So my school got invited to this coding competition for high-schoolers and among them, I was a part member and part mentor along side our CS professor since I was the most proficient coding stuff (although most of I do were JS and Python stuff although i can read other code)

Then this guy showed up.

He was picked by the faculty to take the WebDev competition. He knows how to use Photoshop for Photo retouchings and stuff but here's a problem.

He can't code nor make a proper website design.

So being the kind person I am, I volunteered to teach him what I know about frontend and HTML. This goes on for 4 weeks of nonstop practices, coding sessions and finally, Code In The Dark-style practice (which involves the person to code a full website for only 15 minutes).

When he was able to finish and mastered some of what I taught. I gave him the go signal and we were on to the road to victory.

Unfortunately our first try, we won nothing.

He said after the competition "I give up man, I can't take this!" but I said, "Just because you lost a f*cking competition once, doesn't mean you're a motherf*cking loser in life. There's still one more chance."

So I pressured our WebDev guy to be more better, taught him about mockups, JavaScript and etc.

Then the second attempt a year later, me and the WebDev guy won and moved on the finals. However, he didn't win the finals and I was the lone champion reprsenting our school.

Although he didn't win, he was happy I carried the torch and win the prize.

Prior to that, he asked me "Hey, how to be like you?"

I only answered, "Achievements are just gold with cloth and paper. Wear it lightly".

Fast forward to today, he's now the school's head design coordinator and layout designer for their newspaper column. He also practices his coding skills by frequenting on our coding sessions even when the competition was over.

But whenever someone asks "who taught you this?" he would only look to me, smile and say "that person right there".

I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.

Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.

Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.

Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.

I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.

(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)

Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.

If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.

It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.

I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.

Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!

To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.

They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.

When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.

Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.

In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.

My brother just called me asking for help in some MS server thing and I'm like "I don't know that!" (I really don't), and he replied "Yeah, you know, mom told me to call you to ask for help.". Jesus Christ. Just because I'm in CS it doesn't mean I know everything informatics-related.
I now know your pain, devRanters. I usually don't mind being the IT support (so much that my parents call me to help them when their computers decide to randomly die or do something weird because of something they've done, but I live like 300km away because of uni so I can't just go there and help them. Sometimes I say "Ask your son" (he's taking a tech course in high school), but my brother cuts out of it like "I don't know how to fix it" without even looking at it sometimes. Well duh, me neither at times, but google is your friend damn it. Sometimes I search for the answers. Other times I just poke around in the program until I find what's wrong. Either way, when I say I don't know and/or I can't really do much about it they give me the usual "We're paying your uni fees for what?" (in a joking tone but. I'M NOT STUDYING FOR THAT, I WANNA BE A GAME DEV DAMN IT)), but goddamn it I don't know everything just because I am a CS student. I wanna help but sometimes I can't. Deal with that >:V

In my 1st semester, they taught us C++ basics
In my 2nd semester, they didn't teach us shit about CS.
In my 3rd semester, they taught us C basics
In my 4th semester, they taught us Java basics
In my 5th semester, they are teaching us Scratch and Python basics

Can you be fucking done with basics already for fuck sake? I'm a fucking Front End Developer here interning with companies and getting paid whilst I pay a fucking huge sum as college fee and learn fucking basics I knew back in high school? And you're teaching me Scratch, what the fuck is wrong with you; kids in pre-school are taught scratch. Fuck you education system, India!

Which countries should I consider for my post grad?
I'm so fucking done here.

Navy story time again.
I was a cadet, 1st year, final exams in """CS""". Our """professor""" was handing out the exam sheets, when I told him that one of the questions couldn't be answered by what he had taught. He had supposedly taught us C++ (I would insult every C++ tutorial, however shitty, if I called his class introductory or even elemental).
To give you a better idea of the situation, I'll only say this: one of the questions was "Name three brands of antivirus software."
I. SHIT. YOU. NOT.
This was supposed to be a Naval Academy that trained officers, by the way. Anyway, the question at hand was a program that must use recursion to solve a particular problem. I had been studying programming since high school, so I was not bothered by it, but everyone else was. Anyway...
Once I told him that, he threw a fucking fit. He screamed (as our overseeing officer watched in confusion) that we weren't paying attention, that we were just playing around and watching porn sites (BTW I discovered after that, that most porn videos were on the campus server, in write-protected folders that no student had permission to write, but professors and administrators did. Curious... but my ITSec misdeeds are for another day). Anyway, I got so angry at that idiot, I started writing (yes, programming on paper, if you whine about your IDE/text editor, think about that) the program. Until I found out that I didn't know WTF I was writing. The time was up, however, and I had to give my paper. To this day I have no idea what I wrote and what it did (if anything).
Got perfect score. Only one in class.

At a friend's party, I met one of the guys I've known from High school, and talk about what we've become:

Him: ...so yeah, now I study CS, I code some C, I dislike Java, blablablablabla I'm coding some OS and embedded software, blablablabla, and you, what do you code in?

