Starting to learn and working abroad

Career Advice
1

Hi! Well, I have 2 completetly unrelated questions.

  1. I’m going to a Computer Science University next year. In this spare year, I would like to start learning how to code to both make sure it’s what I wanna do, and already start learning some stuff. I can spare around 1h per day. I have no idea what I wanna be in the long run tho. Everything sounds fun. Software developing seems a really solid job, game developing would be a dream come true, machine learning and AI sounds just way too cool. So yeah, I don’t even know where to start. Should I learn the foundations of computers and such thing I’ll eventually learn in college or focus solely on coding? Either way, how do I start learning it? There are thousands of courses and websites that can teach you coding, but I didn’t really connect with any of them. Any suggestions? Being free would be amazing, but if a paid course is way better for cheap, I’ll take it as well. I saw some guides from p1xt, are they worth it? I need something designed to extreme dummies, most websites I tried don’t explain anything, just asuming you already know to code.

  2. I’m brazillian, and I eventually want to work abroad, and try to permanently imigrate elsewhere. It seems like programming is a job that makes this kind of thing easier, but I would really like some words on the current state of the market. I was planning to get my bachelor’s degree and apply for jobs around the world. If it doesn’t work, I would work in Brazil for a while, save some money to pay for masters in another country, and try to stay there. I don’t have too much of a prefference - any first world country would be amazing. Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance!

2

  1. FCC focuses on web development, which isn’t quite the same as what you’ll be studying in CS. For CS, I might suggest something like C or C++ or Java. Python is becoming popular. Or you might ask the department what languages they teach. But if you want to do FCC, then you will learn a lot of useful things, but it just has a slightly different focus.

  2. Job based immigration is always difficult. Of course, the better the degree, the better the experience, and the better you skills can attract an employer to be willing to do the expensive and difficult work needed to sponsor you, the more luck you’ll have. Skilled coders have it a little easier to get a work visa. Not a lot easier, but a little easier.

3

To start, I think you should try to set aside more time to learn coding. You sound pretty enthusiastic, which is great, but I don’t think you’ll learn too much spending just an hour per day. For most of us, I believe, coding is something that takes many hours to learn. If you can afford at least a few hours or so a day, that’d be much helpful to you.

Other than that, what should you start with? I’d recommend just learn to code and be comfortable coding; any well-known language like Python, C++, Java is fine. If you can find a beginner course, free or not, I’d say just try it out and see how it goes. But one thing I’d emphasize you might want to work on in addition to coding is math. I don’t know what your curriculum would be like, but CS has a fair amount of math, like calculus. If you’re not comfortable with calculus, maybe try to find a book with exercises in it, or hire a tutor.

I can’t give much advice about working abroad. I’d just go along with Kevin’s idea that the better you are, the more likely you’ll get noticed to get hired abroad.