I was thinking over this days on how the development tools have evolved. I think that anybody can just start doing code now, with only some little training or just following some of the courses that exist over the Internet. I’ve been working on software for several years, and as I can tell that I hadn’t a really hard time as the first Assembly or C coders did, things weren’t as easy as they are now.
Obviously, this doesn’t mean that anybody can be a Programmer, even less a Software Engineer. For getting into that, I think, there are more topics that need to be covered beyond how to code or use an IDE. Concepts of data structures, memory management, networking and OS internals are really important to do the things correctly, not just doing them.
But for that, there’s a lot of info too. Even more, there are some schools or private institutions that offer “converting” your non-software degree onto something pretty similar to a Bachelor on Computer Sciences.
Thanks to the new Visual Studio 2012, Nuget, Entity Framework, MVC3/4, WebApi, etc. starting on the .net world is much more easier than it was 6 years ago. Frameworks like jQuery and YUI are helping people to get into the Javascript world with much less difficulty, and the same has happened with Cake for PHP and Spring/SpringRoo on Java.
So there is no reason to be scared, anybody can code now. So if you have an idea, or you’ve wondered if can do coding as a hobby, just do it! Maybe you have a million-dollar idea 😉