Me: Oh, I learned everything I know by myself, still learning, and I'm mostly doing some PHP and Javascript. Doing websites and apps is cool.

Him: but those aren't programming languages? I mean, you can't manage memory, and blablablabla-

Me: Ó_Õ * Quickly dashed my ass off to talk with some ladies and boozed myself to forget what I just heard *

THIS is why unit testing is important, I often see newbs scour at the idea of debugging or testing:
My high school cs project, i made a 2d game in c++. A generic top down tank game. Being my FIRST project and knowing nothing about debugging or testing and just straight up kept at it for 3 months. Used everything c++ and OOP had to offer, thinking "It works now, sure will work later"

Fast forward evaluation day i had over 5k lines of code here, and not a day of testing; ALL the bugs thought to themselves- "YOU KNOW WHAT LETS GUT THIS KID "
Now I did see some minor infractions several times but nothing too serious to make me refactor my code. But here goes

I started my game on a different system, with a low end processor about 1/4 the power of mine( fair assumption). The game crashed in loading screen. Okay lets do that again. Finally starts and tanks are going off screen, dead tanks are not being de-spawned and ended up crashing game again. Wow okay again! Backround image didn't load, can only see black background. Again! Crashed when i used a special ability. Went on for some time and i gave up.

Prof saw the pain, he'd probably seen dis shit a million times, saw all the hard work and i got a good grade anyways. But god that was embarrassing, entire class saw that and I cringe at the thought of it.
I never looked at testing the same way again.

Brother of my friend came to me and asked me to teach him C as it was most important lesson in high school CS. I agreed and started with data types, conditional statements, loops and others that were mostly exam oriented. He was doing good. Then I thought of teaching him a life lesson and introduced him to pointers(questions about pointers are very rare in exams). As soon as I started the pointers, things got pretty bored and he went off topic and started talking about a girl he has crush on and told he wanted to know when her birthday was so that he could gift her something to be ahead of the crowd trying to impress her. I thought to help him out, afterall he's like my younger brother and told him I can help. Result of his previous exam were out then, providing symbol number on Examination Board's website would do the trick because it would return full data of students result which had birthday in it. I modified my previous script to fetch data of his school's result and pass the data to a file. They're together since last few months. He reminds me time to time that my code is what got them together.

Wanted to make a website with some of my friends about whatever kid thing we were into at the time. None of our parents cared, it was the 90s and nobody took the internet seriously.

Copied and pasted bits of html into notepad and FTPed them to some free webhost over dialup. The website lasted three weeks -- my friends got bored, I got hooked.

A few years later I found myself wondering why some websites used ".php" instead of ".html". I discovered this shiny new thing called PHP 4. Built a website for some video game I was into using it. Spent the next two years teaching myself everything there was to know.

Took programming in high school. Chose CS over mechanical engineering because I liked the university better. Got an internship which turned into a job which turned into a career.

So I created this really cool messaging program for my CS class in high school. Though when I say for - I mean for the students which were bored when the teacher told us how to "resize images in Word".
I used python and tkinter to create it all, and didn't even need to touch sockets. (Mostly because I didn't know how to use them back then, but also because I kept the messages in a file on the school nas.)
Anyway, the program worked and we used it every week, with me listening to suggestions and improving it each week. I even managed to create a sort of notification system.
But sadly, my teacher found out about it and shut it down.

Have you ever had a similar experience?

I'm from the UK. My CS teacher took a dislike to me in junior high school, dissuading me from taking the classes I needed to take computer science at college. I ended up starting an economics major and then dropping out.

With the support of my family and friends I started over as a self taught as a developer.

I'm now a Tech Director in New York and love my job.

Hey there! I am pretty new but old to the community xD. Let me explain and introduce myself.

The post might be a little longer, depending on my inspiration, read it at your own risk ;)

I am here on devRant for almost a year now but, this is my first post. I wasn't active until a week ago or so. Why? Well, at the time, I didn't find posts interesting enough to keep me from work or school. I must addmit I was either stupid or confused (not uncommon for me).

Well, I am high school student who, when not prepearing for an entrance exam for faculty, is learning and doing indie game developent with my cousin's support.

Even though I was intermediate gamer whan I was younger, passionate but not addicted, I didn't even think about getting into game development until my cousin showed me one secific game and told me a story about it. Let's stop here and let me tell you why I tagged this rant with wk88.

I've already mentioned my cousin, he's my wk88 trouble. Why? I'll tell you only one thing. He studies CS at University of Cambridge, UK. He earned the scholarship by competing and earning multiple medals in programming in International Olympiad in Informatics. And here I am struggling with ******* trigonometric identities. But nvm, let's move on.

I told you about the game but didn't actually tell you the title and who developed it. So, my inspiration for getting into game development was Alexander Bruce , guy who designed Antichamber. If you haven't heard of it before/tried it yet, give it a shot, you probably won't be disappointed of you like fucking with your brain.

