Code for a Living

Mohamed Said got his first computer at age 13—they were just becoming commonly accessible in Egypt—and started learning to code almost immediately. Flash was what drew him in, he says, with its animations and color and, well, “flashy” stuff.

Last week we wrote about whether a college degree is a necessity for a developer in today’s market. We came to the conclusion that what you can do is more important than how many framed diplomas you can hang on the wall, and the most important thing you can to do make yourself hireable as…

Do developers need college degrees? Just a generation ago, it was a given that a college degree was the best way to maximize the likelihood of securing a high-paying job in the field of your choice. But the world has changed, and more and more you hear of successful developers who never earned a degree,…

Not too long ago, developers were treated as nothing more than interchangeable assembly line workers or typists. Developers were supposed to just write some code and let everyone else do the “real thinking.” Stack Overflow was founded by programmers, for programmers, in part as a reaction to this backwards approach. We don’t think developers are…