The Geek Whisperers work every day with enterprise IT professionals. In Season 2 of the show, the grew centers on talking about careers: particularly about the career success of high tech leaders who have navigated the nonlinear career path. Listen, enjoy and please be sure to share. Join John Troyer, Amy Lewis, and Matthew Brender as they share their experiences, stories, and what's worked for them as they do their daily jobs as Geek Whisperers.
http://geek-whisperers.com
From Photographer to Developer w/Ashley McNamara – Ep 90
This week we’re joined by another Developer Advocate in the wild. Ashley McNamara, community unicorn herder at ObjectRocket, leads us downs the path toward her title. Her and Matt caught up at Velocity Conf and exchanged the secret handshake that they can’t tell you about.
Ashley is an incredible photographer and did it full-time for a while. She now spends her day in a completely different way. We discuss:
- Career transition
- The economics of photography
- Going from “sort of” in technology to Developer Advocate
- Being a business owner (90% business, 10% skill)
- Building our future robotic overlords
- The career pivot
- Learn Python the Hard Way by Zed Shaw
- Meetups, Meetups, Meetups
- Reaching out to a mentor
- Girls Who Code
- How everyone sucks at something (and how to admit it)
- Will Wheaton on why it’s amazing to be a geek
We also mention quite a lot of learning to code resources. For computer science knowledge (which is NOT a pre-req to coding):
- EdX CS 50
- Coursera CS 101 (by Stanford)
For hands-on experience with coding:
- Treehouse
- Code.org
- Codecademy
Ashley found that old school was the most helpful for her and she recommended these books, both children’s and intro:
- Hello World
- Head First Python