Here're some facts:
- Started learning programming at the age of 12, thought by my brother using Free Pascal in Lazarus.
- Have been learning C++ for 4 years and C# for 3, both at the same time.
- While learning these two, started building .NET based back-end and doing SQL stuff; failed to finish it, gave up after I realised I needed some advanced front-end skills, which I didn't want to learn, to implement a lot of things I wanted.
- Played a piano since I was 11 and been playing around with music production recently.

Here I am now, learning Blender and hoping that one day I will publish the game I've been developing for past year and a half.

Hope you didn't waste your time reading this. I will try to keep you up with things I experience durning future development.

Cheers! 🍻

Made a bunch of bad decisions.
This one is the absolute worst.
Studying biology as a main subject intstead of computer science in high school.
Indian people in here would know, studying PCMB is no less than being a dare devil. 🤣
Why did I do that ?
I didn't want to get into medicine.
I just wanted to study it for fun.

And thought, I'll be able to study all of computer science in college 😶.
Its totally useless now.
How much of biology do I remember now ?
Not much.
Studying CS would have been much more beneficial for me.

I’m a college senior now. The best CS class I ever took was in high school. Our teacher didn’t know how to write software, instead he went around on day one and has us submit proposals for year long projects.

With each project, we had to find mentors in the industry who could help us if we got blocked. Every other week we meet with the teacher (who was more a facilitator) and described how the project was coming.

The results? We had final products that were well beyond the expectations of a high school and more impressive than any project I’ve seen at my university.

Why can’t all STEM programs be like that? Students have incredible ability, but are blocked by traditional education. Let students set the bar.

Sometimes, I find myself around a bunch of annoying newbs who ask dumb questions...

because I'm a part time CS instructor at a high school...

but when I see light bulbs switch on and the smell of enthusiasm in the air, makes teaching so worth it.

Well, I was Always into Computers and Games and stuff and at some point, I started wondering: "why does Computer Go brrr when I Hit this Button?".

It was WinAPI C++ and I was amazed by the tons of work the programmers must have put into all this.

13 year old me was Like: "I can make a Game, cant be too hard."

It was hard.
Turns out I grabbed a Unity Version and tried Things, followed a tutorial and Made a funny jet Fighter Game (which I sadly lost).

Then an article got me into checking out Linux based systems and pentesting.
*Promptly Burns persistent Kali Live to USB Stick"
"Wow zhis koohl".
Had Lots of fun with Metasploit.

Years pass and I wrap my head around Javascript, Node, HTML and CSS, I tried making a Website, worked Out to some extent.

More years pass, we annoy our teacher so long until he opens up an arduino course at school.
He does.

We built weather stations with an ESP32 and C++ via Arduino Software, literally build 3 quadrocopter drones with remote Control and RGB lighting.
Then, Cherry on the top of everything, we win the drone flying Contest everyone gets some nice stuff.

A couple weeks later my class teacher requests me and two of my friends to come along on one of their annual teacher meetings where there are a bunch of teachers from other schools and where they discuss new technology and stuff.

We are allowed to present 3D printing, some of our past programming and some of the tech we've built.

Teachers were amazed, I had huge amounts of fun answering their questions and explaining stuff to them.

Finally done with Realschulabschluss (Middle-grade-graduation) and High school Starts.
It's great, we finally have actual CS lessons, we lesen Java now.
It's fuckton of fun and I ace all of it.
Probably the best grades I ever had in any class.

Then, in my free time, I started writing some simple programs, firstvI extended our crappy Greenfoot Marsrover Project and gave it procedural Landscape Generation (sort of), added a Power system, reactors, Iron and uranium or, refineries, all kinds of cool stuff.

After teaching myself more Java, I start making some actual projects such as "Ranchu's bag of useful and not so useful stuff", namely my OnyxLib library on my GitHub.

More time passes, more Projects are finished, I get addicted to coding, literally.
My days were literally Eat, Code, sleep, repeat.

After breaking that unhealthy cycle I fixed it with Long Breaks and Others activities in between.

In conclusion I Always wanted to know what goes on beneath the beautiful front end of the computer, found out, and it was the most amazing thing ever.
I always had constant fun while coding (except for when you don't have fun) and really enjoyed it at most times.
I Just really love it.

About a year back now I noticed that I was really quite good at what I was doing and I wanted to continue learning and using my programming.
That's when I knew that shit was made for me.

...fuck that's a long read.

I used to think I was so clever by viewing the source code of websites, and would just scroll through it for fun, but what really got me started in programming was the TI-83 calculator I got in grade 10.

You couldn't view the code of most programs on that calc without a computer connection, but I managed to get my hands on the source code of something simple and learned how to prompt for values and calculate things with them. Before I knew it, I was making little programs in BASIC that did formulas for me (Area/circumference of a circle, etc.). One of my professors caught me showing my calculator to another student in class, and assumed I was being a bad student. When I said I made a program as a shortcut for one of the formulas we were learning, she tried to call my bluff and said to write the whole program on the whiteboard for the class to see. 10 minutes of writing and more than one blank stare from my classmates later, the teacher just waved me off and continued the lesson. I was chuffed :-). I made these simple programs for all my math classes throughout high school.

