Yes - plenty of campers get hired without a formal CS degree. University degrees are a huge career boost, and often lead to higher paying jobs, but they are not necessary for getting a developer job.

There is no direct substitute for a university degree. No certificate program or intensive coding bootcamp will give you a credential that holds a candle to a university degree, which is still the gold standard for most employers. If you are almost finished with college, I recommend finishing. Spend as little money on it as absolutely necessary.

If you can get a developer job without a university degree, great! But you should still use online courses to plug the gaps in your theory knowledge. Here's a list of great online courses - most of which are free - that freeCodeCamp.org just published a few hours ago: medium.freecodecamp.org/the-50-best-free-online-u…

Academia often lags behind industry. I would try and learn everything your professor tells you to learn, but I would also supplement that with lots of books, podcasts, YouTube videos, and online learning platforms.

University professors are well-meaning, but ultimately it's up to you to learn what you need to learn so you can get a good developer job. Don't get complacent and think that a university degree will guarantee you a job. It won't.

I answered a similar question a minute ago, so again I'll link to this article I wrote again. It's basically all of my core productivity hacks wrapped into one article: medium.freecodecamp.com/live-asynchronously-c8e71…

Thanks for your kind words, Hrishi!

I'm going to answer this specifically for continuing education for adults, which is where I've spent my career as an educator, and is whom freeCodeCamp is focused on helping.

Right now a lot of technology resources that used to be completely free are moving over to corporate training. This is a much more lucrative field than trying to help individual learners gain practical skills they can use to get a better job.

All of the original massive open online course programs seem to be moving in this direction.

I think that's great. Employers should invest in professional development for their employees, and these platforms are way better than what employers used to use for this purpose.

But there are also hundreds of millions of adults out there who would benefit tremendously to learn to code, and their employers aren't going to foot the bill for that.

So I see the rise of inexpensive (and in freeCodeCamp.org's case, completely free) resources that focus on helping busy people learn to code in a self-paced way.

These resources will continue to get more convenient and accessible.

The term "software engineer" is somewhat fuzzy (in Texas, for example, you have to have a 4-year engineering degree to legally call yourself an engineer). So just to clarify, I will answer for someone who is able to get a developer job.

There are a lot of aspects to getting a developer job that go beyond coding: your ability to interview well, to network effectively, and soft skills. Do people like you? Are they convinced that you're reliable?

Assuming you have those skills, I think that most people will be able to successfully get a developer job after 2,000 or 3,000 hours of deliberate practice building projects. So that's about 40 - 60 hours a week of coding. This will vary wildly - some people get a job after just a few months - but I think this is a reasonable conservative figure.

Yes. This is almost always done over Skype or Google Hangouts. (I have 2 young kids so I don't travel much at the moment.) But if you're a professor - or if you're a student and can get your professor onboard - and want me to talk to your class, email me. I may be able to do that.

JavaScript is faster than Python and it's under much more active development, thanks to significant investment from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and thousands of other major companies who pay their employees to improve open source JavaScript tools like Node.js.

Python is a great language to learn if you want to do scientific computing. Some companies, like Quora and Instagram, use Python on the back end. But far more of them use Node.js or are in the process of transitioning to it.

When I started freeCodeCamp I made a conscious decision not to take any funding, and turned down funding, anticipating converting it to a nonprofit. So I don't know how hard it would be to get traditional seed funding. I have lots of friends who've gone through this process, and it's months of their lives they have to spend building slide decks and practicing pitches, then pitching dozens of investors. So I would say raising funding is hard.

For nonprofits, it's even harder. If you want to get government grants, you will probably need a full-time grant writer. Most nonprofits also have other full-time fundraising staff. Fundraising can often be 10-20% of a nonprofit's operating budget.

freeCodeCamp.org is in a special position because the freeCodeCamp community is huge. More than a million people use freeCodeCamp each month. And yet our nonprofit is extremely capital efficient, operating at a fraction of what a typical nonprofit would need. But we may need to hire professional fundraisers in the future.

The money problem is a hard one for everyone. Nothing about running a startup or a nonprofit is easy.

I recommend contributing to open source and learning contemporary web development skills through a platform like freeCodeCamp.org.

Much of this will be review for you. Building the projects will be great projects.

With some practice, you should be able to re-enter the software development job market with confidence.

Remember - the tools may change, but the underlying math and computer science fundamentals haven't changed much. You just need to acquaint yourself with the minority of topics that have changed. You've got this.

The freeCodeCamp.org platform runs on the same tools that the freeCodeCamp curriculum teaches. We eat our own proverbial dog food. :)

We use Node, Loopback (which is basically Express with a few extra API features), and React + Redux on the client side. We use other common tools like Cloudflare, NGINX, and cloud servers.

Yes. Software development is becoming more generalist. Most people on development teams are expected to have wider exposure. These are often called "T-shaped" developers - deep in one specific field (say, cross browser compatibility), but with a broad complementary skillset. You can call these developers "full stack developers" or more commonly just "developers."

Increasingly, employers may expect developers to be familiar with concepts like UX design and DevOps as well.

The body of knowledge you're expected to have as a developer keeps growing. Luckily, the resources to learn these things get better and better all the time, and the tools themselves get easier to learn.

Thanks for your kind words. For helping make the Indian government more efficient, I would look at what Code for America is doing. Here's one of their long-running meetups in San Francisco: meetup.com/Code-for-San-Francisco-Civic-Hack-Night

You may be able to find a similar organization in India or start one.

I applaud you for making an effort to improve your government by empowering it with code. 👍

Contribute to open source. This will help you do the following:

• learn how to work with legacy code
• learn how to work within existing organizations and productively communicate and get work done
• build a portfolio of meaningful contributions (that aren't just good because you say they're good - they're good because an organization believed they were good enough to accept into their codebase)

Contributing to open source accomplishes all three of these things at the same time. Here's a good place to start: github.com/freeCodeCamp/how-to-contribute-to-open…

Most online programming resources are geared toward beginners, and high level scripting languages are a good place to start for that.

Another reason is that most developer jobs involve doing web development - if not for building web applications, at least for creating APIs that can be reached through the giant platform that is the internet.

There are jobs that focus mainly on using tools that are "closer to the metal" such as embedded systems, but in my experience, employers who are filling these positions are more likely to also require a traditional computer science and/or electrical engineering academic background. For example, defense contractors like SpaceX have lots of developers who work on propulsion software for rockets.

Still, there are some resources for learning these things outside of an academic environment. You might take a look at this giant list: github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books