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7 tech jobs with 6 figure salaries

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7 tech jobs with 6 figure salaries

If you’re interested in tech and have the right training, earning a 6-figure salary may be easier than you think. The average salary across all computer sciences is around $104,434 per year. Tech jobs are also in high demand, so not only can you earn a good living, but you can get a level of job security as well.

To help you identify your future career path, we’ll go through 7 tech jobs that pay a 6-figure salary, what each of them involves, and where you can start learning the skills you’ll need to land them. The salaries listed below are for the U.S., but these jobs generally pay well no matter where you are.

1. Computer Hardware Engineer: $119,650

A Computer Hardware Engineer designs, researches, develops, and tests computer systems, as well as the components that make them work. Along with baseline knowledge about how computers work, the job requires analytical thinking skills and the problem-solving mindset of an engineer.

A Computer Hardware Engineer’s tasks often involve ensuring computers operate efficiently with the components and software they help design, such as:

  • Processors
  • Memory devices
  • Routers
  • Circuit boards
  • Servers
  • Access points
  • Other networking devices

Making sure computers and the devices they develop work well together requires Computer Hardware Engineers to gain a basic understanding of coding. To get started with the foundations of coding, check out our Code Foundations Skill Path.

2. Computer Information Research Scientist: $119,570

Also known as a Solutions Engineer, a Computer Information Research Scientist finds ways to use technology to solve problems. This often involves using existing technology to address significant business challenges in areas like:

  • Marketing
  • Medicine
  • Cybersecurity
  • Construction
  • Hospitality

Most industries can benefit from technological solutions, and a Computer Information Research Scientist helps them figure out how. Many have a background in data science, as analyzing a business’s datasets can help them understand the challenges they face. To gain a solid foundation in information research, try our Data Science Career Path.

3. IT Project Manager: $118,822

IT Project Managers have a wide range of responsibilities as they’re in charge of not just the deployment of IT solutions but also maintaining and securing them. Many report directly to their company’s CIO, so they also need to be skilled communicators and understand high-level business concepts.

Given the complex threat landscape many businesses face today, much of an IT Project Manager’s job will involve rolling out initiatives to help make the business’s IT infrastructure more secure. To do so, they often work with cybersecurity professionals.

Because most IT and security systems are built with code, an IT project manager must have a strong foundational understanding of programming.

4. Software Systems Developer: $111,780

A Software Systems Developer finds software solutions for business and public sector challenges. Although many tools are already available on the market, there’s no end to business problems that don’t yet have a program able to fix them.

This is where a Software Systems Developer’s skillset becomes invaluable. They develop solutions for a wide range of situations and challenges, such as:

  • E-commerce
  • Mobile advertising
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Machine learning
  • Laboratory research
  • Medical facilities
  • Sports therapy
  • Building technologies
  • Education

There’s virtually no limit to the ways software can improve our processes, so Software Systems Developers are always looking for new solutions that can help their clients increase their revenue. To do so, a strong understanding of basic business principles is a necessity.

In many situations, a Systems Developer will also be in charge of optimizing the user’s experience with an app, and for this, they need a background in front-end development. Check out our Front-End Engineer Career Path to start building user interfaces and visual elements for web applications.

5. Computer Network Architect: $107,870

A Network Architect designs, builds, and maintains the infrastructure on which an organization’s network is built. This typically involves identifying the needs of the organization’s communications system and finding ways to integrate the transfer of business-critical data and interactions between stakeholders.

Along with a basic understanding of computer science and programming, a Computer Network Architect also needs to be familiar with phone systems and communications hardware — like wiring, physical ports, and various kinds of optic solutions.

A Computer Network Architect is in charge of building and securing an organization’s:

  • Local area network (LAN)
  • Wide area network (WAN)
  • Firewalls
  • Anti-malware solutions
  • Web application firewalls
  • Security information and event management (SIEM) systems
  • Cloud and hybrid cloud architectures
  • Virtual private networks (VPN)
  • Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems
  • Instant messaging and videoconferencing systems

Network Architects need to understand the code behind different systems, including the functions associated with a wide array of languages and the differences in their syntax.

6. Full-Stack Developer: $109,668

A Full-Stack Developer handles everything involved in the product development process, from the back end to the front end. They make sure the user’s experience is productive and comfortable while ensuring that back-end resources and processes run efficiently.

Full-Stack Developers work with all of an app’s dependencies, including elements such as:

  • Databases
  • Hard-coded business logic
  • Hostname dependencies
  • Application programming interfaces (APIs)

If you’re interested in a career as a Full-Stack Developer, check out our Full-Stack Engineer Career Path. We’ll teach you how to program with languages used for both front-end and back-end development, use them to build complete web applications, and more.

7. Big Data Engineer: $165,500

A Big Data Engineer finds ways to gather, use, and analyze data to address business challenges. Organizations generate an enormous amount of data. A Big Data Engineer knows how to leverage that data to improve processes, attract more customers, enhance efficiency, and generate more revenue.