Unfortunately, my first year of university I took a CS course, and my teacher was probably the worst I've ever had in my life. I decided it wasn't for me, and though I did maintain my general aptitude for tech (and was still the person who fixed everyone's printers and viruses), I took a different path, eventually getting an Arts degree in Anthropology.

Where I live, the market for this is more than stale. In fact, it's completely flat, so I thought I would take a course about programming with Arduinos for fun and see if I should return to school for a different certification. It was AWESOME! I made a wireless weather station with Xbees and sensors and built my own anemometer.

I got a job at a manufacturing company, and had the fortune to build a robot which eventually made it's way to the second season of Battlebots. The level of intelligence and enthusiasm I encountered really inspired me, and now here I am at 31, halfway through a BSc in Computer Science and working for a company that makes 3D printers.

It's been a long journey, but the adventure always starts anew tomorrow.

I've actually had mostly good instructors for CS. Or at least mediocre. The worst teacher I had was actually my Algebra II teacher in high school. She taught by reading, word for word, from our textbook. She would copy the example problems from that chapter onto the whiteboard. And then give us the rest of class to work on homework. She was basically a Text-to-Speech program for our textbook.

We all joked that she was drunk and the one locked cabinet in her classroom contained liquor. A year after I had her class she was fired. For drinking on the job. The joke turned out to be 100% true and they actually did find alcohol in the locked cabinet.

This is going to take a second to get dev related, please bear with me.

So, I'm from a pretty small (and poor) town. Like most small towns, not many give a damn about computer science/IT (that shows by the fact I'm the only CS major. And there's one IT major).

Now, my high school offers a few "career prep" classes. There's (no exaggeration) almost 5 or 6 classes for medical majors to prepare themselves; like 4 different agriculture based classes; 2 business major classes; and surprise surprise...not a damn Computer Science or IT class.

Yes, we have a computer class. But can you even call a "How to Use Microscoft Products" class an computer class? Finally by my senior year, I got pissed off by this.

I had/have relatives that have worked/are working in the school system, so it wasn't hard to get a meeting with the superintendent and the assistant superintendent to discuss my thoughts. They were both open to and even supported my ideas. But due to funding, it wasn't a feasible idea at the time. (Especially since not many care about CS or IT.)

This is where I get really really pissed off. Being that the town is small, the people with money/a name tend to control things. So, a former principal retired with the expectations to work in another county. However, this job fail through. But there was a "magical" opening for a job that didn't exist before this job fail through.

This pisses me off. We can create a job for someone and afford a full time salary for them, but we cant get an actual CS class. (And this isn't the first time a job was created for someone.)

My NDA prevents me of revealing a lot but here we go...

Hi,
during a 2 year hiatus after High School I decided to study CS. Coming from a third world country with no prospect of getting a nice job without breaking my back or getting spit on by overconfident CS geeks who now actually make a living wage there, I decided to study abroad.

I immediately realized what I have been missing... the culture, the people, the happenings,... I have been starved of LIFE

Anyways, I got the language pretty much down, uni is pretty hard but doable and I got the unthinkable... A JOB. I am currently a working student for a year at a multimillion dollar global conglomerate, doing what some may think of as scripting/data tinkering. I get payed more than both my parents combined, which is why they don't know anything... 😂 (yet, gotta ease em into it).

Now I have gotten my contract extended, which shows that I am doing a decent job there, the boss is firm but chill, coworkers are helpful and resourceful.

But what really grinds my gears is that I am mashing code together whilst googling my brain out, but I am not gaining any skill...

Now comes my grievance, the bane of my existence, the evil Morty to my Morty,... GitHub.

In this professional surrounding, where I got handed a $2,5k notebook and a overly huge paycheck, I never use Git (because we have a proprietary, internal, and very transparent alternative (transparent for the higher ups 😬 ))

I always wanted to contribute on GitHub, but I get very intimidated by the projects there and their scopes, people are waaay too knowledgeable in comparison to me and I will most certainly screw something up and embarrass myself. Since I am very self-conscious and awkward I would most probably just delete my profile there and lurk in the shadows again.

I need help, not only for my mental health, but also to expand my skillset and improve myself, since skill is the only thing I can still acquire.

Does anyone know where I should start as a overglorified python script-kiddy who still thinks 1337 is cool and mr Robot is a decent show?

Thanks,
@rn

Just got accepted as a volunteer (teacher assistant) in a non-profit organization, funded by Microsoft.
They teach high school students CS twice a week.
I know it might not be much, because I will not be payed, but I will be trained and teach alongside Google and Microsoft engineers.
The organization is called TEALS.

I hope it is a good experience and build a good network.
I do not have any friends, nor any engineer friend since I moved in USA, so I think this is a good opportunity.

P.S. Please for the love of god do not bash here Microsoft. Everyone, even the people who rant about hating Microsoft, will accept a job there if they got the chance. So please stop the hypocrisy if you intend to do some "sarcastic" comment about this organization funded by Microsoft.

