University highlight

Professor: I uploaded 25 C exercises with a 3 week deadline at eclass.

*4 hours later* Me: I completed the exercises.

Professor: ﴾͡๏̯͡๏﴿ O'RLY?

Me: Let me show you

???

Professor : Feel free to skip class for the rest of the month

Well played!

I tutor people who want to program, I don't ask anything for it, money wise, if they use my house as a learning space I may ask them to bring cookies or a pizza or something but on the whole I do it to help others learn who want to.

Now this in of itself is perfectly fine, I don't get financially screwed over or anything, but...

Fuck me if some students are horrendous!

To the best of my knowledge I've agreed to work with and help seven individuals, four female three male.

One male student never once began the study work and just repeatedly offered excuses and wanted to talk to me about how he'd screwed his life up. I mean that's unfortunate, but I'm not a people person, I don't really feel emotionally engaged with a relative stranger who quite openly admits they got addicted to porn and wasted two years furiously masturbating. Which is WAY more than I needed to know and made me more than a little uncomfortable. Ultimately lack of actually even starting the basic exercises I blocked him and stopped wasting my time.

The second dude I spoke to for exactly 48 hours before he wanted to smash my face in. Now, he was Indian (the geographical India not native American) and this is important, because he was a friend of a friend and I agreed to tutor however he was more interested in telling me how the Brits owed India reparations, which, being Scottish, I felt if anyone was owed reparations first, it's us, which he didn't take kindly too (something about the phrase "we've been fucked, longer and harder than you ever were and we don't demand reparations" didn't endear me any).

But again likewise, he wanted to talk about politics and proving he was a someone "I've been threatened in very real world ways, by some really bad people" didn't impress me, and I demonstrated my disinterest with "and I was set on fire once cos the college kids didn't like me".

He wouldn't practice, was constantly interested in bigging himself up, he was aggressive, confrontational and condescending, so I told him he was a dick, I wasn't interested in helping him and he can help himself. Last I heard he wasn't in the country anymore.

The third guy... Absolute waste of time... We were in the same computer science college class, I went to university and did more, he dossed around and a few years later went into design and found he wanted to program and got in touch. He completes the code schools courses and understandably doesn't quite know what to do next, so he asks a few questions and declares he wants to learn full stack web development. Quickly. I say it isn't easy especially if it's your first real project but if one is determined, it isn't impossible.

This guy was 30 and wanted to retire at 35 and so time was of the essence. I'm up for the challenge, and so because he only knows JavaScript (including prototypes, callbacks and events) I tell him about nodejs and explain that it's a little more tricky but it does mean he can learn all the basis without learning another language.

About six months of sporadic development where I send him exercises and quizzes to try, more often than not he'd answer with "I don't know" after me repeatedly saying "if you don't know, type the program out and study what it does then try to see why!".

The excuses became predicable, couldn't study, playing soccer, couldn't study watching bake off, couldn't study, couldn't study.

Eventually he buys a book on the mean stack and I agree to go through it chapter by chapter with him, and on one particular chapter where I'm trying to help him, he keeps interrupting with "so could I apply for this job?" "What about this job?" And it's getting frustrating cos I'm trying to hold my code and his in my head and come up with a real world analogy to explain a concept and he finally interrupts with "would your company take me on?"

I'm done.

"Do you want the honest unabridged truth?"

"Yes, I'd really like to know what I need to do!"

"You are learning JavaScript, and trying to also learn computer science techniques and terms all at the same time. Frankly, to the industry, you know nothing. A C developer with a PHD was interviewed and upon leaving the office was made a laughing stock of because he seemed to not know the difference between pass by value and pass by reference. You'd be laughed right out the building because as of right now, you know nothing. You don't. Now how you respond to this critique is your choice, you can either admit what I'm saying is true and put some fucking effort into studying cos I'm putting more effort into teaching than you are studying, or you can take what I'm saying as a full on attack, give up and think of me as the bad guy. Your choice, if you are ready to really study, you can text me in the morning for now I'm going to bed."

The next day I got a text "I was thinking about what you said and... I think I'm not going to bother with this full stack stuff it's just too hard, thought you should know."

I am an indie game developer and I lead a team of 5 trusted individuals. After our latest release, we bought a larger office and decided to expand our team so that we could implement more features in our games and release it in a desirable time period. So I asked everyone to look for individuals that they would like to hire for their respective departments. When the whole list was prepared, I sent out a bunch of job offers for a "training trial period". The idea was that everyone would teach the newbies in their department about how we do stuff and then after a month select those who seem to be the best. Our original team was
-Two coders
-One sound guy(because musician is too mainstream)
-Two artists
I did coding, concept art(and character drawings) and story design, So, I decided to be a "coding mentor"(?).
We planned to recruit
-Two coders
-One sound guy
-One artist (two if we encountered a great artstyle)
When the day finally arrived I decided to hide the fact that I am the founder and decided that there would be a phantom boss so that they wouldn't get stressed or try flattery.
So out of 7, 5 people people came for the "coding trial session". There were 3 guys and 2 girls. My teammate and I started by giving them a brief introduction to the working of our engine and then gave them a few exercises to help them understand it better. Fast forward a few days, and we were teaching them about how we implement multiple languages in our games using Excel. The original text in English is written in the first column and we then send it to translators so that they can easily compare and translate the content side by side such that a column is reserved for each language. We then break it down and convert the whole thing into an engine friendly CSV kind of format. When we concluded, we asked them if they had any questions. So there was this smartass, who could not get over the fact that we were using Excel. The conversation went like this:(almost word to word)

