Ask HN: I'm teaching my wife to code. What direction should we go?

I realise this is a crazy idea but have you tried asking what she's interested in?

I think the usual advice is that she should try to solve one of her own problems. That doesn't mean curing diabetes or anything. I used to get annoyed because my personal budgeting program expected the debit & credit columns of my bank statement to be swapped, and I had to cut & paste the columns every time I imported a statement. That's a great first Python project, in my opinion. Look for nuisances. Maybe that means front-end development, maybe not. But whether anyone has any personal or professional success with software development depends on that person having the sense that they can solve a genuine problem with their skills, even if it's a modest problem or takes them a while or isn't a perfect solution.

I am with FroshKiller's comment, who said to solve one of her own problems. My girlfriend had little interest in programming, but asked me one day if there was a way to track a price on a shopping website and get notified if it changes. I offered to help her make this, and she didn't believe she'd be anyway near capable of implementing something like that.

Took an evening, she wrote it in Python, and I had her look everything up (StackOverflow and other places), and just helped in explaining the rough concepts involved (here's what a variable is, then you need to read a website's entire content into a variable, see what that website actually looks like in code, spot the words..., here's how you can cut and slice text, and find word positions, etc.) — I then wrote her a tiny python library that only has one function, like a "send_email(to, subject, message)" and takes care of using my smtp setup. She was excited (and exhausted), but she was REALLY excited when she received an e-mail about a week later about a price-drop.

Stuff like that is gold, it takes time to spot those opportunities and find something that matches her interests, but working on things that she actually needs will make things incredibly easier.

Another issue is that most people don't know what they can actually 'do' with programs. A friend of mine lost his job and started studying programming, and when I asked him what projects he had in mind, he had no idea what's even in the realm of things possible. I helped him make a temperature reader with the Raspberry Pi, and a website. And he loved it. But he completely freaked out when I showed him that same website can be opened on his phone and stored as an "app-like" bookmark on his home screen. He showed all his friends, and I'm sure he didn't sleep much that night wanting to improve the website to make it even cooler.

The hardest part about programming isn't the language, it's learning all the technologies and concepts involved in how it all ties together, how to break any given project into its core components that need to be implemented, and what tool is right for the job.

Why not dot net and asp.net core, there will be a lot of jobs in it and the transition is just beginning.

Start with her own website ( no CMS)

I've been telling my wife that she would be a good coder for years. She finally agreed to let me show her some things the other day.

I'm planning on going the JS route. She actually knows a tiny bit about HTML (BBCode from the MySpace days) so there will be something familiar to work with. Plus, it doesn't take much to get to the point where you're moving <div>s around, and I want her to actually see results so she stays interested.

teach him about frontends: the design(html, css).

dont force her to do something she doesnt what.

thats bad idea.

Always remember effective learning can be achieved by doing something like small project and stuff.

dont confuse her to make or clone something big. it's really hard to discern.

tell her about good learning trick like spaced repetition

https://www.cantikcan.tk

Same story here. My wife did some online course at EPFL for java programming, then she did the front end developer nanodegree from udacity.

Now she is writing elm with me. I'm doing my best to keep her away from all the js "drama" (setting up webpack, dealing with npm...) and only into programming to avoid her being overwhelmed. And all this build stack/devops... part can be really frustrating.

Also, functional programming is somehow much easier to grasp when you start with it.

before teaching her programming find out if she is into logical thinking. it may sound horrible but I came to believe my math teacher that only 20% of mankind is capable of 'logical intuition', and only those can become true good programmers.

I would start by doing simple calculator in scheme, then maybe tryruby.org and then maybe analysis of brainfuck/turing machine.

Try Go, it is a nice language for making small tools that can simplify and automate your life. I wouldn't touch JS ecosystem with a ten foot pole, it only leaves you with frustration.

For general programming? Start with Python. She's not going to get that job tomorrow. You may as well help her get some strong fundamentals in a language that's easy to code in and has straightforward semantics. If she really wants to do JavaScript, she can pick it up later.

Consider starting with theory.

I have tried to teach couple of close friends programming in Java before. Most people are interested with what you are building and excited to learn. But after writing some code with not much visual result, they interest started to fade in. So I would recommend to start html/css/js so she can see results of her work and get more interested to build more. ))

I'm actually going to conflict with some other suggestions here, but when I first started learning to code, I started with simple HTML, CSS, and JQuery/Vanilla JavaScript. I took a framework: bootstrap and started building websites. I liked this approach because the elements are well documented and easy to pick apart AND even more important, you can start to see the results of your code immediately.

