First, a confession - I actually occasionally call myself a coder, but in a tongue in cheek, post-modern and ironic way. Heck, it does make for a good blog title and license plate.

Nevertheless, with all the recent “coding schools” cropping up all over the place - at least if you are in the Bay Area - it does seem that being able to code in the context of a reasonably sought after web technology without much further formal training is the path to new, fulfilling careers and of course untold riches in an economy where recent graduates in all fields have problems finding work. Well, at least a career that allows you to rent a room instead of crashing on somebody’s couch.

One thing I really like about stackoverflow.com is that you end up learning as much answering questions on there as you do by asking them.

For example, when I saw this question I was sure there would be a way to delete a region by simply starting to type after selecting the region, but I didn’t know how. However given that this is emacs, I seriously doubted the person asking the question would be the first one to want this particular feature.