Smartass: "Why would you even use that primitive software? How stupid is that? Why don't you get some skills before teaching us about your shit logic?"
Me:*triggered* "Oh yeah? Well that's how we do stuff here. If you don't like it, you can simply leave."
Smartass: "You don't know who I am, do you? I am friends with the boss of this company. If I wanted I could have all of you fired at whim."
Me:"Oh, is that right?"
Smartass:"Damn right it is. Now that you know who I am, you better treat me with some respect."
Me: "What if I told you that I am not just a coder?"
Smartass:"Considering your lack of skills, I assume that you are also a janitor? What was he thinking? Hiring people like you, he must have been desperate."
Me:"What if I told you that I am the boss?"
Smartass:"Hah! You wish you were."*looks towards my teammate while pointing a thumb at me* "Calling himself the boss, who does he think he is?"
Teammate:*looks away*.
Smartass:*glances back and forth between me and my teammate while looking confused* *realizes* *starts sweating profusely* *looks at me with horror*
Me:"Ha ha ha hah, get out"
Smartass:*stands dumbfounded*
Me:"I said, get out"
Smartass:*gathers his stuff and leaves the room*
Me: "Alright, any questions?"*Smiling angrily*
Newcomers: *shake heads furiously*
Me:"Good"

For the rest of the day nobody tried to bother me. I decided to stop posing as an employee and teaching the newcomers so that I could secretly observe all sessions that took place from now on for events like these. That guy never came back. The good news however, is that the art and music training was going pretty well.

What really intrigues me though is that why do I keep getting caught with these annoying people? It's like I am working in customer support or something.

Story of my most useless meeting?

Too many to mention. Here's one. Years ago a new HR associate was specifically hired to better engage the workforce. About once a week, she conducted about an hour to two hour meetings which consisted of every 'touchy-feely' idea you could think of. I swear any day I was going to walk into a meeting and do the "fall back into your partner" trust exercises.

One particular meeting, 'Betty' engaged us with the topic of what keeps us motivated, and I was a little more annoyed than usual because I was behind on a system critical project and these meetings were mandatory.

User1: "Knowing I make customer satisfaction my number one priority."
User2: "The strong sense of accomplishment I feel by doing my best"
Me: "Money"
<you could almost hear Betty's gasp>
Betty: "Oh, no, money shouldn't be the motivator. Money is like icing on the cake. Tell us what keeps you happy and engaged."
<other users nod their heads in engagement>
Me: "Again, money."
User3: "I can't...ugh..I don't believe..oh..why would you say that? I think being part of such a great team is payment enough."
<more nodding of heads>
Me: "Do you work for free? I don't. None of us do. Would any of you keep doing your jobs here if you weren't getting paid?"
Betty: "That is really not the point of this meeting."
Me: "Sure it is. I'll bet if Order Taking starting providing bonuses for positive after-call surveys, employee satisfaction would go through the roof. Anyone else like that idea?"
Betty: "Your attitude isn't helping this discussion. Lets move on."
Me: "Lets not. In 20?? the Gartner group performed a study where they 'discovered' the primary motivator for employees was money. You want employees to perform better, you pay them. It is really that simple."
<I could see the looks of "Its OK to speak my mind?" and others wanting to speak up>
Betty: "Moving on. Lets go over the company core values again and discuss how they enrich our lives at work and at home."

I kept quiet for the rest of the meeting.

The poop hit the fan, and my boss pulls me into a conference room
Boss: "Betty is really pissed at you. She went directly to the VP of HR"
Me: "Good. Does this mean I don't have to attend the enrichment meetings?"
Boss: "Yea, that was her idea of punishment. Lucky bastard."

So I missed the first 3 days of my programming class. Once I showed up to the 4th the professor was really cool about it. She informs me on the HW I missed and so after the test she handed me (which was overdue as well) I started on the HW. By the end of the class I show her the exercises I did and just by how I structured each function (Python btw) she could tell that I was advanced for the class... I was surprised when she said that I didn't have to show up to the class because it would be a waste of my time, and that I can use the time to focus on personal projects. She offered to help me out with database dev (which ironically I planned on reading head first sql after a design pattern book). The thing that hit home was when she said "I think you're going to be a great programmer."