Big Data Engineers often work with artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms that look for patterns in large data sets and use them to adjust what a program does. Collecting, organizing, and studying the data — with or without advanced algorithms — falls on the shoulders of Big Data Engineers. They then use the insights they gain to help the organization meet its objectives, some of which may include:

  • Empowering AI systems to learn customer behavior
  • Discovering opportunities to alter marketing tactics
  • Understanding the behavior of key customers
  • Finding inefficiencies in building systems and addressing them
  • Uncovering ways to streamline or improve manufacturing processes

At the core of a Big Data Engineer’s skillset is data analytics. You can learn more about what it takes to be a data engineer by checking out our Data Analyst Career Path.

The road to a 6-figure salary has many paths if you’re pursuing a career in tech. With our courses, you can get the knowledge and experience you need to pursue various avenues toward a 6-figure income.

Each of the Career Paths linked above will help you build the skills you’ll need in your future career. You’ll also use your new skills to build a portfolio that’ll help you stand out in your job search. Or, if you already have a solid foundation and you’re just looking to learn a specific skill, take a look through our catalog.

Deciding what skills to include on your developer resume

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Deciding what skills to include on your developer resume

Every day, developers become more and more integral to our society. Businesses rely on developers to build and maintain their websites and applications, financial institutions need devs to help manage their massive databases, etc.

Our global reliance on developers means that they have one of the fastest-growing job markets — projected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to rise by 22% over the 8 years. So, if you’re looking to enter this booming job market, there’s no time like the present.

But, to get your foot in the door, you’ll need to highlight the right skills on your resume. Below, we’ll explore some of the hard and soft skills you should include in your developer resume and explain why they’re important.

What hard skills should I include in my developer resume?

Because developers have a wide range of responsibilities, the hard (or technical) skills you’ll need to include in your resume will depend on the specific role you’re applying to. Review the job postings from the companies you want to work for, and make sure their desired skills are reflected in your resume. In the meantime, common hard skills to feature in your resume include:

Programming languages

Programming languages are the tools developers use to write code and build applications. The specific languages you’ll want to include will depend on your specialization. For example, aspiring front-end developers will want to indicate their proficiency with languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. If you’re more interested in mobile development, you’d want to emphasize your skills with Swift, Java, or Kotlin.

Libraries and frameworks

Libraries and frameworks provide developers with pre-written code that expedites the development process. Like programming languages, the frameworks and libraries you’ll want to include in your developer resume will depend on your role.

If you’re pursuing a career in web development, you might want to emphasize your familiarity with frameworks like Angular or libraries like React. Or, if you were more interested in game development, you’ll want to include tools like Phaser.js or A-Frame.

UI (User Interface)

Adding UI skills to your developer resume shows potential employers that you can accommodate the needs of their users. You might also want to briefly summarize any demographics you’ve targeted while building a clients’ UI and your approach in fulfilling their needs.

If you’re new to UI and looking to add it to your skill set, check out our responsive design course. Responsive design involves writing code that allows applications to adjust their appearance to fit users’ devices.

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces)

APIs play a pivotal role in development as they help developers save time that could be better spent on other projects. Showcasing your proficiency with APIs in your resume lets employers know you’re comfortable with the technology and know how to use it to meet key objectives.

You should do more than simply mention “working with APIs” on your resume. If possible, try to explain:

  • The reasons behind choosing specific APIs
  • How you altered an API, if applicable
  • Ways you strategically used multiple APIs in conjunction with each other to improve the final product

What soft skills should I include in my developer resume?

Your soft skills include the qualities that, while not technical, are equally instrumental in completing a project. For developers, these qualities include the ability to communicate, collaborate, and solve problems.

Communication

Developers often work in teams to tackle larger projects, so each member needs to know how to communicate effectively. Still, good communication goes beyond conveying your own ideas in a clear, concise manner. You’ll also need to know how to actively listen to your teammates and implement their recommendations.

Use examples to illustrate how your communication skills contributed to the achievement of organizational goals, such as:

  • Serving as the liaison between the dev team and C-level executives
  • Assuming the role of lead developer for a project or a specific period of time
  • Implementing suggestions from others on your team to improve the end result
  • Composing reports, presentations, or email newsletters

Collaboration

Communication plays a big role in collaboration, so people often use the two interchangeably — but they’re actually very distinct. While communicating involves sharing ideas and keeping everyone informed, collaboration involves working with your teammates to accomplish a goal. Illustrate your collaborative skills on your developer resume with examples of pair programming, code reviews, and similar practices.