Sometimes I see my old high school, or a library in my town. And I think of making a workshop to get the next generation excited about CS.

Then I remember I hate people.

! rant

Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.

I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.

Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.

His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.

It got worse. Much, much worse.

I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.

Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.

So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.

Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.

And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.

Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.

I was talking to a CS student here at my University the other day. We were discussing our high school careers. He had the opportunity to take 6 different CS classes, but he cheated his way through most of the classes.

Meanwhile, I had the opportunity to take a huge total of 0 CS classes. But boy did I desire the ability to take CS classes.

It's kind of sad that students who desire to learn get left out in the rain, while people who can take classes just cheat their way through the courses.

When I was 8 I discovered RPG Maker 2000 by chance... I started making little games and basically never stopped.
Fast forward a few years, I wanted to know how to do the 'real' stuff SO BAD. So I chose a CS-oriented high school, which filled in some gaps in my otherwise self-taught programming skills.
Discovering Ogre3D was the final nail in the coffin.

I always wanted to be an airforce pilot since I was a kid. Then snes came, spent a great deal of hours playing so many games. I got curious on how they were created and although I did it, I always wondered why people blow on cartridges if the game won't start. Fast forward to CS, Diablo 3, Red alert. I was fascinated whenever I type something on the console and something happened, that got me excited. Add that I was using wordstar and programming HTML/CSS in school when I was just 10-11. When I turned 12, I was programming using Borland C++. It just snowballed from there, curiosity and a series of my programs working made me focus a lot of my time talking to computers (especially when I built robots using lego mindstorms). While my classmates were having a hard tim deciding what course to take in college, I was already certain since I was just a sophomore in high school. I will write and talk to computers until I wear thick glasses.

So there it is, my dev story. Apologies for a lengthy post. 😀

Do anybody remember when i wrote a rant about the IT teacher in my high school?

Few months ago we got the results from final exams! (we have precentage based grades)

Another thing to remember:
You can pick basic or extended version of the every test you take.
Everybody has to get at least 30% on basic exams (they are nessesary for everybody) to graduate from the school. The extended exams give you more points at university and they are not mandatory.
In addition to that extended ones dont have the lower limit

The IT exam has only the extended version (because its not mandator, you pick it yourself). It is pretty easy: just basic algorithms, basic C++ programs and general PC things.

I didnt take the IT class because i thougt i can learn much more at home. My friend took it. He is very good. He uses linux he wants to become a pen tester. I know he is worth getting 100% on that extended IT exam. (We did a lot of projects thogether)

Well... NOBODY GOT MORE THAN 20% on that exam! WTF!

That POS teacher should die in that win xp IT class with all ethernet cables stuck in his ass!

He didnt teach anything useful about algorithms to anybody! And that was the easiest and the most important part on the exam!

In addition to that people had to do few tasks on pc as well! And one of those tasks could been a picture in gimp BUT THE GIMP DIDNT EVEN WORK ON THOSE PC'S!

Algorithms are easy! That son of a twat didnt even understand it himself! That is why im telling everybody in my town to NOT go to that hight school for IT exam!
I dont want anybody to waste their life trying to learn something useful when that fucking bitch dosent understand anything!

That teacher is lucky. My friend got rejected from studing CS on university (due to the shit score) but he at least got accepted to study math.

I hope he will be able to continiue his dev dream.

Here in Spain instead of calling it CS we use the term "Informática", which is closer to the broader IT. Which means that hyped me enrolled in all the "Informática" courses since high school, only to be shot in the face by yet another "Let's learn PowerPoint" course. I honestly hate that.

I've been giving small courses (one week long) to kids at age 12-16 about real programming, starting from scratch to real-world arduino or Java, because that is what I hoped I would have found at their age.

Not entirely dev related, but definitely shameless. In high-school we had to study CS, but it was more about knowing to use Office. We had class tests, which mean that we all had the same task and we had to finish it until the end of the class. Obviously no one wanted to do it, so whoever finished first would email it to everyone. Most people, however, were stupid enough to leave the meta data untouched, so it was obvious who was the original author. To not appear suspicious, I removed the original metadata and put my own in, and deliberately made errors in the sheet and corrected others that I noticed. I never got caught, because my work would always have "unique" mistakes.

So I got the Google Foobar challenge while I was in highschool. I completed up to level 3 of it and got into contact with a recruiter. They said to contact them when I was in college. I then stopped doing the challenge due to school keeping me too busy. I've heard that level 4 is the hardest level and requires high level programming and math concepts to be able to do. Should I complete it now or wait until I have done more difficult courses in cs?

Well it’s Sunday so last day to leave my thoughts on probably the only topic that’s current to me.

I think you should pay teachers a competitive salary.
The problem with teaching CS at high school level especially (in university there are grants, actually competitive salaries between unis and other perks) is if a person is versed in programming/cs theory why would they settle for a $40k job? When the alternative is finding a job in the field where salaries are around $80k+ (this figure came from my head, can’t remember the source) it’s hard to justify going into teaching even if you would enjoy it more than a desk job.

