How to become a developer!!!

Ste1605

Hi everyone,
I hope I am putting this in the correct forum and the folks here can offer some advice.
I currently work in the financial sector and have done so for 9 years. My current role has allowed me to develop excel VBA knowledge to a decent level with various projects. The excel VBA has all been self thought from Google and YouTube etc.
I am now looking at how to persue a career as a developer. Is there a specific qualification offered by colleges that I could look into?
I understand there are many languages, is it a case that I should look to focus on one in particular and if so what would best to choose.
I am not neccesarliy looking to change jobs however I would like to get some official qualifications in the field.
Sorry for the long post however I am hoping you guys can set me off in the right direction.
Thanks

14ned

Ste1605 wrote: »

I am now looking at how to persue a career as a developer. Is there a specific qualification offered by colleges that I could look into?
I understand there are many languages, is it a case that I should look to focus on one in particular and if so what would best to choose.
I am not neccesarliy looking to change jobs however I would like to get some official qualifications in the field.

Firstly, VBA, whilst convenient, is a bit ... unfortunate in terms of the many very bad practices it generates in people. There is an enormous gap between even quite complex VBA scripts and what most software professionals would call a well written piece of software. All that said, I'm no hater on VBA, it's as useful and powerful as Javascript, but shares a similar lack of ... structure which leads to a lot of bad practice.

So, before paying thousands in college fees, I'd suggest go take an online taster course in something like Python or Java. If you can finish the course, you'll know whether to proceed.

The next thing I'd do is either the OU's Java taster course http://www.openuniversity.edu/courses/modules/m250 or their PHP/HTML/Javascript taster course http://www.openuniversity.edu/courses/modules/tt284. Both are about two grand in euro including exam fees etc. Obviously the Java one will be much deeper on software development than the web one.

If you do really well in the OU course, then would be the time to consider turning it into a proper OU qualification, or else get your employer to pay for you to retrain, most financial outfits need more programmers with trading understanding and are willing to partially or fully fund a retrain. You'd need a very good grade in the OU course to persuade them usually.

Hope that helps.

Niall

Tom Dunne

I would echo what Niall says above. VBA makes you very good at writing very bad code.

Having said that, programming is programming, so if you have a flair for it, you should have no problem picking up other languages such as Python or Java. You could also look at C# (C sharp in case you were not familiar with the pronunciation).

Ste1605 wrote: »

I am now looking at how to persue a career as a developer. Is there a specific qualification offered by colleges that I could look into?

A lot of colleges/universities offer post-grad conversion courses, aimed at people such as yourself coming from a non-IT background.

Have a look at the respective websites to get an idea what is on offer.

Inspector Gadget

I suppose it's important to remember that there are certifications available in some languages (Microsoft do it for their languages, Oracle do it for Java, for example) but a bunch of others (particularly the open-source stuff such as Python, for example, don't have an official certification, though some third parties may offer certification in those)

As someone who once wrote a lot of VBA (did contracting work in Access once upon a time... don't ask) I can echo the sentiments above about it not being the best start. Don't let that put you off though. You can think like a programmer, though you will probably have to unlearn some bad habits.

If you don't have any particular time pressure on you to reskill, then take your time and look at what's out there - maybe a free course or tutorial series might give you good insight into whether something is for you or not before you commit lots of money.

Odds are that the easiest transition for you would be to VB.net - a lot of the language terminology will be the same although the syntax will be subtly different; at least that was my experience picking it up after writing a bunch of old-school VB 4/5/6 as well as VBA back in the day. C# is - in some ways - a small jump from there, from what little I've done of it (though I'm not a C# dev, so I'm open to correction on that)

Some languages are better suited to client-side than server-side, some are the opposite, and some do well on both - check that out and think about the kinds of things you'd like to work on and your typical use case(s). Don't forget that there's also a plethora of Web technologies that you could look at, as well as more niche stuff such as Swift (if you want to develop iOS apps). As an aside, remember that the native language for Android apps is Java, and that it's possible to build hybrid apps using Web technologies for all the mobile platforms.

You could also do your career some good by getting involved in open source projects and contributing - code, documentation, whatever - and having profiles that prospective (or current) employers can inspect and get a feel for how capable you are. Github is pretty much the go-to site for this stuff. As well as contributing to other people's projects, you could start your own if you had some pet project (assuming your work contract doesn't claim ownership of stuff you do in your spare time - some do) and let people see how you do what you do.

Hope that helps.

youcancallmeal

Some good advice in this thread even though it never worked out for op

irishgrover

Slightly oblique suggestion...but here me out..
You have good VB skills, but as others have said VB is not exactly where it's at, from a development point of view
In addition, you have very good financial services experience
In addition, you want to transition to a IT/Development role....

I'm suggesting the following....make a short to medium term goal of becoming a test engineer within a financial services company, specializing it automated testing, using QTP or as it's called now Unified Functional Tester. Reason for this thinking is that scipting language used for UFT is VB. Other reasons for this suggestion include

1. There are plenty of Financial Services companies that have test teams
2. Business experience (your financial experience) would be of benefit from a testing point of view (business domain expertise)
3. It's sometimes easier to transition from non IT to IT through software testing
4. You could, with a lot of self study (or by spendign ~€2k) get ISTQB certified in software testing, which should help you in the door
5. You could download a 30 day eval of UFT and teach yourself how to use UFT (you can already script in VB)
6. From there, with time, you could ease yourself into more "modern" test automation such as Selenium webdriver & Java, API testing (soap ui / XML / Rest / Jason etc
7. At that point you should have fairly reasonable and transferable technical skills
8. A good automation engineer gets paid at least as well as a good developer (supply and demand)