Robert Heaton

Software Engineer /
One-track lover / Down a two-way lane

I'm doing Office Hours

17 Jul 2018

I’m going to start holding weekly Office Hours for people who want to get better at computer programming. These will be sessions of up to an hour over Skype where I’ll try to answer your questions and help you over any stumbling blocks you’ve hit in your projects or learning.

Why should you sign up?

I think that these sessions will be most useful for “Advanced Beginners” - people who have grasped the basic fundamentals of writing and running code, and are now trying to make the leap to designing and building more complex programs. But regardless of what stage you are at, if you think that spending some time talking about programming would be useful then I’d love to hear from you.

We can cover any topic that you like. Some example things I think I could help with include:

  • A specific concept doesn’t make sense and you’d like to talk it over
  • You’re working on a project, you’re stuck, and you’d like to get unstuck
  • You’re trying to decide what to learn about or work on next
  • You’d like to review the code of one of your projects
  • You just want to talk about programming
  • The sky’s the limit

If you're a member of a group that is underrepresented in the technology industry then I especially encourage you to get in touch.

How do you sign up?

Send me an email at [email protected] with a few sentences on who you are and what you’d like to work on. I’ll email you right back with whether I think I can help, and we can get scheduling.

What do I get out of this?

I’m working on a series of “Programming Projects for Advanced Beginners” to help people make the difficult leap from beginner to intermediate programmer. This jump is hard enough when you have a background in maths, lots of free time, and experienced programmers around to talk to. It can be absolutely diabolical if you don’t. I want to make these projects as useful as possible, and the biggest part of doing that is talking to as many people working on this challenge as I can..

I’m also just a friendly guy who has had lots of people help him over the years.

Robert Heaton

Who am I?

I’m a software engineer at Stripe, where I work on Machine Learning Infrastructure and Application Security. I’ve written a lot of blog posts about software, and the best way to decide whether you might enjoy talking with me is probably to read a couple of them. The “Best Of” section has some of my favorites.

Subscribe to my new work on programming, security, and a few other topics. Published a few times a month.
Follow me on Twitter ➜ RSS ➜