I suggest picking a project, and focusing on it while learning how to code. Learning is such a continuous process while coding that I think you need some kind of focus to ever feel like you have learned enough to apply the skills. Plus, that project could be a portfolio piece when she is seeking work.

Also, the project doesn't have to be a business - I think utilities that you would use, whether it's family communications or something funny, are perfect.

As a teacher, your job is to expose the student to a variety of programming topics early on. But when it's time to narrow the focus, their interests should be what guides their study.

The hardest part of this is actually convincing companies afterwards that she can actually code. Although there is a huge shortage of developers companies still are primarily looking for Senior Devs with years of experience in this very special framework the company is using.

If the end goal is remote work, I think front-end is the way to go. Like you said, there are the most freelance jobs associated with it.

I've been thinking about this a bit so I thought I'd share: Two successful, but fairly tech illiterate, Women in my life have wanted websites built for their businesses. I put both of them in touch with a bunch of developers and they also searched on their own. They both ended up choosing a Woman freelance developer. They said the Woman made them feel most comfortable and seemed to empathize with their needs and many uncertainties. I wonder if there is untapped potential there.

Would be be so kind to share your research up to this point, i.e. the great learning resources you have been referring to? Seems like you already put quite some thought into this :)

Everyone gets into coding a different way. If she is inclined toward design, I would definitely start with HTML and go from there.

As a new coder even things like learning the tree-like structure of HTML, the brutality of an errant slash or missed closing tag, or the frustrations of bringing a visual idea to fruition with plain text are challenging enough. I wouldn't worry too much about HTML "not being real code".

If time is on your side (more than a year), I would gently nudge her into HTML and see what she comes up with. If she finds it tedious maybe try another route, but if it sticks I would segue into simple Javascript or CSS after that depending on what she wants. If she wants more control over how the page looks, naturally she'll want to learn CSS. If she wants more control over functionality and making the page "do" something, Javascript.

As a completely radical idea, you could show her LOGO. I remember that being incredibly inspirational when I was a kid and appealing to the artistic side.

If time is on your side, you are lucky in that she can afford to play around and not go down the bootcamp route which will inevitably lead to burnout. I say nurture the interest as gently as possible.

There's a Rails Girls coding event in Munich in April, I highly suggest checking that out. Even though my SO didn't stick with Ruby, it was a catalyst for her interest in programming and understanding of frameworks.

http://railsgirls.com/munich2018.html

I had a similar discussion with my wife. I instead found it better for her to start off native mobile app development. She has started the udacity android course and is loving it. The best thing about learning Android for beginners, compared to Web dev, is there are fewer things to learn. They just need to learn Java and Android Studio, and have an Android phone to test their app. I guess the same stands for iOS dev too.

>however, I started wondering if I shouldn't push her towards front-end

Yeah I would do the same

>i.e. HTML/CSS and eventually JS and a respectable framework or two. I did some substantial AngularJS projects a while back, so I could support her if we chose this direction. She is quite inclined towards design and has a good sense of color palettes, fonts, arrangements, etc. (IMHO).

Go for Vue, it's way easier to learn and to build small things quickly, and the doc is really well made so it will not be as frustrating as it could with angular

There is a good, free book on Python[1] that teaches practical skills for automating tasks. I sometimes recommend it to people, because it's immediately practical.

After that, you could try Flask[2] or Django[3] (Python web frameworks) and gradually introduce HTML, CSS, and JS.

JavaScript frontend development has more moving parts, so I think it's harder to pick up as a first technology. You have to explain asynchronous code earlier than with Python, and that's one more mental concept to juggle.

There are also a couple of online courses[4][5] that might be useful. I've only watched part of the first one -- it was good.

[1] http://automatetheboringstuff.com/

[2] http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/0.12/quickstart/

[3] https://tutorial.djangogirls.org/en/

[4] https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-computer-science-mit...

[5] https://www.edx.org/course/cs50s-introduction-computer-scien...

My wife took the CS50 Harvard course, great content, engaging lecturer and the problem sets are very satisfying. Gives a wide spectrum of coding exposure and then she can choose where to go from there. The CS50 in a box/virtual machine makes getting up and running pretty straight forward.