If the salary difference was smaller then one could maybe justify liking work over pay but here it’s basically double difference... Kinda makes you understand why some comp sci teachers seem incompetent in even using their own computer. Yes there will always be that odd person out who will teach (or go to a private school and negotiate a workable salary) but until education becomes a priority for government salaries there will be very limited progress, if any.

You can do anything to the syllabus, make it more verbose, make it appeal to the lowest common denominator, but if you can’t find people to teach it (and know it themselves) you are really screwed.

It was the last year of high school.

We had to submit our final CS homework, so it gets reviewed by someone from the ministry of education and grade it. (think of it as GPA or whatever that is in your country).

Now being me, I really didn’t do much during the whole year, All I did was learning more about C#, more about SQL, and learn from the OGs like thenewboston, derek banas, and of course kudvenkat. (Plus more)

The homework was a C# webform website of whatever theme you like (mostly a web store) that uses MS Access as DB and a C# web service in SOAP. (Don’t ask.)

Part 1/2:

Months have passed, and only had 2 days left to deadline, with nothing on my hand but website sketches, sample projects for ideas, and table schematics.

I went ahead and started to work on it, for 48 hours STRAIGHT.

No breaks, barely ate, family visited and I barely noticed, I was just disconnected from reality.

48 hours passed and finished the project, I was quite satisfied with my it, I followed the right standards from encrypting passwords to verifying emails to implementing SQL queries without the risk of SQL injection, while everyone else followed foot as the teacher taught with plain text passwords and… do I need to continue? You know what I mean here.

Anyway, I went ahead and was like, Ok, lets do one last test run, And proceeded into deleting an Item from my webstore (it was something similar to shopify).

I refreshed. Nothing. Blank page. Just nothing. Nothing is working, at all.

Went ahead to debug almost everywhere, nothing, I’ve gone mad, like REALLY mad and almost lose it, then an hour later of failed debugging attempts I decided to rewrite the whole project from scratch from rebuilding the db, to rewriting the client/backend code and ui, and whatever works just go with it.

Then I noticed a loop block that was going infinite.

NEVER WAIT FOR A DATABASE TO HAVE MINIMUM NUMBER OF ROWS, ALWAYS ASSUME THAT IT HAS NO VALUES. (and if your CPU is 100%, its an infinite loop, a hard lesson learned)

The issue was that I requested 4 or more items from a table, and if it was less it would just loop.

So I went ahead, fixed that and went to sleep.

Part 2/2:

The day has come, the guy from the ministry came in and started reviewing each one of the students homeworks, and of course, some of the projects crashed last minute and straight up stopped working, it's like watching people burning alive.

My turn was up, he came and sat next to me and was like:

Him: Alright make me an account with an email of asd@123.com with a password 123456

Me: … that won't work, got a real email?

Him: What do you mean?

Me: I implemented an email verification system.

Him: … ok … just show me the website.

Me: Alright as you can see here first of all I used mailgun service on a .tk domain in order to send verification emails you know like every single website does, encrypted passwords etc… As you can see this website allows you to sign up as a customer or as a merc…

Him: Good job.

He stood up and moved on.

YOU MOTHERFUCKER.

I WENT THROUGH HELL IN THE PAST 48 HOURS.

AND YOU JUST SAT THERE FOR A MINUTE AND GAVE UP ON REVIEWING MY ENTIRE MASTERPIECE? GO SWIM IN A POOL FULL OF BURNING OIL YOU COUNTLESS PIECE OF SHIT

I got 100/100 in the end, and I kinda feel like shit for going thought all that trouble for just one minute of project review, but hey at least it helped me practice common standards.

Alright, epic throwback to high school
-So I'm taking this CS course on java
-Teacher seems legit
-Knows his shit
-Gets the job done
-Introduces the class to an IDE
-Such wow
-I whip out my Eclipse Oxygen (with Hello World preloaded, obviously) like the nerd I am
-Suddenly:
-BlueJ
-Literally the worst editor ever
-And teacher somehow expects us to work in it with git

WTF.

For those of you who have never worked with BlueJ, thank God you haven't.

/end rant

What new languages should I learn? I'm working on C++, but PHP seems fun...

First: I have to give credit to my high school CS teacher. She gave us a good grounding in computer theory about: pointers, memory organization, and algorithms.

Second: Second I just read the fucking manual. Then programmed a LOT more than people who didn't get good. Hundreds of hours during college, thousands since then. I got style information from reading other peoples code and also learned about how not to code by reading other peoples code. Ever buy a book that proclaims to teach you X, but actually teaches you a proprietary wrapper they wrote for X that has a shitty license? Fuck those people. Anyway, when internet sharing became more of a thing I started watching videos by experts and reading articles. And now I learn from people here as well. Never stop learning and always RTFM.

Definitely landing the first real gig.

I've been writing software since I was 12 (full disclosure: early code consisted of C=64 BASIC). I learned C in high school. Contributed to a MUD in my 20's. But I never got a CS degree and didn't really understand how hiring works, so I limped along doing technical support for years. Years turned into decades.

