Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Enter The Matrix

So there's this thing on the web called the Programmer Competency Matrix.  It's a skills rubric written by an experienced developer used to gauge one's mastery in certain programming competencies.  It's exciting to see all the skills I have to learn, but at the same time, quite scary that many of them might as well have been written in an alien language.

The Architect was the coolest guy in the Matrix.
A fitting continuum.  Noob on the left.


It's as good a test as any to gauge my starting abilities.  I'm happy to report that I'm not 2^n in every category.  I consider myself the highest level, log(n), in the area of Knowledge > Blogs :)  I have done some basic programming tutorials in a few different languages, i.e., html/css, php, javascript, mysql, python.  I have even taken what I consider a bit more in-depth look at Python, although my inexperience doesn't allow a good comparison.

Feel free to follow along, but this is mostly an indicator for myself.  Here is a chart of where I stand:



These squares won't mean much if you didn't follow the link.  There are some areas where I felt I didn't even deserve level 0, but others where I was a little between 0 and 1.  I erred on the side of conservatism.  Obviously, I was going to have 0 for Experience.  I did rather well in the 'meat' of Programming skills... probably because a lot of those categories have looser correlations with the actual art of developing software than others, like code organization.

There are a couple of reasons why I like this chart.  It shows me where my skills/knowledge/experience gaps are, thus providing an unsorted map of specific things I should try to dive into.  It's also a way to periodically check my own progress.  Perhaps I'll make it a habit to re-evaluate using this rubric every month or two.  Further, I think it's a great visual way to address the fact that I don't have a related degree to a potential employer.  I can't wait to fill this thing up... it's like a real-life video game!

On that note, I found this awesome blog post about Levelling Up As A Developer.

But, I'm getting ahead of myself.  It's time to hit the e-books.


9 comments:

  1. I sit about where you do on most of this stuff, I'll be trying to follow along with your progress.

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    1. Awesome. You're exactly who I want to share stuff with. Feel free to let me know if there are certain topics that you're looking at. I tend to go off on a tangent sometimes.

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  2. Btw I found this through /r/learnpython

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  3. From /r/learnpython too. I'm doing something similar to you, although my starting age is higher. :) I'll be following your adventures with great interest!

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    1. Glad to have more fellow redditors! Especially ones that are too old to be switching careers but are too hell-bent on the idea to be stopped. :D

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  4. I'm going to accompany you on your journey! :-)
    Which e-book are you going to start with?

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    1. Haha that was just a figure of speech. I'm actually doing udacity.com's CS101 course. Check it out, it's completely free. The catch is, you don't get any certificate/credit from the institution.. the experience is worth it!

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    2. I was working on that for a while too, learn python the hard way is also great, lately I've been finding projects on bit bucket/github that interest me and diving into the code.

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    3. That sounds like a natural path to follow. I really want to learn how to use github! Anything elementary enough that I could understand?

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Let me know what you think!