Problem-solving

Developers are digital problem-solvers, so you’ll want to emphasize your problem-solving ability in your resume. Your experience with problem-solving may be easy to highlight when outlining:

  • How you overcame challenges while testing an application
  • How you’ve altered code to incorporate feedback from other departments
  • Anything related to maintaining a solution or system after it has been rolled out
  • Efforts made towards incorporating user feedback or supporting a solution post-roll-out

Take the time to come up with a few solid examples of your problem-solving ability. These will help you later during your interviews — especially technical interviews, which involve completing a coding assignment on the spot to help your interviewer understand your approach. Check out our technical interview guide to make sure you’re prepared for the next steps of the process.

How to present your skills in your resume

Your developer resume should only be a page or two long, so you’ll want to make the most of your space and list your relevant skills properly. Listing hard skills like programming languages and libraries is fine, as you can always explain your proficiency in greater detail during your interviews. But, soft skills usually require a bit more context.

The best way to present your soft skills in your resume is within the context of your previous roles and responsibilities. For example, to illustrate your collaboration skills, you could say something like this:

  • Collaborated with the marketing, sales, and product development teams to fine-tune user interfaces.

In this way, your softer skills can come across as clearly as your hard skills.

As we said above, the specific skills you’ll want to emphasize in your resume will depend on the role you’re applying for. Take a look through job postings from the companies you want to work for. If you notice any gaps in your skill set, use our comprehensive catalog of programming courses to hone your skills, build projects, earn certifications to include in your resume, and more.

We Cannot Fight Anti-Asian Hate Without Dismantling Asian Stereotypes

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We Cannot Fight Anti-Asian Hate Without Dismantling Asian Stereotypes

This essay, by Madison Xu, age 16, from Horace Mann School in the Bronx, N.Y., is one of the Top 10 winners of The Learning Network’s Eighth Annual Student Editorial Contest, for which we received 11,202 entries.

You can find the work of all the winners and runners-up here.

We Cannot Fight Anti-Asian Hate Without Dismantling Asian Stereotypes

A few weeks ago, my aunt decided to close the nail salon she had been running for years. Early on in the pandemic, her business was hit hard, regulars refusing to return and associating her salon with the spread of Covid. Now, she fears for the safety of her salon employees — most of them Asian and Asian-American women.

The New York Times has documented a surge of anti-Asian hate crimes during the coronavirus pandemic, including the deaths of six Asian women during the recent mass shooting in Atlanta. These incidents have rightly sparked protests and outrage, yet there can be no effective response unless we look beyond easy explanations. Talk of the former president’s xenophobic rhetoric, or the shooter’s “sex addiction,” only serves to distract from the underlying issue: America’s history of stereotyping, fetishizing and oppressing Asians and Asian-Americans — especially women.

By the 20th century, mainstream media and popular culture had already categorized Asian women into tropes still resonant today, from the hypersexual “Dragon Lady” to the docile “Lotus Flower.” Predating the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Page Act of 1875 made it unlawful for East Asian women to enter the United States without proof that they were “virtuous.” That Asian women were painted as a “moral contagion” becomes even more chilling when juxtaposed with the Atlanta shooter’s claim that the massage parlors were, “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” Objects of desire easily become objects of hatred. The key: both are things for the dominant class to fetishize, feel entitled to — or dispose of.

By now, many Americans understand how negative stereotypes of Black and Latinx people in the United States have enabled police brutality, anti-immigrant hysteria and violence. However, we tend to react differently to Asian stereotypes. While there are plenty of derogatory tropes (think bad drivers who eat dogs), Asians in this country are often viewed as smart and industrious — a “model minority.” But the truth is, all stereotypes are ultimately dehumanizing, stripping people of their individuality and objectifying them in ways that can lead to shameful violations like the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Perhaps most dangerously, stereotypes like the submissive “Oriental” serving girl create artificial roles that women are forced to play, or to be punished for “not knowing their place.” When the dominant class feels threatened, even model minorities suddenly become invading Others, the alien “them” displacing “us” and threatening what is rightfully “ours.”

Until we stop regarding Asian stereotypes and the fetishization of Asian women as innocuous, Asians and Asian-Americans will continue to face the threat of racist violence. Recognizing that anti-Asian prejudice is deeply rooted in American history is the first step toward dismantling those dangerous stereotypes.

Works Cited

Jeong, May. “The Deep American Roots of the Atlanta Shootings.” The New York Times, 19 March 2021.

Lang, Cady and Paulina Cachero. “How a Long History of Intertwined Racism and Misogyny Leaves Asian Women in America Vulnerable to Violence.” Time, 7 April 2021.

The American Teacher’s Plight: Underappreciated, Underpaid and Overworked

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The American Teacher’s Plight: Underappreciated, Underpaid and Overworked

Before the 1800s, teaching positions were largely held by men, until socio-economic shifts facilitated the entrance of women into the work force. As teaching was one of the few jobs that fit within the feminine ideal, women increasingly took on teaching roles. The feminization of this occupation correlated with a decrease in respect for teaching and in teachers’ wages as schools paid women less for their work. This perception of teaching has persisted: The New York Times finds that today, “jobs dominated by women pay less on average than those with higher proportions of men” and “enjoy less prestige.” Funding for K-12 education has also suffered, as the Center for American Progress found that the “states with the steepest funding declines have seen one-fifth of state education funding vanish.”