We currently have multiple exercises for a lecture and they decided to use python this year instead of Matlab, but the codestyle is all over the place. Everything is yellow in my IDE and warnings everywhere.

Arghhh 😭

Had devRant installed for a while now and finally have something worth sharing.

This happened in my last Python lab at uni:
Me: *Working away at this week's assignment*
Dude next to me: You know last week's assignment?
Me: Yes?
Dude: Did you test you solutions to the exercises?
Me: Yes
Dude: Oh, I didn't. Do you think I'll lose marks?
Me: Yes

I can only hope I'm not forced to work with this guy on group assignments...

I feel the need to take a different approach to this week's rant. I think someone needs to defend teachers, for a number of reasons. Obviously this is probably out of place on devRant but it is a kind of rant against those who think they know everything and have nothing to learn.

1) Teachers are not industry specialists. They do not spend their lives keeping on top of the latest framework or project management methodology or code management tool. They are educators and that brings its own set of out of hours challenges and training exercises.

2) They have a course to teach and have probably used the same one for quite some time. Years probably. They (should) teach the fundamentals of programming not a particular language or syntax or quirk. Those fundamentals don't really change. Logic, problem solving, precision, structures, etc.

3) They need to provide a course which will cater for different skill levels. There are always class members who are bored because it's too easy and others who struggle in any subject.

4) Teaching is like any profession - there are really, really good ones, OK ones and there are shit ones.

5) They have probably never developed a detailed project or solution in their lives. They don't know the pitfalls and challenges that teams face in this kind of environment. Should they - maybe. But the probably don't.

I think that's all... I'm not a teacher (although I did fancy the idea at a time) but just feel they get a rough ride sometimes (particularly on here).

This is my most ridiculous meeting in my long career. The crazy thing is I have witnessed this scenario play out many times during my career. Sometimes it sits in waiting for a few years but then BOOM there it is again and again. In each case the person that fell into the insidious trap was smart and savvy but somehow it just happened. The outcomes were really embarrassing and in some cases career damaging. Other times, it was sort of humorous. I could see this happening to me and I never want it to happen to you.

Once upon a time in a land not so far away there was a Kickoff Meeting for an offsite work area recovery exercise being planned for our Oklahoma locations. Eleven Oklahoma high ranking senior executives were on this webinar plus three Enterprise IT Directors (Ellen, Jim and Bob) who would support the business from the systems side throughout the exercise.

The plan was for Sam Otto, our Midwest Director of Business Continuity to host this webinar. Sam had hands-on experience recovering to our third party recovery site vendor and he always did a great job. He motivated people to attend the exercise with the coolest breakfasts and lunches you could imagine. Donuts, bagels, pizza, wings, scrumptious salads, sandwiches, beverages and desserts. He was great with people and made it a lot of fun.

At the last minute Charles 'Don't Call Me Charlie' Ego-Smith, the Global Business Continuity Senior Vice President, decided to grand-stand Sam. He demanded the reins to the webinar. Pulled a last-minute power-play and made himself the host and presenter. You have probably seen the move at some point in your career. I guess the old saying, 'be careful what you wish for' has some truth to it - read on and let me know if you devRanters agree...

So, Charlie, I mean Charles, begins hosting the session and greets all of the attendees. Hey, good so far! He starts showing some slides in the PowerPoint presentation and he fields a few questions, comments and requests from the Oklahoma executives. The usual easy to handle requests such as, 'what if we are too busy to do recover all systems', 'what if we recover all of our processes from home', 'what if we have high profile visitors that month?' Hey you can't blame them for trying. You are probably thinking to yourself, 'been there - heard that!' But luckily our experienced team had anticipated the push-back. Fortunately, Senior Management 'had our backs' and committed that all processes and systems must participate and test - so these were just softball requests, 'easy-peasy' to handle. But wait, we are just getting started!

Now the fireworks begin. Bob, one if the Enterprise IT directors started asking a bunch of questions. Well, Charles had somewhat of a history with Bob from previous exercises and did not take kindly to Bob's string of questions. Charles started getting defensive and while Bob was speaking Charles started IM'ing. He's firing off one filthy message after another to me and our teammate Sam.

'This idiot Bob is the biggest pain in the ass that I ever worked with'; 'he doesn't know shit', 'he never shuts the f up', 'I wanna go over to his office and kick his f'in ass...!'

Unfortunately...the idiot Charles had control of the webinar and was sharing his screen so every message he sent was seen by all of the attendees! Yeah, everyone including Bob and the Senior Oklahoma executives! We could not instant message him to stop as everyone would have seen our warnings, so we tried to call Charles' cell phone and text him but he did not pick up. He just kept firing ridiculously embarrassing dirty IM messages and I guess we were all so stunned we just sat there bewildered. We finally bit the bullet and IM'ed him to STOP ALREADY!!! Whoa, talk about an embarrassing silence!

