Learning to code suggestions

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Coding is a vast sea of always changing platforms and languages.

It's hard to give you advice on such a general topic. It'd be like me saying I want to get into construction...what part of construction?

I'd suggest you find a project related to the business you run - and try to develop a solution for that. This will keep you working at your current job - while developing some experience with coding to see if you really like it. It will be a great learning experience - as you will see that there a million ways to solve every problem. There is no best way - too many people get caught up in that.


Planning and design phase is the most important - if you just start coding - you will run into roadblocks and things you didn't plan for and will end up with a huge mess.

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Is there a market for individual “jobs” to do from home on an irregular schedule?

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Yes, there are freelancing sites like upwork and such where you can work "gigs". But you'd be competing with people overseas who are both better and cheaper than you. It's tough to break in.

If you think this is really something you want to do, do like FuzzyBear said and find a problem in need of a solution in a domain that you already know, like construction. Surely you've used lots of industry-specific software... how would you improve the tools you've used, or what tools did you need that seemingly don't exist? It could be related to estimating/costing, or time/material tracking, or maybe something to do with vendor management, or whatever.

Or ask people that you know if there are pain points in their life that could be solved with software. Or maybe you have a hobby that could benefit from better software tools.

It's impossible to start from scratch and immediately generate a living income. You will have to build out several projects, not just to learn, but also to build a portfolio and, maybe more importantly, confidence in the fact that you can build things.

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If you think this is really something you want to do, do like FuzzyBear said and find a problem in need of a solution in a domain that you already know, like construction. Surely you've used lots of industry-specific software... how would you improve the tools you've used, or what tools did you need that seemingly don't exist? It could be related to estimating/costing, or time/material tracking, or maybe something to do with vendor management, or whatever.

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Piggy backing off this, there are usually plenty of opportunities to code your business processes to make them more accessible to your software. Is there anything that you or someone else at your company has to do regularly that is repetitive and tedious and you ask yourself "why can't the computer do this?" while you're doing it? Something like manually combining multiple spreadsheets into one before it gets uploaded into the software you use. Or maybe when a new report comes out you copy a portion of it and email it to somebody.

I'd look for simple automation tasks like this and learn how to code them. A scripting language like Python would probably be a good choice and if you google the problem you'll probably find examples of people coding for similar situations. As Korkstand pointed out, you're unlikely to be able to quit your dayjob by becoming a freelance coder, but if your company lacks in house IT development resources, there are likely plenty of opportunities to learn to change your role in the company into one you like better.

Learning the tech part wouldn't be difficult for me at this point because I've been doing stuff like that my entire adult life. May or may not be very difficult for you. All of the info is online now and that makes it easier.

Regarding landing work, if I picked up a new language today the hardest part would be interviewing and convincing the interviewer to take me on, minus any real work experience with the new tech. They want work experience, and lacking that you'd have to be a good salesman.

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My goal in this is not to make my company run smoother

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Coding is about telling computers how to solve problems. Computers do EXACTLY what we program them to do and we often don't give them good enough instructions. Good programming isn't just about knowing a language and commands, it's about being a good problem solver and having real life experience trouble shooting when your programs inevitably fail to do what you expect (because they only do what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do).

Having real world problems to solve will be very helpful in learning to code. Your current job is one potential source of problems to solve, but you can also learn with hobbies. Sports, for example, generate tons of data that you can create programs to turn that data into reports and visualizations. There has been more than one basketball blogger that ended up getting hired by NBA front offices based on the work they did creating advanced statics or reports and analysis.

The bottom line is the online tutorials are a good place to start, but if you want to make a career out of this with no background in it, you will have to build up a portfolio of projects where you show you know how to solve problems by coding. And as someone else said earlier, coding can mean so many different things. Even having advanced Excel skills might be enough to get you a decent job.