As a result, teaching is becoming unsustainable. Teacher salaries simply aren’t enough, as stagnant wages over the last 20 years have forced many teachers to take on extra work to supplement what should be a full-time job.

This ongoing undervaluation of teaching, combined with a lack of education funding, has created a perfect storm for teachers and students alike. Not only are fewer people going into teaching, but lower wages contribute to lower quality teachers. Better teaching quality is the top factor behind increased student achievement, meaning the state of teachers’ salaries is damaging the quality of American education as a whole. In fact, U.S. education rankings lag dramatically behind those of its global counterparts.

How do we fix this education crisis? For starters, we need to increase investment into public education to bolster teacher’s salaries and provide necessary classroom funding. Our political leaders must also heed feedback from teachers, as their voices are often sidelined and ignored, leading to brewing frustration.

As for your roles, my fellow students, the next time you see your teacher struggling during online school, remember the sacrifices they’ve made for the sake of your education, and go turn that camera on.

Works Cited

Boyle, Elizabeth. “The Feminization of Teaching in America.” MIT Program in Women’s and Gender Studies.

Diliberti, Melissa Kay, Heather L. Schwartz and David Grant. “Stress Topped the Reasons Why Public School Teachers Quit, Even Before Covid-19.” RAND Corporation, 2021.

García, Emma, and Elaine Weiss. “A Policy Agenda to Address the Teacher Shortage in U.S. Public Schools.” Economic Policy Institute, 15 Oct. 2020.

Partelow, Lisette, Sarah Shapiro, Abel McDaniels and Catherine Brown. “Fixing Chronic Disinvestment in K-12 Schools.” Center for American Progress, 20 Sept. 2018.

Ravitch, Diane, and Antonia Cortese. “Why We’re Behind: A Report by Common Core.” Grantmakers in the Arts, 2009.

Rich, Motoko. “Why Don’t More Men Go Into Teaching?” The New York Times, 6 Sept. 2014.

“Why Teachers Are Paid So Little In The U.S.” YouTube, uploaded by CNBC, 10 Dec. 2020.

Deliver academic integrity with these new features

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Deliver academic integrity with these new features

By Terri Czerwinski, Principal Product Manager, Coursera for Campus

For leaders in higher education, academic integrity has long been a top priority. But as more universities begin to take their programs online and start to accelerate automation, academic misconduct is becoming an increasingly common challenge. 

According to the International Center of Academic Integrity, more than 60% of university students admit to cheating in some form. ProctorU, an online proctoring service, administered 1.3 million exams through their platform from April through June in 2020—a four-time increase compared to the three months before that. In those 1.3 million exams, they saw an eight-time increase in the cheating rate. To uphold confidence in the validity and efficacy of remote instruction, online learning platforms are faced with an urgent need to provide a robust suite of academic integrity features.  

In response to this need, Coursera has developed a suite of academic integrity features that  will help institutions deliver a high level of academic integrity by 1) deterring and detecting cheating and 2) accurately assessing student mastery of the material they’re learning with private assessments.

Stop cheating before it happens and detect it when it does

Plagiarism deterrence features are designed to discourage academic misconduct before it happens by alerting students when their work will be flagged for plagiarism, preventing students from copying each other’s work and reminding them of their responsibility to uphold integrity in their work. Inevitably, some students may submit a plagiarized assignment. That’s where plagiarism detection comes in—helping you uncover and track instances of academic dishonesty while giving you the information you need to maintain high standards of academic integrity within your program. Here is a list of our plagiarism deterrence and detection features.

Available in both Institution and Basic plans: 

  • Disabling of URL sharing: Disabling URL sharing means that your students won’t be able to send their submission link directly to a friend to grade the submission, making the peer review fairer and more objective.
  • Disabling copy of peer reviews: This feature restricts your students from being able to copy the submissions of others to use for their own submission while they are reviewing their peers.
  • Anonymization of peer reviews: This feature anonymizes the names of both the submitter and reviewer for peer review assessments. This is helpful when you’re concerned about the objectivity of reviewers who may know the learner who submitted the peer review assessment. 
  • Online gradebook (coming in August 2021): When available, our  online gradebook report will show information on learners who are currently or previously enrolled in a specific course. This will allow you to monitor the progress of the learners and keep track of plagiarism incidents. 

