Talking to high school students at Mektebim Schools

Not every day I get the chance to present about the life of a software developer to High School students :) That was exactly the topic of my visit to Mektebim Schools. I did a short talk about how I started with development during middle school, and the overall journey so far. It was fun :)

The questions I received after the session were pretty much aligned with the ones I get during university talks. “How can I start,” “Where can I start?” are the popular options :) I try not to suggest any technology, language, or stack. I simply counterattack with another question “What do you want to build?” That’s what students need to focus. The tools are the tools, they are not the goal. Especially with the amount of information available on the internet, it is crucial to be able to filter out what’s needed. Having a project in mind, or simply knowing what you want to build helps drastically with what you should focus on learning, and adds additional motivation into the soup. You can’t simply keep learning just for the sake of learning, or calling yourself “the master of X.” At the end of the day whatever you tell people you know, the next questions will always be “what did you build with it?” So, maybe, starting from there and going back might make more sense :)

I would like to thank to Isil Bati for their warm invitation to their school and hope I was able to give them a feeling of what a software developer does :) See you next time.