a week and having some MATLAB and C++ knowledge will hopefully get me there quicker.