Curious about becoming a programmer?

Write 1000 words article and add html headings based on this youtube script Is it still a good idea to be or become a software developer many people have that on their minds because of AI and wondering we’re all wondering what’s the role of software developers in the future I was recently interviewed by one of my YouTube viewers and we thought it would

Be a good idea to record the discussion because he’s he’s thinking of becoming a software developer and wondering what are the skills that are going to take him farthest as a software developer so thank you Tony Rodriguez for talking with me and I want to share this interview because I think we

Covered a lot of really valuable ground I don’t think Tony is like a typical person thinking about getting into the software industry he’s clearly and you’ll see this from our conversations um quite a bit more mature and quite a bit more aware of uh what the profession

Of software development is about so I was very impressed about about that talking with him uh so it was a great and fun conversation there was problems with his audio uh so I’m going to put some subtitles in and then I’ll answer his questions so enjoy uh and if you want to

Continue that conversation please feel free to add to the comments uh because both Tony and I would love to hear from you so um this is the passionate programmer this is my first like real interview I’m very excited and thank you so much for for talking with me uh tono

Is that how we pronounce your name yeah yeah yeah excellent yeah my friends call me Tony Tony okay I’ll call you Tony thank you and um I I hope in our conversation today we’re going to dive into some of my views about what software development is and isn’t because I think everybody misunderstands

It I think it’s completely misunderstood and what it really is is TR truly amazing and and Incredibly powerful and creative we’re we’re just focusing actually on just one side of it that’s the challenge and that’s the challenge with the with industry and with education around it I believe and you

Ask me like should I go for my computer science degree I believe that there teaching information that is a quarter of a century out of date completely out of date no one in Industry uses what most what I see in most curriculums of computer science and those are the details and

The skills that AI will be able to handle for us the minua like what is the backing data structure behind this interaction that I’m going to be doing does things we can let AI help us with what we what we need to do as the humans in the equation

Is the creative side is the problem solving side is the visualization side is the finding discovering how to create designs that are resilient to change and understanding the evolution of a product so that we can allow it to change more easily these are things that humans are not paying attention to today they’re

Costing industry and they’re costing software development enormous amounts of money and they’ll be the only things left for us to do once AI takes over takes over in the sense of when AI starts to assist humans in writing code one of the questions you asked me was

What was my journey but when I went to school back in the age of the dinosaurs my college didn’t even have a computer science degree uh so what we did was the chair of the chemistry department and I found that there was an old pdp8 sitting in a corner somewhere in the chemistry

Department and we both we dusted it off and that was the beginning of the computer science degree at Sarah Lawrence College you know where I went uh so we were learning as we went you know which was kind of cool it was pretty exciting and I actually didn’t put much emphasis on software

Development because it was super easy for me and by the way the kind of problems we solved back then 30 years ago were much more trivial than the problems that people solve today so of course the the tools were much more rudimentary as well so to me it was like really easy to

Do so someone we need somebody who knows how to read and write because we’re going to have them write books but have you read Warren peace Moby Dick and fairy tales because you have to read those books because if you don’t you don’t know how to read that’s not true right it’s just

One particular thing right and so the people are looking for skills and what we really need to do is look for potential look for people’s ability because those skills you can learn like that I mean you can learn a programming language in a week or a couple of weeks

Or a framework in a weekend but what people don’t have and this is across the board I see is the skills around how to build software that’s maintainable you one of the things you ask me is um you know well what are the skills that developers need and I

Started to create a list and it’s completely different than the list that I see other people have because again I think that software development is is misunderstood those key skills are problem solving skills abstraction skills being able to visualize and when I and I’ve worked with tens of thousands

Of professional developers and when I ask them you know what are the key skills do do you agree that some of the key skills is being a developers is being able to solve problems being able to you know abstract things finding commonalities yes they say but I don’t see very many

Programs any computer science programs that have courses that teach that or books that talk about that and so it’s like okay these are the important skills but who is teaching them where do I go to learn them you know those are the challenges that’s why do you think that it’s again it’s

Because people completely misunderstand what software development is so I think that our development does end when we get the computer to do what we want it to do we have to go back and say how do we make this supportable how do we make it understandable to other people and

When we ask those questions because these are the most fruitful questions to ask then we start to build stuff that lasts longer in the field so you are asking about what are some of some of the skills what are the key skills and you know I will list I’ll list some them for

You and I think that they’re not on people’s radar so number one skill refactoring and when I talk to senior developers they’re like huh what refactoring what you know most developers have heard of refactoring they know that it is changing the design without changing the behavior of the

Code but like a lot of managers they wonder why would I do that why would I go into code that’s working and change it if it’s doing what I want it to do then I’m done right no no because there’s an enormous amount of risk involved and to go from one design

To another design it’s not often times a straight line it’s we have to go through the process and understanding the process of changing designs is vitally important it’s as important as factoring an equation is to a mathematician you know imagine being a professional mathematician and going oh I don’t

Factor equations um we don’t do those things we just come up with formulas every equation would be miles long and it would take forever to read right factoring is a key part of mathematics refactoring is a key part of software development and very few people know how to do it design patterns is

Another thing that I think incredibly valuable and super useful for developers to understand have you looked at patterns I I don’t recommend gang of four to read this one is called design patterns explained by Al shaay and Jim Trot this is the second edition and it’s my

Favorite book um so so I think it’s a great book on patterns yes and of course if we’re talking about other books I also want to recommend my book my first book have you checked it out I think that it talks a lot about the philosophy behind the technical practices and why they’re

Valuable love to know what you think of it cool cool so yeah books and you know when I was starting out in the field there weren’t very many good books today there are a lot of really good books on software development also I think that we as software developers have a very

Important role in the future not just to show the world how AI can actually help us but to to increase the velocity of humanity we’re things are changing so rapidly and they need to change rapidly because you know we’re running out of time in a lot of places of in our world

In our civilization and what we do as software developers help us respond quicker you know look at Pro computers and the internet that has changed we used to have to carry messages by horseback across the country now we can just like electronically interact so I feel like our role is so critically

Important to the future of humanity and learning these skills are really going to help I think we covered a bunch of stuff oh so I just wanted to very quickly mention some of the things that are coming up on this channel that you might find interesting this year so and

I think about a season a quarter at a time so uh the first quarter was really about Ai and and software development I’m going to be focusing on what I call Seven strategies in the next quarter they are um different areas in software development and different strategies for like doing continuous integration or

Test Force development or or other skills or growing as a developer or whatever so that’s Q2 hopefully by Q3 then I will do what I call the layer cake and these are um a series of principles and practices and patterns that I find that are most valuable for

Developers I want to spend this year really focus on focusing on the background material for people because next year I want to dive into completely different areas and I find that having the background will be really really relevant okay so a a lot of background stuff but a lot of stuff that probably

Most developers even senior developers haven’t been exposed to principles like the solid principles practices code qualities virtues in software be and all of those become the foundation for understanding design patterns so those are just a quick thumbnail of what I’m planning I have so much that I want to

Share that I want to try to figure out how to get from my head into the world my pleasure my pleasure great talking with you thank you Tony and looking forward to continuing our conversation so best of luck and keep me posted thank you so much have a good weekend okay you

Do byebye