Ben Weese

So in my quest to be the best QA Team Lead I could be I have been relearning coding. I started out studying Software Engineering in College and took 2 years of java, 3 semesters of C, one semester of C++, and one semester of web based programing. That is somewhere around 27 credit hours. I was actually a really good programer but a bad internship sent me away from it. Now that I am a QA Team lead, I work with programmers on a daily basis, so the fact I read and understand code helps. Also there are many test I could run if I programmed them myself or learned how, but it has been 7 years and I am rusty. So if you’re a QA manual tester looking for the next step to Quality Engineer or Automated testing; What do you do?

Here are some pointers:

Sorry, had to be done. So what can you do to learn code? You could always sign up for workshops, or go back to school, but not everyone has the time or money for that. Then what you can do is go to online schools to teach you about coding in your own time. These are sights that help teach you how to code. Will you be able to add it to your CV or resume? Probably not, but you can start adding these to skills you know and even build up a github account. So what are some of these sites?

Code School

So as I work for a company that programs for mac computers I wanted to learn Objective C syntax as I already knew C and C++. A fellow coworker showed me to Code School where he took Try Objective C. I tried it out and started to like it. I then tried a few more classes and I really loved Rails for Zombies. They have some good courses, some are free and the rest cost a membership of 29$ a month. 

Code.org 

Now this one I have not tried but it is for all ages so maybe you can try it with your kids. They have all kinds of ways to bring in all ages and run with the saying that everyone needs to learn to program a little, and to try their Hour of Code. It is backed by Celebrities and is really out there to make an impact on the world of programing.

Codecademy

This is one I have recently started I have gone through the make a website class and learned a lot. This one is completely free and will teach you about website programming to ruby to python to how to use certain API’s. I would suggest trying this site out and take from it what you can. 

Udemy

Udemy is entirely different from the other sites. What Udemy does is sells courses that other people sell. For instance the course I bought was on how to make IOS 8 apps with swift in the course as well. They have all kinds of courses and run deals all the time. You can by a 500$ course for as little as $10 and learn so much. You have access to videos, contacting the professor, quizzes, and other materials. This is really good for when you want to learn something at your own pace that has a lot of information. This one has been recommended to me time after time.

W3 Schools

This one was shown to me as a really useful reference tool but it has it’s own tutorials as well. It has all different kinds of web stuff, server stuff, and XML stuff. So I would check it out if you don’t like the tutorials the reference material is still good to use.