Programming During a Pandemic - Covid-19 Programming Surge

 Programming during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The effects of Coronavirus on programming across the world.

Early Stages of Covid-19

Computer-learning for programming has been trending up over the years

COVID-19 has, and continues to, isolate people from others. During the early months of COVID-19, many programming-teaching companies such as Unity, Udacity, and Coursera offered free programming lessons to the users with accounts on their site. This was a common trend for companies in early 2020, in an attempt to either capitalize or remain relevant by reaching out to the large number of remote learners. Coronavirus presented many with an opportunistic time to learn skills, and programming was a highly-learned skill during this time. With many programming jobs becoming remote following the pandemic, learning and practicing programming online is a perfect Segway.

Impact of Coronavirus on Programming Jobs

Programming jobs declined during the pandemic, but are surging back.

As with many other of the other job markets, the programming market was hit hard by the pandemic. Many positions were temporarily or permanently removed, and the total amount of developer jobs for the year were 1.6% lower than originally thought. With that said, There are now more than 24.5 million programming jobs with a large part of the increase happening in 2020 and the early stages of 2021. The amount of jobs is expected to increase in the future more than they ever have before due to the recent installments of remote jobs at many companies. Many developers worked in-house at the company's organization, but now both employees and employers are seeing the benefit to remote work. By an employee working remote, the company doesn't need to have office space, equipment, and provide commodities for them. Remote work is also beneficial for many employees, as it gives them more freedom and space than a traditional programming workplace would have. Company's are in dire need of programmers who are willing to work remote, and even bigger companies like Google and Microsoft are starting to hire remote workers.

What Skills and Languages should I learn?

With so much to learn, where should I start?

It's easy to point out the top programming languages, but that's not all that matters. Learning popular programming languages is great for finding specific jobs and handling solutions with the most-appropriate languages, but if you only learn something to find a job you are more likely to lose interest. The programming language that you pick should be the one that you are the most interested in. With this personal interest, you are much more likely to continue working and growing to achieve your goals, whatever those might be. Programming skills are fairly transferrable throughout different languages, so if you learn a lot about one of them you are likely to be able to transfer those skills to another one. Find a language you like and learn the basics, once you do that, dive in and create things that interest you!

One can learn the basics using a variety of methods, and the best methods vary per person. This blog will go over various entry-level fundamentals and techniques for various programming languages. Along with providing this knowledge for free, I will also provide links to the top resources that I have used and provide articles on the various methods that professionals use. There is no investment needed to begin programming, with most of the software and languages being free to use. There is a lot of free learning resources that can be found online in audio, text, video, etc. format, so there's no excuse to not giving programming a try. The most important thing is to not rule out possibilities and to keep growing, so go ahead and learn how to program today!