I really felt sorry for Bob. He is a good guy. Deservedly, Charlie 'Yes I am going to call you CHARLIE' got in big time hot water after the webinar with upper management. For one reason or another he only lasted another year or so at our company. Maybe this event played a part in his demise.

So, the morale is, if you use IM - turn it off during a webinar if you are the host. If you must use it, be really careful what you say, who you say it to and pray nothing embarrassing or personal is sent to you for everyone to see.

Quick Update - During the past couple of months I participated on many webinars with enterprise software vendors trying to sell me expensive solutions. Most of the vendors had their IM going while doing webinars and training. Some very embarrassing things came flying across our screens. You learn a lot reading those messages when they pop-up on the presenters' screen, both personal and business related. Some even complaints from customers!

My advice to employees and vendors is to sign-out of IM before hosting a webinar. Otherwise, it just might destroy your credibility and possibly your career.

I've found sites like Udemy/Khanacademy/Codecademy/Brilliant/Edx to be very useful — possibly more useful than expensive education.

But they still need:

1. Better correction/update mechanisms. Human teachers make mistakes and material gets outdated, and while online teachers are rectified faster than classroom teachers, the procedure is still not optimal. Knowledge should be a bit more like a verified wiki.

2. Some have great interactive coding environments, some have great videos, some have awesome texts, some have helpful communities. None has it all. In the end, I don't want to learn a new language by writing code in my browser. It could all be integrated/synced to the point where IDEs have plugins which are synced to online videos, with tests and exercises built in, up to a social network where you could send snippets for review and add reviews to other people's code.

3. Accreditation. Some platforms offer this against payment, but I think those platforms often feel very old school (pun intended), with fixed schedules, marks and enrollments. Self paced is a must.

4. Depth is important. Current online courses are often a bit introductory. We need more advanced courses about algorithms, theoretical computer science, code design, relational algebra, category theory, etc. I get that it's about supply/demand, but we will eventually need to have those topics covered.

I do believe that for CS, full online education will eventually win from the classroom — it's still in its infancy, but has more potential to grow into correct, modern education.

It all began yesterday in my math lesson.My teacher introduced us into a new subject: The Heron method.
This is a method for iteratively computing the square root of a number which was made up by Hero of Alexandria.
But here's the cool part:
When my teacher said "method" I had the thought that I could make a programm on my TI-82 Stats (my calculator).
So I used the next break to make a little programm that does exactly the same what my mates has to do in several steps, in just one step.
Here is a picture so I can explain the programm:

First it asks for the root that it should calculate then for a value to begin with and finally for the amount of arithmetic operations.
Then it goes trough the algorithm and displays the interim results (this is important for later ...) .
So back in story.It wasn't surprising that we got exercises with this method as homework but through my programm I just needed 5 minutes instead of 20 minutes (like my class mates).

I have teens in my classroom who want elite hacker status but complain about doing programming exercises outside of class. >.<

I explain to them that learning to code takes a lot of practice and can be frustrating at first. Some still went to the dean complaining that my class is tough. I work at a private school where open communication is encouraged and social justice is a thing.

So, I'm over here like "How do I reach these kids?"

I'm optimistic and I try different approaches to teaching and learning. Some stuff has worked. A lot haven't.

I figure I'd ask here: Does anyone have a suggestion for any creative programming exercises/projects that are beginner-friendly, legal, and hacker-ish? (I teach intro to Java.)

Xpost from /r/sysadmin:
I occasionally see posts from people who seem like they want to spend every waking hour of every waking minute working on home lab stuff and studying for certs.

If you do this, you're missing out on life which you will regret later, but even if you don't care about missing out on life, it actually is hurting your career.

Being well rounded helps you interact with others at work in a number of ways. It makes you less one dimensional as "the computers guy" and it also gives you topics to discuss with people. If you know how to cook, or brew beer, or bake bread you end up using a lot of your technical and troubleshooting skills. Biking long distancing and learning how to fix your bike helps with your troubleshooting skills too. You learn to look at things from other angles.

Reading novels or writing poetry or making art work also helps because it exercises your brain. Woodworking or metal working involve a lot of skills that'd help your IT career including project planning and measuring and budgeting for each project. Working on cars or motorcycles would be similar. You just have to do SOMETHING.

I have a member of my team who literally has nothing going on in his life other than studying for certs. No friends, no hobbies, and he basically eats nothing but McDonalds and frozen dinners because even making a meal takes time away from his studying. He thinks means he's dedicated and will experience great career success.

But instead he has nothing to talk to anyone about, and when I say nothing, I mean literally nothing. It's borderline terrifying. Even if he was into comic books and video games it might help, which might help him relate to SOME of the IT staff even if the rest of the people at the company know nothing about it. But he doesn't even have that.