About 2 years ago, I became an embedded support person inside a development team. I got to show off my skills, and the year effectively became a live interview. Last October I finally got the title.

On the positive side, by taking the long way around I missed out on some of the insanity of the software world in the 90s/00s.

In high school I absolutely hated business and science subjects(phy, chem, bio) as well.
Not to forget fucking maths. Calculas and all that shit I never paid attention to.
I chose CS hoping it would rid me of maths.
Fell in love with programming the very first semester.
Now I'm in my last semester and a freelance Web Dev.

I think professors should relate computational processes to mathematical ones more often. This helped me out at the beginning a lot when learning CS through the internet during high school.
I remember that a lot of the computational logic made sense to me because of math.

e.g. functions, comparators, variables, for, and, xor, sets, trees, sorting, searching etc.

A lot of these topics are hard to teach for beginning computer scientists. But I think if professors made the relationship with math from the beginning it would be easier for the students

I dont know if teachers already do this but the first time I had a professor relate math to code was while taking data structures in my second year of college

Fire the teachers who don’t know anything about CS except out of a guide. Make it about CS. Also update the god damn information taught + plus tools used to learn CS.

Another thing is to let people start learning at a early age, not forcing them but atleast offering the option. Like let’s say in Junior High instead of High School.

In high school for an assessment we all had to make a simple game and we to plan it first and then program it. In the planning stage we had to list variables and functions used and whatnot I'm my planning sheet I was given I had "variables modified by user" which basically meant data inputted buy the user stored in a variable with only one player name variable listed in it and everything else in my game was being computed another runtime and my CS teacher told me I didn't have enough user inputted variables and I explained that it didn't need any more she said "so you're telling me the user enters their name and the the game just plays itself?!!! " :|

Okay this is my first time posting on this site. I've browsed it (definitely not in class) and the community looks beautiful, so I'm going to just kind of slide in here. Anyways this is the part where I use my caps lock button and type lots of naughty words I guess...

<rant type = 'school'>
Our programming classes are fucking DISMAL uuugh... Okay so we have four technology classes: Tech Exploration, Coding 1, Coding 2, and Intro to CS (a 'high school' level class)... So this means a fuck ton of kids in programming classes, mostly because I WANNA MAKE MINCERAFT AND BE A KEWL BOI LIKE GAME DEV BUT I'M ALSO A FUCKING IDIOT AND WILL NOT LEARN ANYTHING YAAAAAAY but that's a mood and so there's a fucking tidal wave of dumb kids in these classes. So right we're dealing with like 80 kids per class period. Sorry if I'm repeating myself but there are a FUCKTON of students. Now, we have... wait for it... ONE FUCKING TEACHER. ONE. I fucking swear this district does not give a SINGLE SHIT about possibly THE SINGLE FUCKING MOST IMPORTANT SUBJECT WHYYYYYY... Okay so the teacher is kinda overworked as fuck lol. She can't really teach eighty kids at once so she mostly gives us exercises from websites but when she can she teaches us shit herself and actually knows a good bit about her field of study. She's usually pretty grumpy, understandably, but if you ask her a good question that makes her think you can see the passion there lol. So anyways that's a mood. Now at the other school it's even worse. They have this new asshole as a teacher that knows NOTHING about ANYTHING IT IS SO FUCKING REDICULOUS OH MY UUUUUGH... THEY STILL DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT A FUCKING LOOP IS LIKE OKAY YOU'VE BEEN TEACHING PROGRAMMING FOR A YEAR AND YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE TEACHING IT AT THAT DISTRICT SO MAYBE YOU SHOULD AT LEAST FUCKING TRY WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU... so he just makes them do shit from a website and obviously can't do half of the shit he assigns it's so fucking sad... I swear this district is supposed to be good but maybe not for the ONE THING I WANT IT TO BE GOOD FOR. Funny story: in elementary school once I wrote down school usernames for people I didn't really know and shared them a google doc that said "you have been hacked make a more secure password buddy" etc etc and made them the owner and these dull shits report it to the principal... So I'm in the principles office... Just a fucking dumb elementary school kid lol and the principal is like hAcKiNg Is BaD yOu ShOuLd NoT dO iT and I'm like how did you know it was me... so he goes on to say some bullshit about 'digital footprint' and 'tracing' me to it... he obviously has no clue what he's saying but anyways afterwards he points to where it says last change made by MY SCHOOL ACCOUNT... HOW DULL CAN YOU FUCKING POSSIBLY BE IT WAS FROM MY ACCOUNT THAT LITERALLY PROVED THAT I DID --NOT-- 'HACK' INTO THEIR ACCOUNT YOU DUMB FUCK. Okay so basically my school is a burning pile of garbage but it's better than most apparently but it's GARBAGE MY GOD... Please fucking tell me it gets better...

okay lol that was longer than I thought it would be guess I just needed to vent... later I guess
</rant>

!dev (?)

