Jason Ng just joined our team as a Full-Stack instructor and code guru, and, has some tips for the noobs. A former instructor at General Assembly, Jason has a wealth of teaching experience. On a side note, he also enjoys moonlight walks on the beach and candlelight dinners.

Coming from a voice of experience who has dealt with plenty of beginner coders, here are Jason's Top Tips for when you start coding:

“I want to lose 10 lbs before summer.”
“I want to read a book a week.”
“I will eat more fruits.”
“I will give up smoking.”
“I will be more organized.”
“I want a bikini-bod this year.”

We all make New Year resolutions but they tend to be personal. Many don't last more than a month, so when we reconsider how to self-improve, why not do something relevant, achievable and, new - like learning a very important skill in this digital age: coding.

It’s common to look at a website and wonder how it was made or look at a mobile app and think, “Hey that's pretty neat!” or, “that was so useful but I wonder if it could also do that...” Even marveling at technological innovations, we distance ourselves from them if we don't know the basics in order to understand what's happening behind the interface.

 The world of 1’s and 0’s was hostile territory to me, sanitized by a set of rules. Studying Arts, coding and I were like oil and water. I could not relate to my friends struggling to learn C++. Once in grad school, I took a compulsory coding workshop. It wasn't like swallowing the red pill, but when I saw my sample Web page from the lines of code I had sweated over, everything seemed to make sense in the former unknown universe. At an age where I felt the world was out of my control, coding was something that I could do by myself. If something didn't work, I could mend it. The power to build websites and databases could be mine...

Our instructor Jeff is also an author, here are some tips from his blog, a great coding resource:

As an instructor at Byte Academy, a high school AP computer science teacher, and a former middle school teacher, I’ve worked with countless beginning computer programmers. I’ve been there for everyone - from 10-year-old kids to adult career changers - while they write their first “Hello, World!” programs in languages like Python, JavaScript, C, PHP, Ruby, and even with MIT’s cool Scratch.

tl;dr

• Learning to code is no more difficult than learning anything else because all skills have a similarly high mastery point.
• Learning to code seems harder than learning other stuff because it has a higher barrier to entry.
• There’s proven strategies you can use to make this barrier to entry less intimidating.

Being a hackathon newbie until this weekend, I had always imagined hackathons as a room filled with glasses wearing programming nerds.  Bartending my first, I realized that they are fun, bonding experiences filled with innovation and networking opportunities.

I served as bartender of the “Byte Bar” which was sponsored by Byte Academy, the coding bootcamp that partnered with StartupBootcamp FinTech, a global accelerator, on the event.  This was StartupBootcamp’s first hackathon in the United States and appropriately called FinTech City Never Sleeps. Developers, VCs, designers, and more from across industries came together to solve some of the greatest challenges in financial technology. Categories of challenges included Financial Trust, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Financial Inclusion, and Target Niche Banking. Technology, energy drinks, banks and companies from around the world sponsored the event, even providing beer openers (thank you Xignite for making my life easier…)

Aside from the enrollees, comedians, industry experts, volunteers and business minds contributed to the 24 hour event. Cody Hess, a coding instructor, MC’ed the orchestration. His programming jokes still make me laugh..