This isn't a solitary field anymore. Even if you truly are "the best" you still have to interact with other people and stay mentally stable enough to not burn out. Even if you know more than everyone else (or think you do) you have to try to broaden your horizons.

This guy I know applied for a senior position at a company I used to do freelance for. He walked in while I was spending the day there to work on our project.

We used to work in the same company and I knew that this guy doesn't know shit. He's the type that would foam in the mouth while bullshitting his way through any sort of discussion.

Anyway, they had him set up on a computer a few tables from me to complete some coding exercises--real simple stuff just to see how he would approach some common problems.

There was no time limit set but the tests shouldn't have taken him more than an hour.

He sat there for SIX HOURS.

At this point, I went out for a smoke, came back 5 minutes later, and found that he wasn't there anymore.

Apparently, he just stood up and said, "Nope, can't do it" and then left the building without a word to anybody else.

We never heard of him again.

Oh, and the tests? Not a single line of code written XD

So I was very bored in IT class and I asked my teacher to give me some extra exercises. What did he gave me??? Scratch. A Tool for 8 year old kids to learn some programming basics.. fml

I have this great professor who taught us how to be logical human beings (not that I learned much of that haha). He introduced us to web dev. He started with the basic html shit, then proceed with php and sql. His lectures were awesome. He'll then proceed with code exercises. And we'll have mini 'codefights' in his classes! yey! He taught us that in programming, it is much more important to practice logic than master a single language(no hate please). I learned to love programming through his passion. :) I learned to program in his class, now I hope never to stop learning. :D

One of my theoretical CS teachers always complains and makes it sound like everything around him is an annoyance to his existence
- being late or in a bad mood? His pregnant wife is very tiring (good ol' haha women are hormonal much?)
- having to create and correct exercises for us (students) is a nuisance because it's so much work and we're not supposed to be spoon-fed (which makes the whole learning experience very demotivating)
- every explanation start is continued by at least 3 changes in the explanation itself, which makes everything super-confusing
- all his helpers are incompetent and not rising up to his expectations

Someone needs some self-reflection

I was with the train in Vienna already when suddenly I received an email that the test can't be held today because of technical problems 🙄

Now we have it next week when I also have to study for a maths test, do statistics exercises and exercises for database systems
Fml

The tour provided with Golang is really nice for learning the basics..
Just doing

go get golang.org/x/tour/gotour
go tool tour

starts a local webserver with the tour. The lessons and the exercises at the end of certain chapters are really easily understandable.

I think it might also be a good tool to refresh the knowledge about Golang for those that haven't used it in a while.

Several hours ago decided to quit my job due to insane manager (more in the upcoming rants) without a new job lined up.

An hour ago I got an interview invite from Uber.

WHAT IS HAPPENING

P.S. Anyone working at Uber? Did you have to do much LeetCode? I’ve done two LC exercises in my entire life. Not sure what to expect.

It's my first 'rant' so be kind :P

When I started my studies a already knew some very basic programming stuff. I went to the exercises with another dude I met. We always joked about the tasks we had to do and did other things while the others tried to fix bugs in their code. After the semester ended he asked me whether I want to work part time at his mother's office. I went to the interview which was weird because I have never been to one before but got the job straight away. I'm in my fourth year of working there because the team is awesome.

A moment of silence for all those poor CS students who have to do hours of math exercises...

Dumbest experience.
Talked to recruiter, they praised I know ruby, said I needed to do a code test in ruby.

I was given 1 hour to complete 5, exercises in a codefight like thing.

1 exercise had C as the only lang option.
2 more had C and Python.
The last two has ruby too, they were permutation exercises that never completed within the time restriction (that was probably on me, but they did complete on my local ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

I told them about all this, I failed, no second chances, no explanation, no nothing.

I feel like there are more and more people who only THINK they can program, but in reality they barely can make the “Hello, world” program. Many of them come from all of these “online courses”, I’m not saying that from there come only the bad ones, but many of them are bad programmers, who just think that one or two courses is good enough.
You have to gain experience by doing actual work, not by doing pre-baked exercises. In real life most of things you have to solve with your imagination - Stackoverflow will only provide you some raw draw!

People who says jQuery is a programming language should go back to
alert("hello world")
exercises.
Man, I hate those guys

Create real world programming exercises to teach people how to use vim.

The feeling of looking back at some old projects and coding exercises and then realise how much you have improoved

:')

I started out learning Python. And before you "tsk, kids these days", it was before Python became the go to starter language for a lot of universities. No, I started learning around age 12.

My dad (a programmer himself), bought "Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner" and we went through it together. He started out holding my hand as I went through the exercises, but pretty quick I was getting through them mostly on my own.

It was really fun, and I'm absolutely going to do the same if/when I have children of my own. The books exercises were all games, which made it really fun. Instead of "hello world", the first program printed "game over". I was super proud of the hangman game I eventually wrote.

It gave me a leg up when I started taking actual classes, and really instilled a love of coding and puzzle solving in me that propelled me through two degrees.

