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Back to Software Development

In this article, I will tell the short story of recycling to software development. My goal is to come up with a sample roadmap for those who have returned to software development like me or want to become software developers.

25 years ago, I quit the software development business that I continued for 6 years and started sales business. I had thought it was impossible to return to software development again. Because the technology had changed a lot and I could not imagine that I could adapt to these new technologies with my advanced age (50+). Everything changed when a friend of mine, who gave training to software developers 3 months ago, encouraged me. He told me that I could develop software again in a short time like 1-2 months. He said that even people who have nothing to do with the software started to develop software in less than a year when they made enough effort. I was convinced. And… I started. It wasn’t as hard as I thought, I am quickly heading towards the goal.

First of all, you should set your goal, you cannot learn everything, you should go to one goal. After reaching your goal, you can set new targets. I set my goal as an “Android” based mobile application development. I decided to work on JAVA and then on “Android Studio”.

JAVA Process

I found a video series from YouTube that provides JAVA training in my native language and started working. First of all, I must state that it is absolutely necessary to use the same IDEs as the person giving the training, then I have written and tested each code in the training by writing it personally. In the meantime, I did not forget to make minor changes to the codes I learned in education and to observe the differences. My Java basic training took a week, of course, I did not memorize everything, so I made use of this video series in the later stages. (This time may take up to 1-2 months for the beginner to start writing.) After the video series, I tried to adapt to this software language, which is new to me, by solving sample Java projects from https://www.hackerrank.com/ site for a week or two. (For those who do not have previous software experience, it is useful to keep this period as long as possible.)

Android Studio Process

I started working on Android Studio, one of my friend’s training videos, which I mentioned above. Again, as in Java training, I ran each code one by one. At the end of this training series, I developed my first android project to publish on Google Play. I frequently applied to previous training videos at every stage of the project. Then I followed my friend’s advanced video training series. I am now developing my much more comprehensive new project, it contains many topics I learned, and I can find plenty of resources on the internet for different needs. The most important of these sources is the https://stackoverflow.com/ site and YouTube videos.

I should mention that while there are so many sources on the internet, your work is not very difficult. Sometimes you can struggle for something small for hours or even days. This is not lost time, on the contrary, it is an important part of education. What you need is to decide to start, set the goal, and continue patiently.

Ömer Kadayifci
Developer