Hey community, I’ve got a friend about to graduate high school. He has had a bit of an uneven path in life, and I would like to help inspire him to focus on something in tech/programming/etc.
He is a smart kid, but doesn’t have a lot of good examples in his life. I think he believes his options are to just get a job at a restaurant or store.
I helped him build his first pc a few months ago. I tried to convince him to install Linux, but he was concerned it might be too complex for a computer he wanted to game on or do music editing. I didn’t push too hard. I know he has been doing a lot of modded games and stuff lately. And he seemed open to testing out Linux on old laptop.
He is smart and I would like to encourage him to either look into pc building or programming. But neither is my field, so I want to know what are good on ramps into programming and open source. What are Blogs, youtubes, or even should I recommend an associate degree at the local community colleges? (I would recommend full college degrees but I think he has some family situation which might make that hard).
All my knowledge feels like osmosis in the last year of being on Lemmy and now I have a Linux server with 20+ self hosted docker apps… but I realize I’m just hacking things together, not developing anything. I just want to show him there is another path he could pursue other than retail.
I started my embedded engineering journey by blinking an LED on a PIC microcontroller back in 2007. Maybe you can toss them an Arduino development board. Programming by itself could be boring and tedious, but seeing your program actually do things in the real world could be exciting, at least it was for me. There’s so much to branch to from there, everything from industrial automation to vehicle navigation to robotics.
Awesome. This is something I have never done either, so this would be cool to consider/add.