Damn hackers! Within the course of a week, the internet of my country has been DDOS-attacked three times! Last week the attacks came from Russia or China". Yesterday they came from Russia and Ukraina. Is this a part of the Russian military exercises Zapad 17? Well, when an important part of the infrastructure is down and thousands of civilians are affected, it's for real and not an exercise.

Instead of having 90% theory and 10% exercises it should be the opposite.

I am using do while ONLY on programming exercises. And do not remember a single case I have used it for anything real.

Told a teacher I finished a week worth of exercises, and asked for the next one
"This code is not yours. It's too clean, redo everything"

... what, is it wk64 already ?

I feel like "programmers are not computer technicians" joke is kinda overused lately. It doesn' matter if we are not technicians, we are very knowledgeable in computers and people knows that. People of course will try to get help from you when they can so it's not a wonder that they ask you to help with something they are not confident. Everyone that exercises practical professions lives through that. If your sister-in-law is a mathematician it's normal to ask for help if you are not able to come up with the right algorithm for the task. People depend on each other. That's how we survive.
But I'm not saying start helping everybody that can't open a pdf file. Just know who to choose to help. If they are a capable person or someone that's a part of your everyday life they will most likely repay you when you are also in need. Believe me everyone needs help time to time.

In a class i attended we learned about advanced image synthesis and had to write OpenGL in the exercises.
It was incredibly difficult and i put incredible amounts of time into it and solved the tasks and was incredibly happy when it started to work ☺️

My wife was done with exercises on her electronic 88 keys piano.
Me: I also know something nice.
Her: oh so?
Me: (repeatedly typing key #3)
Her: (thinking)
Her: C hacking?!

At the University, Algorithms class, exercises lesson..the assistant explaining the results of an assignment:

"Because here..if we use a classic 'if-else' loop..."

😳

It's funny when you study in a diploma course that clearly states having a computer as a prerequisite but your mum nags you everyday for studying on the comp top much instead of doing exercises on paper. Well I didn't know I could check syntax for c++ on paper.

A funny story I just remember while my code is compiling :

Back in high school, in Math, we were taught how algorithm works, and we made some exercises with practical examples.

I didn't know anything about it back then, so was curious. Was pretty fun, but one day, my teacher said that a IF is a loop. I said "no, this is a test" but she keeps saying that it was a loop, ignoring me (I dunno if she actually heard me) and no one actually noticed it as she repeated it several times (while I was saying that it's not). I just gave up trying to say it's wrong.

Ok now I'm gonna tell you about my "Databases 2" exam. This is gonna be long.

I'd like to know if DB designers actually have this workflow. I'm gonna "challenge" the reader, but I'm not playing smartass. The mistakes I point out here are MY mistakes.

So, in my uni there's this course, "Databases 2" ("Databases 1" is relational algebra and theoretical stuff), which consist in one exercise: design a SQL database.

We get the description of a system. Almost a two pages pdf. Of course it could be anything. Here I'm going to pretend the project is a YouTube clone (it's one of the practice exercises).

We start designing a ER diagram that describes the system. It must be fucking accurate: e.g. if we describe a "view" as a relationship between the entities User and Video, it MUST have at least another attribute, e.g. the datetime, even if the description doesn't say it. The official reason?

"The ER relationship describes a set of couples. You can not have two elements equal, thus if you don't put any attribute, it means that any user could watch a video only once. So you must put at least something else."

Do you get my point? In this phase we're not even talking about a "database", this is an analysis phase.

Then we describe the type dictionary. So far so good, we just have to specify the type of any attribute.

And now... Constraints.
Oh my god the constraints. We have to describe every fucking constraint of our system. In FIRST ORDER LOGIC. Every entity is a set, and Entity(e) means that an element e belongs to the set Entity. "A user must leave a feedback after he saw a video" becomes like

For all u,v,dv,df,f ( User(u) and Video(v) and View(u, v, dv) and feedback(u, v, f) ) ---> dv < df

provided that dv and df are the datetimes of the view and the feedback creation (it is clear in the exercise, here seems kinda cryptic)

Of course only some of the constraints are explicitly described. This one, for example, was not in the text. If you fail to mention any "hidden" constraint, you lose a lot of points. Same thing if you not describe it correctly.

Now it's time for use cases.
You start with the usual stickman diagram. So far so good.
Then you have to describe their main functions.

In first order logic. Yes.

So, if you got the point, you may think that the following is correct to get "the average amount of feedback values on a single video" (1 to 5, like the old YT).
(let's say that feedback is a relationship with attribute between User and Video

getAv(Video v): int
Let be F = { va | feedback(v, u, va) } for any User u
Let av = (sum forall f in F) / | F |
return av

But nope, there's an error here. Can you spot it (I didn't)?

F is a set. Sets do not have duplicates! So, the F set will lose some feedback values! I can not define that as a simple set!

