There are a lot of ways to change the world. Programming is one direct way to use your brain and the social net afforded to us by our western governments.
I want to introduce you to the concept of ‘open source’.
If a project is open source it means the source code is open for anyone to download. Like wikipedia is free to read and anyone can edit - open source projects are created and maintained by individuals.
Programming is a community. And not just a single community, a vast community of proportions we can’t fathom. There are large open-source projects, but more importantly there are thousands of tiny projects. Each project has dreams and motivations built into them. Some are just getting started, some are already running.
The exciting thing is that you can join any team in the world.
There are open-source projects for building wind-energy farms in Africa. There are projects for developing open-source facebook. Open source youtube. Open source self-driving cars. Open source ‘vertical farms’. Almost anything you can imagine.
Programming being what it is, you don’t need to have a degree to contribute. You can open your laptop on the train. Open the buglist of your favorite project. Locate a bug that seems possible. Solve it. A day or two later, people from across the globe will give you feedback, and then have your code added to the final project.
Okay. But not to sound dickish, what about me? Can I get some of that internet money?
To make money in programming, you need to know two things.
All companies use an API and a database in some form. It’s two cornerstones of any it-solution. The reason this is a good place to start is not because it’s easy to do, but because it’s a limited scope. It’s enough to know about these two areas to be useful.
But to do that, you need to be able to code. All the stuff you learn in the course is directly usable for coding APIs.