r/Glasgow Tools

A bit of general advice I'd give as someone in the field...

* There's a lot of programming languages out there, but when you're getting started out it's better to just pick a language and stick with it. There's little point in learning a bunch of languages at surface level, because a lot of the basics transfer over easily, so you're not learning anything "new" doing that - if you're going to pick up something new, have a good reason for it. So for instance, you could get started with Python, then move to Java when you want to know more about object-oriented programming, then C/C++ if you want some lower-level systems stuff, and so on. If you understand the underlying concepts really well, then picking up new things becomes far less daunting.
* On top of that, once you've got the very basics of a language figured out, I'd recommend picking a project that's personally interesting to you - it shouldn't be anything massive, but something you want to make even if you don't know how - and then learn what you need as you go throughout that project. So for instance I worked on a project a few years back which would scrape football scores from BBC sport, then give you some graphs over how different teams would fare throughout the progression of a game (e.g who plays the best in the first 45 minutes?). And as part of that I learned a fair bit about web scraping, particularly "interactive" web scraping (where you need to press buttons on a page to get more information). Learning as you go is a really key skill if you're going into industry, and it can help motivate your learning if you're doing something you really enjoy. Plus it helps you understand the "infrastructure" of that language (where do you find new libraries? how are those libraries documented? where's a good place to ask for help?), and that sort of thing doesn't come up much in introductory courses.
* Don't neglect the theory - most roles in software development don't require any particularly heavy maths, but especially if you'd like to specialise in something a bit more niche in the future, learning the basics will help make that transition easier, and it's a good way to polish some of the logical reasoning skills you'll need for more general programming as well. If you look for "discrete maths for computer science", there's a lot of introductory courses out there that give you a good overview.
* As other folk have said, it's a field where you're continually learning and picking up new things, but you're not going in from scratch especially with previous work experience. A lot of software development is about communication - within a team, with documentation, with clients just to give some examples - and a lot of aspiring developers are shockingly bad at that, so if you can show you have those skills that can definitely give you a leg up