It has to be a set of couples, like (v, u), where v is the value and u the user; this way we can have duplicate feedback values in our set.

This concludes the analysis phase. Now, the design.

Well we just refactor everything we have done until now. Is-a relations become relationships, many-to-many relationships get an "association entity" between them, nothing new.
We write down on paper every SQL statement to build any table, entity or not. We write down every possible primary key or foreign key. The constraint that are not natively satisfied by SQL and/or foreign keys become triggers, and so on.

This exam is considered the true nightmare at our department. I just love it.

Now my question is, do actually DB designers follow this workflow? Or is this just a bloody hard training in Pai Mei style?

So I agree with some arguments against using dark themes but only because they all seem to be about white text on black, but I would never use that as a dark theme... (who would?) Dark shades are where it's at! Take devRant itself as an example.

I had a hockey accident where the hockey stick hook caught me in the eye and among many other things, tore my iris to the point that the doctors couldn't stitch it (something about cutting being reparable but tearing not :/ )

Luckily with some exercises, it healed a lot in its own but still let's in about double the light it should. Since then, black on white for more than a few hours will, without fail, give me a migraine. But then so would white on black, too much light allowed in means that white on black give an almost blurry effect on the characters. Hence, colour shades for the win :D

Just my 2 cents ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So I'm coming out of one that has a focus on this stack (JS [JQuery after weeks of Vanilla JS drilling in our heads, React], Java, MySQL, Python [Django, Bottle], HTML/CSS, and a few web security concepts (XSS, SQL injections).

The whole course has been 4 months learning, 3 weeks working on a final project. Next week is the presentation, so I think I can safely comment on the course.

We moved fast, but that's to be expected. Lecture in the mornings, exercises in the afternoons, assignments due at the beginning of each week. Constantly working towards it and improving. I have been working pretty hard. We were given some help, but had to get a lot of answers online (based God StackOverflow), but that's part of it.

We touched on some concepts like inheritance in JS, Python and Java, OOP and to be open to concepts we don't know so we should be thirsty for that knowledge.

In my off time, I've begun texting myself Node and really trying to double down on React because it seems useful. I realized I was more drawn to the backend, but I was comfortable in front end as well. (Just don't ask me to design anything, my eye for aesthetics/CSS sorcery is terrible.)

The overall experience has been pretty mixed, but we were mostly unsatisfied. We weren't given then help we were promised. The explanations weren't exactly crystal clear, so we would have to teach ourselves and each other quite a bit. We worked together a lot. Some people really fell behind, some caught up, some flew ahead and thrived. (I'm somewhere between caught up and thrived, I recognize where I stand.)

I'm happy I did a bootcamp, they aren't miracle programs, but they at least kick you into place that you are learning and need to continue to learn. (Just kinda wish I had done a different one.)

Feel free to ask about anything concerning it!

Been on a Android dev meetup yesterday.
Guy in front of me started solving exercises of Graph Theory on his laptop.
I took a peek to see what this shit is all about(I have never studied for a CS degree).

Holy moley this is some scary shit. How the fuck you people study this.

A few days ago I decided to learn C by writing a simple Minecraft clone. Guess who has less than 26¼ hours to do university exercises for two weeks. And It's not like I had double that time because of Christmas Holidays.

I recently tried to apply the same data analytics rationale that I use at work to my personal life. This is not a rant, it is more like an data storytelling of an actual use case I would like some input on.

I set a goal - gotta thin up a bit and calm down my ticker - and got a (almost unreasonably expensive) field expert consultant to yell at me about it for a couple hours.

I unravel the metrics - there is like a million weight-related KPIs and most say nothing at all. I have never seen an non-infrastructure measurable subject that could not be resumed to 2-5 performance metrics. I got overall weight, how well my nine-years-old business suit fits me, heart rate, and day-after relative muscle pain (it will make sense soon).

Then its data-pipeline time. I bought a cheap weight scale and smartwatch, and every morning I input the data in an app. Yes, I try to put on the suit every morning. It still does not fit.

After establishing a baseline, I tried to fit different approaches. Doing equipment-free exercises, going to the gym, dieting. None was actually feasible in the long run, but trying different approaches does highlight the impacts and the handling profile of each method.

Looking at the now-gathered data, one thing was obvious - can't do dieting because it is not doable to have a shopping list and meals for me and another for the family.
Gym is also off the table - too much overhead. I spend more time on the trip there and back than actually there.
And home exercise equipment is either super crappy or very expensive. But it is also the most reasonable approach.

So it is solutions time. I got a nice exercise bycicle (not a peloton), an yoga mat (the wife already had that one) and an exercise program that uses only those two resources. Not as efficient without dieting, not as measurable and broad as the gym, but it fits my workflow. Deploy to production!

A few months pass and the dataset grows. The signal is subtle but has support - it works! The handling, however, needs improvement, since I cannot often enough get with the exercise program. Some mornings are just after some hard days.