Why does my teacher think it's reasonable to give an assignment for writing a scientific article about quantum computing in the first semester of CS? Like really? I just got out of fucking high school you bitch, all math I know is basic linear algebra. Thankfully I'm a nerd that likes computers so I got the basis of classical computing covered, I can only imagine how my classmates that never touched a computer are holding up.

My best CS teacher experience? Well, I've only taken one computer science college class(dual enrolled while in high school) but I think that I got the best possible teacher for that class. He wasn't a full time teacher, he was just part time from another company and was teaching Java.

It was great to have a teacher who was not a teacher by profession and actually knew the industry. Again, this was my only CS class, but I think that, from stories I've heard, I got lucky.

I was always interested in computers. My dad was a big computer geek and a programmer to boot. Usually had a couple old PCs in the basement to play with.

In middle school, I took tech ed and we made simple web sites with html and css. I remember the struggle of nested tables.

In high school, I couldn't fit any CS into my schedule. But someone gave me a learning to code book in ruby. I loved it, and have been hooked ever since.

Ok It's my last term in CS and guess what I have the knowledge as same as some one in high school i rly don't know what to do nAw any suggestions

In 2011,when i was 12, i was playing Garry's Mod with a couple of friends, and i don't remember the circunstance, but one of my friends said: "I wonder how games i made". I have no idea why i was never curious about this subject before,since i played A LOT of videogames, but this question did stick to my mind, so i decided that i would search about it. Searching, i discovered that Garry's Mod used the Source engine, and that it was made in LUA. Tried LUA. Understood very little. Lost my interest. And then, i would only attempt to program again back in 2015, where i learned C++ in high school. Then i learned SQL, and now learning Java. I also discovered that i LOVE programming, and now i have plans to graduate on CS.

Not my CS lecturer but my ICT teacher in high school convinced me that it would be a great idea to go study CS at University. It was the best decision of my life as I'm now happily working full time as an Android developer for a startup. Couldn't imagine myself doing any other well paid job and being this happy.

Sadly I never got to tell him where I ended up post graduation but I did get to tell him that I secured myself a good placement year when I was at university when I found out he was sick.

He was so grateful of me getting in touch and I'm glad I managed to get to say thank you to him before he passed away.

Leukemia fucking sucks. RIP.

My path into development started with my dad. He was a COBOL programmer and would bring his work home to debug by hand. He would explain his thinking and programming concepts as he went through his code.

I then got into Basic, and Visual Basic 6.0 (right before .NET). In high school CS I and CS II consisted of VB.NET and Java, but it also solidified some foundational concepts I was missing; binary, hex, flow charts, etc.

After that though, everything else was self exploration and trial and error. It all came together. I love my path, and it brought me here to devRant via the programming friends I have made along the way.

CS teacher: "I want you to do this project using DSDM. Every member needs to be appointed a role that is best suited to their abilities."

He has never heard of Agile.

A bit long, sorry.

I "inherited" an A+ certification book from my older brother over 10 years ago after he saw me meddling with some old computers that still used SIMM's. I still lived in my native country at the time and got my A+ certification through my high school when I moved to the US. I knew before I got the book that my career would revolve around IT.

I learned HTML and CSS right after I finished high school and started working with JS and PHP because of WordPress a year later. To this day I still help family and friends with IT related stuff, but after digging into web development I made it my main focus. I am now working on my CS degree after failing at college years ago because of laziness and procrastination. I also work at an amazing startup as a software engineer for the web. That's it in a nutshell, questions are welcome.

Can I get a stress ball? 😅

!rant

Question to the devs that hire.
Would you hire a developer with the qualifications:
- knows multiple programming languages (can be any but knows them well)
- has worked the past 6 years in the field however worked during his school life.
- started of career in web development and worked with high end clients, (big corps, businesses, celebs)
- does not have a CS or Engineering Degree (has a different degree that is remotely related)
- has failed his A Level exams (pre-college, high school board exams by Cambridge) (not that this matters)

Disclaimer: This is not about me. I was in an argument with my extended family about the importance of grade school education in work. My family consists of Teachers and School Administrators entirely. The above point all define me and I was successful enough to earn more than what my family does early on when joining college. I did however fail my alevels only to get a scholarship in a great University for my field.

!rant

So, at this day I have two jobs as software engineer (I'm self thought). The first one with a friend from high school, a billing platform. The engineer he had flew to Canada and leave him with nothing, so I made one from scratch, I couldn't deliver on time and most of the clients he had moved to another services so the benefits of the deal I made with him ended being less than expected (there was a deadline set by our government as these clients are merchants and the Costa Rican IRS equivalent is moving everybody to electronic billing to mitigate tax evasion). The backend was done using Go, the front-end with React and MobX.

Then, the second job. I'm being staffed to a big outsourcing company for a North American business. The engineer team is small compared to the other departments and the people are really nice. Their stack is Python and React, I'm the only guy allowed to use a different editor than Neovim (Emacs in my case).

between the two I work 11 hours per day, and I'm satisfied with this.

This is way better than my old CS job at Amazon Spain where I couldn't use Emacs to have a decent text editing experience.

Thanks, Lord.