Available in the Institution plan only:

  • Turnitin similarity score*: Through our integration with Turnitin, your students will know if their assignment is similar to other sources online or existing submissions within your institution before they submit work, providing them a chance to amend their assignments. If your students submit an assignment that meets or exceeds the similarity score threshold, the assignment will be flagged for plagiarism.  
  • Plagiarism policy reminder: With our plagiarism policy reminder, you’ll be sure that your learners are always aware of Coursera’s honor code. Additionally, this feature will require learners to provide their signature acknowledging Coursera’s policies and remind them of the high academic standards they need to uphold.  

*Note: The Turnitin integration is available on request as a standard part of the Coursera for Campus Institution offering. Contact your customer success manager to learn more.

Disabling of URL sharing feature as described above

Measure student learning outcomes with robust private assessment functionality 

A key requirement of institutions to maintain academic integrity involves rigorous assessments that effectively test students’ mastery of the course material.  In addition to assessments already built into the courses, you can build your own private assessments on Coursera using the same world-class, private-authoring platform leveraged by our 200+ university and industry partners. 

Available in the Institution plan only: 

  • Staff-graded assessments: Staff-graded assessments are graded by your course instructors and/or teaching staff. You can create  these assessments manually or you can create them leveraging our assessment import functionality, which allows you to seamlessly import your Google Doc and Microsoft Word documents into Coursera to easily create assessments. There are two types of staff-graded assessments:
  • Individual assessments: A learner works independently to complete and submit the assessment. Then, your course staff reviews and grades each learner’s submission. Individual assessments can have both staff-graded questions and auto-graded questions, and can even be completely auto-graded.
  • Team assessments: Learners in a team work together to complete and submit the assessment. Your instructors and/or teaching staff review and grade each team’s submission. Note that team assessments cannot include auto-graded questions. 
  • Auto-graded assessments: Auto-graded assessment questions can be added to quizzes and individual staff-graded assessments. Similar to staff-graded assessments, you can create these assessments manually, or you can create them leveraging our assessment import functionality.
  •  Timed exams: Any staff graded assessments that you build can be timed. You can schedule the assessment to start on a specific date and time and can set a duration for the exam to limit the amount of time the learner can spend on it. These settings are comparable to the on-campus exam experience. 
  • ID verification: Coursera supports increased security for high-stakes private exams using third-party identity verification tools in order to ensure that the user taking the exam is actually the expected learner. (Only available for private assessments authored by your institution.)
  • Online proctoring: With online proctoring, institutions can monitor online exams to ensure that students are demonstrating their own knowledge. Our authoring platform supports using third party tools to proctor online high-priority, privately-authored exams. These exams can also be timed and scheduled for a specific date, so that the exam experience is comparable to taking the exam on campus. (Only available for private assessments authored by your institution)
  • Question banks: The question bank functionality allows you to build assessments from a catalog of relevant questions. You can populate your own question bank with questions developed in-house. Coursera’s unique approach to question banks will allow you to tag questions with a difficulty level and learning objective, giving you more control when it comes to question selection. These questions can then be auto-graded or graded by staff. 
  • Rich grading features:  Our comprehensive grading features will allow you to assess student mastery in a manner that fits your own institution. Whether that be deadlines and late penalties for assessments that correspond to your institutions’ timeframes or  grading formulas to assign different weights to assessments, these grading features will help you administer and grade your private assessments on your own terms. 
Question banks feature as described above

Coursera’s academic integrity features can help you deliver an online learning experience that upholds your academic standards. If you’d like to learn more, reach out to us at campus@coursera.org or contact your customer success manager.  

 

How to debug your code

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How to debug your code

A software bug is an error that happens in an application causing it to return an invalid result or to function incorrectly. A bug can result from incorrectly written code, errors in a compiler, or even hardware issues. In this article, w’ll be looking at code-specific bugs because those are usually created inadvertently by programmers.

Don’t worry if the code you write has bugs. It’s expected. Bugs are an inevitable part of writing code. Even developers with years of experience have probably never written a bug-free application. Once bugs are found in an application, developers use a process called debugging to track down what is causing those errors and find a fix for them.

You can use quite a few methods to debug software depending on the tools you have available, your level of skill, and the complexity of the bug. Mike, a developer from Philadelphia, talks about debugging code in the video below. Take a look, then read on to learn more.

6 code debugging techniques

You won’t have to use every one of these debugging techniques to fix a bug. Some are simpler than others to implement. It’s usually best to start with the simpler techniques that only take a few minutes to set up and then proceed to more complex techniques if you still have not tracked down the bug.

Using a print statement might be the simplest way to debug code. All programming languages have one or more commands that you can use to print values out on the console when the software is running. Once you have tracked down where you think the bug is occurring in your code, you can add a print statement to print out the value of the variables around the bug to determine why the bug might be happening.

This is a great method to start with because it doesn’t take any extra tools or an IDE. If you are debugging JavaScript code, browsers like Chrome even add extra features that allow you to print out the variable you want to know the value of in a nested fashion. So, when you print out an object, you can search and dig down into the object to see all of its attributes in an easy-to-read format.

