!rant

What is something I can complete in a week (let's say 30-40 hours) as a newbie (I made an android app, played around with engines like unity and unreal here and there, tried some c#, and I always mess around with the linux command line, my RPi, etc etc)? I'll start working in a dual-studying job ('applied CS') in 2 weeks so I'll have enough learning-without-doing to do. I just want to learn something by doing something useful (e.g. a small android app that I can put ads in or sell, or maybe provide something for free that people like. I don't want to write my own engine( that'd take very long anyways) or make a compiler because I feel that'd be kind of useless and even though it'd probably be fun, I would lack initiative.

The main reason I moved from Linux to macOS was that I grew up. If we count not just Linux experiments but prolonged usage, I was an avid Crunchbang fan. After it died, I moved to elementaryos.

What I want to say is, Linux can be very fun and educational when you're still in the uni. You have all the energy in the world, and you can afford to diverge from your daily routine for an hour to debug GPU drivers.
Now, the backbone of my life is keeping a very tight sleep schedule, taking meds on time, avoid infohazards, avoid scrolling on the web, all to remain in a very fragile state of balance that keeps the bipolar disorder away. I'm in the middle of all this, earning derealization (yes, I'm also autistic) every time I design a data model. All I want from my computer is to be treated like a careless, regular user, not like someone with a CS degree.

I use Sublime Merge instead of command line Git. I use Postico to explore PostgreSQL databases, not psql from my terminal. By the way, my terminal is not iTerm, Alacritty or some other such thing, my terminal is whatever came with my Mac, with whatever default settings.

Linux is crawling into a non-street-legal racecar's cockpit and strapping yourself in, ready to blast off. MacOS is your chauffeur, holding your old shaking hand as he helps you into your Maybach's backseat. They're different, and that's okay.
Can Maybach race? Well, it has a 621 HP V12, so if _you_ can race, it probably can too, but we all know it's not a racecar.

Windows? Windows is an SS officer, wearing the all too familiar Windows logo for swastika, throwing you into a gaswagen.

So, in my second semester of CS I had a class about OS and the way they work. The professor made us do presentations every two weeks (we were basically giving the class...).

For full points we had to have the presentation, an example (video or pictures), and an activity.

My team was one of the last presentations of the first round (iirc there were 5 rounds). I was in charge of the activity, so I decided to create a program to make it fun (and leaned a new language in the way). Thanks to this the professor gave us extra credit because we were the first team that ever did that.

My classmates decided that it was a good idea to follow my idea and a couple of teams started to code their activities too. At the end of the semester almost every team had a program as their activity...
But the professor didn't gave them extra credit because it wasn't a novelty anymore. :D

In another round, my team got as a topic encryption. By the time I was already a Linux user and I knew a thing or two about encryption, so I decided to do the example in real time showing how to encrypt and decrypt using command line. Once again we received extra credit because of it. :D

At the end of the semester the professor offered me a job as a developer, but I couldn't take it since I moved out of the country the next month :(

TypeScript types are fun. Problem is: the check is compile-time only.

I just wasted an hour not understanding that an integer passed from command line was actually getting transmitted as a string. The library, where that value landed as parameter, happily ignored the non-matching type and worked as if the value has not been set at all!

Dear library maintainer, please enforce your parameter types! Throw an error right into my face saying I shall not pass anything but an integer! Don't just continue to work to produce false output correctly. Thank you!

Dear TypeScript, I really want type checks on runtime.

Dear JavaScript: Why did you ever think loose types were a good idea? (And I say that as a PHP developer as well.)

Yes I do find myself quite funny, how so?