Is there a field in programming that would suit me?

I am a graduate of BS Computer Science 5 years ago but never really pursued it after graduation.
I manage my own internet cafe and also runs a hospital as the hospital acting administrator. Now I realized that I want to go back to programming and now trying to decide where to start.

By the way, one of the reason I left programming was because when I was in college our professor keeps putting it into our minds that its important to learn how to add edit delete records and that we will be doing it over and over. I don't like that idea.

I just realize that it maybe true if you are going to develop systems for companies like a hospital system or whatever company and system is needed, but maybe there are fields that has less of those and more on problem solving like making an app that decodes encrypted stuff, making games, other usable apps that comes in mind.

strength:
problem solving
weakness:
visual design

I don't have much idea of different types of jobs on the industry.
A list of different type of programmers would be great.
And maybe which field you suggest I take, language and dev software to use get started
**I'm planning to specialize on a particular field

Thank you very much in advance

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jecko

, one of the reason I left programming was because when I was in college our professor keeps putting it into our minds that its important to learn how to add edit delete records and that we will be doing it over and over. I don't like that idea.

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I find it somewhat disturbing that you graduated with such a limited outlook on what programmers do. You certainly don't have to shuffle records as programmer.

Five years is a long time of absence in this field so I suggest you stay where you are and start programming in your spare time. Do something that looks fun and let that guide you. You'll get useful skills just by doing something. And you'll get a feeling for what you want to do and what kind of employment opportunities there are.

Yeah. Think about what kind of stuff you would like to work on. Your visual design weakness is generally not a problem, even if you wanna do game programming, because there's a lot more to that then just visual design - and you can always team up with an artist. Anyway, I know it's hard to chose when you don't really know what's out there, but you have to start somewhere - find something at least remotely interesting and see where it'll lead you. Just be prepared to put in a lot of work.

You need a random person on a random forum to offer you random ideas for your decitions ? Your life would definitely be like a random float variable. :cool:

I am a "partronage" of this site www.physicsforums.com :cool: they offered me a lof of ideas too. I asked myself once why should I listen to them, even about the thing I didn't actually know about... I then learnt that I mostly behad in accordance with my own likes, which were the main weaknesses to be dug up. My heart skipped a beat to realize the truth.

Follow your heart, man!

In Computer field, an administrator seems to always have easy tasks to do. Salary paid for an admin is seemingly lowest among others such as programmers, testers, etc/
It's good to know you are looking into something more challenging. You can start with whatever you wish to, ie grab a book on a particular common language you ease yourself most with, VB or C# can boot your learning pace quickly.

I always thought that VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) is kind of a neat place to start. If you're an administrator you surely know how to handle Excel - why not open up the developer mode (CTRL+ALT+F11 if memory serves me right) and then start writing some modules.
If you're not familiar at all with code, you can just start off by recording macros and see what Microsoft generates for you.

The great advantage of this is that it is very visual and you pretty much see right away what's happening.

Please keep in mind though that VBA is very different from other programming language in the sense that it is integrated in the MS Suite.

Laurent

Administrators used to have to know DOS commands, and how to use Netware. Now, they NEED to know Powershell. 400 commands then vs 4000 BASE CMD-LETS (and growing)