Error handling

Another method of debugging your code is using error handling. Code that does not use error handling will often crash when it encounters a bug. Error handling catches an error before it has a chance to crash the application. It then does something with the error data, like logging or storing it in a database, and the application then continues normally.

Error handling is perfect for finding bugs in a production environment because errors can be collected as they occur and then analyzed later to determine what type of bug is causing them — all without causing a bad experience for the software user.

Another simple method of debugging is “commenting out” some of the code. This means turning some of the functional code into comments that won’t be executed. You start by commenting out code in the part of the application where you think the problem is until the error stops happening. Then you just add each line of code back, one at a time, until the bug shows up again, and once it does, you’ve pinpointed where the bug is occurring.

Debugging tools

Debugging tools are the most sophisticated way of finding bugs in software. These are usually built into the integrated development environments (IDEs) developers use to write code. There are also debuggers that come with some of the web browsers, including Chrome and Firefox, for debugging web applications.

Debuggers allow programmers to create “breakpoints” in code. When they run code with a breakpoint in it, the code will stop running at the breakpoint. The developer can then step through the code line by line and examine the variables in each step to determine what went wrong. Using a debugger is the best way to find the hardest bugs, but it is also the most advanced method and is not needed when other techniques will work.

Tests

Another way of debugging your code is by adding code tests. These come in many varieties and include unit tests, integration tests, functional tests, and more. These types of tests are created to check that the application is running correctly. The tests are run on the application code before it is added to the code repository or deployed to production. When the tests do not pass, it usually indicates a bug that has to be fixed. The code that failed is not allowed to move onto the next phase until the bugs are fixed and the tests pass.

Asking other developers

While this is the last method on the list, it’s one of the most important and is often overlooked. Most times, you will be working with other developers on the same project who may know more about some of the code than you do. Even if they don’t, they may have worked on the part of the application that has the bug. But you won’t know unless you ask.

Another reason to ask other developers for help is that after you look at the same code for a while, you may be too close to the problem and choose the wrong route to a solution. Even if the developers you ask don’t work on your project, they can often help you find the bug by giving you a fresh perspective.

Summary

Bugs are part of the software development process. So if there is a bug in the code you wrote, you’re in good company. Even developers with years of experience expect to deal with bugs. Luckily, there are many ways to debug your code and fix it.

Simple methods you can start with include using print statements to print out variables or commenting out part of the code until the error goes away. Using a debugging tool is an advanced method that will allow you to stop the code and inspect it as it is running. Adding tests to your code can help find bugs before they go to production. You can use error handling to report production bugs that you would rather not have users see. Of course, one of the best debugging procedures is simply asking other developers if they know what could be causing a bug and point you in the right direction.

The best way to learn code debugging is by writing code. If you are interested in building web applications, check out either our Back-End, our Front-End, or Full-Stack Engineer Career Path. For even more possibilities, check out our complete catalog of programming courses.

What is a QA engineer and what do they do?

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What is a QA engineer and what do they do?

If you’re learning about the world of software development, you may have read something about QA engineers. But what is a QA engineer exactly, and why are they so important?

In this article, we’ll look at software development through the eyes of a QA engineer and understand more about this key role.

What is quality assurance?

The first step to understanding what a QA engineer does is to understand what QA is. Software quality assurance (QA) involves working with developers to ensure that everyone working on a software project follows the same rules, processes, and testing requirements.

Typically, software QA focuses on ensuring compliance with:

  • Project-specific standards, including the scope of work
  • Company policies and standards
  • External standards, such as ISO standards

The primary goal of a QA engineer is to ensure that the end-product does what the client wants it to do and that the underlying software follows established policies and procedures.

QA engineers love breaking things

Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration. But, as one of our community members, Pablo, puts it, QA engineers love asking, “What if I do this….” While software developers typically work with well-defined instructions and specifications, the role of the QA engineer is a bit more open. QA engineers want to find non-ideal situations and ensure that the software can handle these situations without crashing or resulting in a wrong output.

Suppose that a client wants you to develop a photo-sharing app. What happens if you try to send a PDF file instead of an image file? What happens if the file is too big? What happens if you suddenly lose the signal while uploading or downloading a photo? These are some of the situations that a QA engineer might explore.

Of course, it’s impossible to design software that can handle every foreseeable situation or input. However, QA engineers use their experience and judgment to identify the most likely situations and focus on those.

Why QA engineers are so valuable: 5 key roles

Though they’re not always as visible as the rest of the development team, QA engineers quietly keep projects running and clients happy. Below are five critical roles of a QA engineer:

1. Defining the testing environment

Imagine that you’re working on a small development project with one or two other people. Each of you is responsible for developing a piece of the software that interacts with the other parts. It’s relatively easy for two or three of you to work together and develop enough test cases to ensure each piece of the software works together with the other components, but what about when you need to bring together software created by dozens of developers? Large development teams look to QA engineers to create a test plan to ensures that all the pieces work together seamlessly in the end product.

