A very thought-provoking article from Readwrite.com: Why Citizen Developers Are the Future of Programming: Just How Necessary is That Computer Science Degree?

Aside from the whole idea that what you did -- and how you did at it -- in college doesn't matter so much to the coder-hiring Googles of the world, this article shows how anybody with a desire to learn to code can in all likelihood make a living doing so.

As it's called in this article, the "self-taught coding movement" is a powerful way to immerse yourself in something and then find yourself quite employable as a result.

I've been playing with the load function in jquery. It works quite well. I'm going to be using it in a project very soon.

Rob Reed, who created the Ode blogging system in Perl, writes about how he's looking into Python but still finds a whole lot to like about Perl in his entry titled I Like Perl:

Like many other people who work or play at web design and development, I've spent a considerable amount of time learning new (to me) languages in recent years. Now I'm starting to take a good look at Python. Why? First, because there seems to be a lot of promising activity around Python. But more importantly, I suppose it's because Python, like Perl, is readily usable beyond the web.

Keep in mind that I'm an IT guy more than I am a developer. That tends to be the way I look at things. Perl is a fantastic language for accomplishing all sorts of programming tasks (virtually anything you're likely to want to do that doesn't require a dedicated team of developers). Python is the same sort of language. By comparison PHP, Ruby, and others are not so much (which is not to suggest that they aren't perfectly fine languages for what they're used for).

The interesting thing is, the more I learn about these languages, the more I appreciate just how sensible Perl is. It makes me appreciate Perl all the more.

There's a lot more to this thoughtful entry, and I highly suggest you read the whole thing.

To know Markdown is to love it.

Markdown is baked into Ode and makes writing things tour need to end up as HTML faster, easier, less broken and nicer to read on the back end, too.

When HTML was created in the early 1990s, it was envisioned (in my hazy opinion) as something that would be applied to text by a computer program, not laboriously typed out (and inevitably messed up).

But type it out we do. Or at least I do. All (the live-long) day.

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Chromatic, author of "Modern Perl," writes in a recent blog post anybody interested in programming should read, How to Learn Perl, these words to live by:

Find something that interests you. Find a way to automate it. Keep a list of changes or improvements or new techniques you might apply. Write down what you think about when you're commuting or walking or falling asleep or bathing. When you can't get it out of your head, break it into small pieces, test and experiment, and see what happens.

Programming well requires knowledge, certainly, but like anything else it requires passion to keep you practicing in a disciplined way. The resources I've mentioned here can give you knowledge and will help you develop your discipline. (They're not the only resources, but I believe they're great resources.) What's left is up to you.