Get Yourself Coding ...

I have a simple piece of career advice ... if you want a great job in the future ... get yourself coding. Our new world is being built with software, and the jobs of the future will require strong analytical skills.

I have great pride in our own students when I give them an additional Python lab on Cryptography, and the next week they start to discuss how the implemented their own code, in order to test some of the concepts. To me, they are using coding as a scratch pad for their ideas, and in the way that we used pocket calculators in the past.

Overall the years, too, I've seen Python flourish ... and I've become hooking on it too and it's the first place I turn if I want to do a bit of back-end processing ... even though I don't much like its syntax and it just doesn't quite integrate fully with Microsoft Windows, but it is just is so powerful.

So I often get asked ...

"What is the best way to get into coding?"

and my answer is that whatever works for you, but perhaps avoid buying a book on the Introduction to ...., and going on a three-week course, as that will probably switch you off, especially if it crawls through the ins and outs of the syntax of the language.

My advice is always to find something that interests you, and get a bit of code from the Internet, and start coding. It might be controlling some wi-fi lights from a Raspberry PI, or investigating some hashing methods, but it will serve a purpose for you to learn.

These days there's often no need for complete development environments and Python will run quite happy on your Macbook (you just need to find the Terminal):

So my strong recommendation is to get yourself into coding and Big Data, and Pandas is one of the best places to start:

Here's one of the free courses we run here:

And if you are more of a 1's and 0's person, here's some crypto in Python:

Or programming wi-fi lights:

Or reading network packets:

So ... go and get coding ... it'll look great on your CV (and it's fun too!). Coding is for all these days, and not just for developers.