From the client’s perspective, software should look and work as if a single developer created it, and QA engineers help make that happen.

2. Keeping an eye on the requirements and scope of work

When a development project involves multiple team members working on a small part of the software, it can be challenging to understand how changes in the project requirements or scope affect each team member and individual test cases. QA engineers understand how each software piece fits together within the whole project and adjust test plans to meet the client’s requirements.

Even after the end product is presented to the client, QA engineers still play a vital role in working with the client during acceptance testing. The QA engineer helps identify, analyze, and classify issues as they come up, and they update the test plan to address these issues.

4. Bringing an objective set of eyes to the software project

Have you ever worked so long and hard on a project that you consider it “your baby?” So have we. It’s okay to be proud of your work, but there’s also a downside to this. After putting in so many hours and so much effort into a complex project, software developers can become attached to the end product and be willing to overlook minor flaws and bugs when it comes to testing.

But what if the end product isn’t what the client is looking for? This is where QA engineers come in. Without any role in directly developing the software, QA engineers can provide a fresh, objective review of the software, its functions, and its flaws. What might seem like a minor bug to the developer could be unacceptable to the client, and QA engineers are there to keep everyone focused on the project requirements.

Even when the software has no bugs, QA engineers serve as peer reviewers to ensure that the software is efficient.

5. Keeping the development team in line with company policies

A lot of software companies have policies that guide development projects. For example, there might be company rules about interoperability, resource utilization, modifications, documentation, or user interface aesthetics. QA engineers ensure that development projects always comply with company policies. This is particularly important when the company is certified with an external standard such as ISO 25010 or SPICE. Losing these certifications could lead to canceled contracts or even legal trouble for the company. This is yet another reason why QA engineers are key players in any serious software company.

How do you become a QA engineer?

If you’re interested in a career in QA engineering, you’re probably wondering what it takes to get started. Codecademy Community member Pablo, who we heard from above, offers up some great advice in the Codecademy Forums.

As you continue your journey in advancing your career as a developer, we hope you’ll add “QA engineer” as another possible path. Even from behind the scenes, they play an essential role in software development.

Introducing Intermediate React courses: Learn React Router and Learn React Testing

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Introducing Intermediate React courses: Learn React Router and Learn React Testing

Ready to take your React skills to the next level? We’ll show you how with our new Intermediate React content.

In Learn React, we taught you the framework’s fundamental concepts and components. Then, we showed you how to use them to create a front-end app with React. Now, we’ve taken it even further.

Our Intermediate React content consists of two new courses: Learn React Router and Learn React Testing. These courses are the logical next step for learners who have completed our existing React courses and Skill Paths and want to learn how to build production-level applications.

What will I learn from the new courses?

As their names suggest, the two new courses will teach you how to use React Router and React Testing Library. Both tools are popular with React developers — the former for its utility in front-end development and the latter for its capacity for stability and debugging.

In Learn React Router, we’ll show you how to create a seamless user experience with single-page applications (or SPAs) that function like multi-page applications.

In Learn React Testing, you’ll learn how to streamline the testing of your React components and write tests from the user’s perspective. You’ll also learn how to use the Jest testing framework, which prioritizes simplicity and ease of use while providing all the tools you’ll need to write unit tests.

What skills will I take away from the new courses?

After completing Learn React Router, you’ll be able to:

  • Understand the basics of URL structure
  • Create multi-view single-page applications
  • Build navigational components that link to other page views
  • Create dynamic pages that respond to URL and query parameters

After completing Learn React Testing, you’ll be able to:

  • Build and execute unit tests using the Jest testing library
  • Test the rendered output of React components
  • Test asynchronous code and mock APIs

Recap

Our new Intermediate React content consists of two new courses: Learn React Router and Learn React Testing. These courses will help you take your web development skills to the next level by ensuring a stable, seamless user experience. Both courses are suitable for learners who have completed our existing React content or React developers who are looking to learn these specific technologies.

Do I have to be good at math to code?

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Do I have to be good at math to code?

Here at Codecademy, one question we hear a lot is: “Do I have to be good at math to code?” To answer this question, we spoke with developers from the Codecademy team and our larger community during a recent Women in Tech Panel live event to hear their thoughts on the topic.

In general, programming is an incredibly diverse field. Being good at math is important for certain types of programming, like designing games and inventing complex algorithms. But for many other types of programming, such as developing business or web applications, you can become a successful programmer without having to study advanced math.

“You don’t need to be good at math to be a good software developer. We have so many folks here [at Codecademy] who maybe don’t have that much experience with math and computer science and are great developers,” shares Sanam, a Software Engineer on our team.

