Question for Techies: Best Things to Learn

[Elitis]

I'd say cyber security, both the slightly more boring blue-team side and the exciting breaking into things red-team side are excellent things to learn for anyone getting into technology, but may be a little difficult for an 8 year old. Honestly, everything depends on goals. This field is incredibly vast, so the "best things" to learn are going to be different for everyone.

As an expert in this field, you CANNOT learn Cybersecurity without having background knowledge in other areas of IT (coding, networking, systems administration). I think Python is an excellent start, as it is not only a very flexible language, but also requires good coding habits (e.g. proper spacing and indenting for readability) that will likely carry over to other languages. HTML, CSS, JS et al are likely going to be good knowledge to have for years to come. PHP is good to know, but still has a stigma of making it easy to code badly.

Of course, I did say Cyber security may be a bit difficult for him at this point. And he does have some background knowledge (however small) in programming/scripting. Adding on to that basic ability and teaching him how to program securely may be an option for him. I'm not suggesting he learn how to secure an entire enterprise domain at this point.

Funny enough I avoided Python for years growing up due to its odd syntax. I was so used to C-style syntax, everything else just seemed wrong. Although I was already using spacing and indenting anyway lol. And PHP would be excellent for him to know if OP wants some help with Wordpress.