Andre Duvoisin

Hey, Programming Twitter! I'm going to be speaking to impressionable youth in a couple of days They are in their early years of learning. In the 20ish age range. What is your one solid advice? Language Agnostic. RT's are loved (I'm gonna quote you in the slides so be nice :)

Find area of programming that interests you and do work there. Small incremental tasks - "hey I made screen red! now I made a gradient!", "hey I made button on the page move!" etc. Language, framework, library, "tech stack" does not matter (ignore everyone who say it does).

For beginners, I’m tempted to disagree. You need to start with a popular language / framework / tech stack to land your first gig. Branching out and cross-applying your knowledge becomes much easier with experience. However, I agree that the best way to start is to “just do it”.

Landing gig, yes. Learning, not necessarily. So I guess depends on whether they want to learn, or land a job asap. e.g. in something like web frontend, if they start to learn something now, then one year later it might be obsolete! :P

twitter brevity & all... I've seen too many folks get so paralyzed at "is this language really the best?" (framework, API, tool, engine, ...) that they never really start *doing* anything

they spend a day on (for example) making DX11 app. Then read some post by someone saying that Vulkan is better. Switch to that, since "hey it's better". Then read that "vulkan is too hard", switch to something else.