Solving problems

As a programmer, you’re more likely to apply existing algorithms and technologies to solve a particular problem. And even though math goes into building many of these tools, you don’t necessarily need to know how the math works in order to use these tools effectively. In much the same way, you can become a skilled driver without knowing the details behind how a car engine works.

“It’s great if you have that mathematical background, but you just need to be able to problem solve. A lot of it is just sticking with a problem,” says Mariel, a Codecademy Curriculum Developer.

Negar, a Machine Learning Engineer who leads the Codecademy Georgia Chapter, shares similar advice: “I think you should be good at problem solving, and that’s why people get confused that they have to do calculus while coding. No, you just have to solve problems and use basic logic, that’s it.”

A large part of problem solving involves defining the problem and breaking it down into smaller, more manageable tasks. “Learning how to break down a problem and articulate that problem is a skillset that’s really key to being a successful developer,” says Taylor, a Full-Stack Developer and Consultant for our Back-End Engineer Career Path.

Sophie, a Curriculum Developer focusing on Codecademy’s Data Science content, shares that being skilled at math — while not a prerequisite for coding — can be a useful tool for problem solving. “You’re going to have a problem that you have to solve, and you need to figure out what tools you can use to solve it. Mathematics is really like a toolbox that you can tap into to solve those problems. In my everyday job, what I use are problem solving and research skills to figure out which tools to use,” Sophie tells us.

Collaborating with others

In addition to problem solving, coding involves being able to collaborate with others to tackle complex challenges. “In agile development, and at every company that I’ve worked in, the culture has been about working as a team, where you’re problem solving, but you’re also sharing and working with others and giving feedback. You need to have great communication skills and collaboration skills,” Sanam says.

Creative thinking

Another important skill for developers is creative thinking. When it comes to solving a coding problem, you’ll often come across a number of possible solutions. Your job as a developer is to discover the best possible solution given your unique set of constraints, which requires a combination of creativity, curiosity, and determination.

Shirley, a Software Engineer here at Codecademy and previously a Fashion Designer, shares her thoughts on creativity: “A lot of people think that coding is extremely analytical, and you have to have insane technical skills. But I personally think that coding is extremely creative. If you come from a background where you love art, and you love problem solving, I think that you are extremely prepared to be a coder.”

The bottom line is, you don’t have to be good at math to become a great developer. Instead, focusing on problem solving, collaboration, and creative thinking can allow you to take your programming skills to the next level, wherever you may be on your coding journey.

Ready to start your own coding journey? Check out our full catalog of courses to learn more and to get started.

Cheap for You. Costly for the Environment.

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Cheap for You. Costly for the Environment.

From your trash bin, our food waste’s next home is the landfill. The Environmental Protection Agency finds that food is the largest occupant of landfills, making up 24 percent of the 146.1 million tons of total municipal solid waste in landfills in 2018. Therefore, in a year, more than 35 million tons of food ends up in landfills; according to The New York Times, around 40 percent of which — 14 million tons of food — is thrown out by consumers.

The issue worsens when the food reaches the landfill; our wastefulness is a significant contributor to climate change. As stated by The New York Times, in landfills, food waste “decomposes and emits methane, a potent greenhouse gas”; this creates 3.3 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases annually across the globe and amounts to about 7 percent of total emissions per year. The issue does not end there; Forbes points out that the wasted food also drains the resources that went into making it, including “a quarter of our water supply.”

As one of the top contributors to climate change, the global food system undoubtedly requires changes in all aspects, including production, processing and supply, on top of consumption. But, as consumers, we drive the food industry, and thus by reducing our household waste and, in turn, our carbon footprint, we are capable of reshaping it. With simple adjustments to our shopping habits, more environmentally conscious shopping trips are feasible. The Federal Drug Administration advises that people make a shopping list before going to the grocery store, be mindful of the items they already have, be aware of what they intend on preparing and be wary of perishable items. The environment, like food, is precious and life-sustaining, so next time you go to the grocery store, think twice before taking advantage of that convenient two-for-one deal. It may be more costly than you think.

Works Cited

“National Overview: Facts and Figures About Materials, Waste and Recycling.” The United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Nixon, Ron. “Food Waste Is Becoming Serious Economic and Environmental Issue, Report Says.” The New York Times, 25 Feb. 2015.

Sengupta, Somini. “How Much Food Do We Waste? Probably More Than You Think.” The New York Times, 12 Dec. 2017.

Simon, Ben. “What Environmental Problems Does Wasting Food Cause?” Forbes, 18 July 2018.

Taber, Sarah. “Farms Aren’t Tossing Perfectly Good Produce. You Are.” The Washington Post, 8 March 2019.

“Tips to Reduce Food Waste.” The Federal Drug Administration, 15 Nov. 2019.

Yu, Yang and Edward C. Jaenicke. “Estimating Food Waste as Household Production Inefficiency.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 23 Jan. 2020.

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