Everything .Net

Why this blog?

The reason for this blog is to talk about coding with this points in mind:

  1. I want to encourage as many people as possible to learn coding, as I consider it THE skill of the 21st Century.
  2. I want to help you learn to code and have fun doing so, especially in a way that helps you avoid the mistakes I made.
  3. I’d like to share some of my insights on new projects, ideas and techniques and discuss them on this blog.
  4. I will talk extensively about .Net Framework and all its provided components because I like the concepts of it very much and deal with it as a professional
  5. Last but not least, I learned to code not all by myself, but with a lot of help from peers, colleagues, blogs etc., so now it is time to give something back.

Why should you learn to code?

I do not want to go into detail in this post, but the main points I generally want to convey are: firstly it is a core skill for the 21st century. And secondly and even more important, after the inital learning curve it is a friggin lot of fun, you will forget the time and things around you while you are working hard on solving a given task.

If you have already made up your mind and want to learn coding, then just go ahead and dive right into it. Best to start with the How to get started post.

If you need some motivation on why you want to learn coding consider reading Why should I learn to code

Also if you want to learn things about .Net navigate to the .Net specific sections, like framework, WCF, TPL and such.

If you want to learn more about me than just read ahead. Else look at the Contents this Blog has to offer from technologies in .Net to how to get started with coding. For this look at the menu above and select the appropriate category.

About me

I consider myself a software engineer/programmer/developer (coder for short) among other things. I currently work as a senior software developer at a company in germany, blog about coding and learn as much as I can day in and day out.

I call it coding instead of programming/software engineering or whatever, even so it might not capture the essence of it, but because I like the word ;). With that said, I will use all of those names as I see fit (my blog, my rules).

Most importantly for you to know: I am a self taught coder. I found my passion with it after lots of different jobs and career paths. And that underlines what I want to achieve with this blog: help other people learn how to code and maybe find their passion or at least make their life a little easier.

How and why did I learn to code?

… and more importantly why did I stick with it.

Although I studied Industrial engineering at university, which had computer science as part of its curiculum, I had little knowledge of professional software engineering when I entered my career.

My first professional software project was during my work as a research assistant at my university. To cut a long story short, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but with each day I learned a little more and delivered a full functioning programm that did what it was supposed to do. Nothing more nothing less. (praise the mighty internet and ctrl+c/ctrl-v)

With the positive outcome I had the realization that it was the first time (maybe ever), that I did not have to work at my job, rather I enjoyed what I did all day. I wanted to make a professional career out of it.

So in my complete naivity I went out to buy books, read blogs, watched video courses online and build sample application after sample application. But the content was overwhelming. There was so much to learn and much more material than I could ever read. Also at the beginning you feel the need to know about low level OS features, high level this and that and so on. In general you start somewhere with high hopes, but you end up with more questions than you started. And I felt I was not going anywhere.

So naturally I got frustrated and thought I would never learn all of that stuff. Despite all that (and some might say because of my thick head) I decided to just go for it and applied for a full time job in the software industry. To my surprise I landed one. At that job I hustled and put in crazy hours each and every day, learned a lot and got better and better at my job, yet I never had the impression that I know all the stuff I need to know.

Just recently I realized that this a feeling you will always have as a developer. The only way to work/live with it in my opinion is to embrace it. This will make you crave for even more knowledge each day to just understand everything a little better. For me that is part of the fun of being a coder.

So you can see I learned it sort of the hard way, and why should you too? I hope this blog might help you out on your personal journey to learn to code, whatever your goal is that you want to achieve.

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