I start thinking about what else I can improve in the program, but it is already pretty lean and full of compromises.
So I pull an engineer and start thinking about the support systems and draft profile. What else could be draining my willpower and morning time?

Chores. Getting the kids ready for school, firing up the moka pot, setting the off-brand roomba, folding the overnight-dried clothes, cooking breakfast, doing the dishes, cleaning the toilets. All part of my morning routine. It might benefit from some automation.

Last month I got that machine our elders call "wasteful" and "useless crap lazy entitled Americans invented because they feel oh-so-insulted for simply doing something by hand like everyone always did" - a "dish-washer".
Heh, I remember how hard was to convince my mother-in-law that an remote-controled electric garage door would not make she look like an spoiled brat.
Still to early to call, but I think that the dishwasher just saved me about 25 mins every morning. It might be enough to save willpower for me to do more exercise.

This is all so reflective of all data analytics cases really are out in the wild - the analytics phase seems so small compared to the gathering and practical problem-solving all around. And yet d.a. is what tells you that you are doing the wrong thing all along. Or on what you should work next.

I'm learning python3 right now, advises or exercises to practice? I want to learn machine learning. I'm developng on elixir for now. But I hear good stuff about python.

8 hours of networking/static routing exercises...

Result?

Windows bug: system provides two standardgateways

Let me write that again:
Two STANDARDgateways

Neither me nor my teacher found out how this happened

my students use ChatGPT to solve programming exercises... they will surely get a very bad grade!

Oh guys, i'm fucking tired with JQuery right now, a simple exercises doesn't goes well.

Started new course called "Introduction to natural language processing" in uni. I am super bad at doing regular expressions and don't understand anything about them.

Saw the first weeks homework. Have to do i.e. some text cleanup with regex... I was sad. But now after reading the course material and trying some of the exercises I'm super excited since I'm actually doing something "real" with it.

Do you guys just love it when teaching material is well written? I do.

I'm new to Australia and trying to get a job here. The visa process is sorta complicated, but let me say that you usually start with a Working Holiday Visa (6 months work) and go on from there.

Had an interview the other day. First smalltalk, then coding questions, then hands-on exercises, then I was talking to 3 different people about their experiences in the company. Overall 2 hours plus 3 hours train. The same day I get a email with a positive response and I should send in my papers (passport, Visa etc.) for the contact. I stopped sending out applications at this point.

5 days later (!) I get an email telling me they won't hire me on that visa.

Crushed my motivation for rest of the week 💀

English pre-finals today.

No literature, just an unseen, grammar, vocabulary and listening exercises.

I am going to ace this.

I'm diving back into c++ for a nice opportunity (if that happens) but Jeez I straight up suck balls with exercises... It's depressing, like I can't even solve a very simple problem, I can code from memory pretty much all I learned so far, but when I comes to applying it to a real problem, I become super dumb and don't know what I'm doing anymore...
I've set myself a goal tho, I'll keep doing minimum 5 exercises / days and I have to finish atleast 3 without looking at the solution to understand
I hope this will make me a little bit more interview ready if that day ever comes..

So I'm sitting there in Android practice. I already have some experience with Android, so the exercises they make us do are quite easy for me. Nevertheless I start doing the exercises, when the teacher tells us that whoever implemented last week's exercise well gets a + point (and a pat on the back).

Implementing it well only means that you used a Model class for your Model (basic stuff). I raise my hand, hoping to get that sweet ++.
Teacher comes over. My laptop dies. Can't boot for shit. All the while I'm losing my shit. Then I remember that I have the code up on Github (I started using git for these small projects, to practice it). I showed the teacher my code on Github and the app on my phone (I debug from my phone because there is no way I can run an emulator on my laptop). I got the ++ and the teacher was delighted that someone was using Git, even though they didn't *have to*.

I definitely learned my lesson there. I'll be using Github for all of the small shitty projects we have from now on. My Github repo might look like garbage, but I will have peace of mind.

PM here. I'm having an interview with prospective junior devs next week. I want to make sure that they know a little and can learn a lot. Do you guys have any suggestions of how to ascertain that? I'm thinking simple programming exercises or something.

Again, it's not that important what they know today.

Am I the only one who's a final year undergraduate, but isn't sure he/she knows enough about programming and comp sci as they should?

Like I recently went for an interview with a company, and they asked what's the difference between pass by reference and pass by value. Now, this is probably a very basic qs, so I was surprised when I couldn't answer this. So I'm really scared that I don't know enough, also I'm terrible in their group exercises too, I can't see how the others can do it so easily.

I haven't coded anything for months now, maybe 1.5 to 2 years even, because I was struggling with depression and unresolved issues. I'm still not out of it, and I'm not seeing anyone for now because of quarantine, but I've been taking antidepressants during the last months (prescribed by a doctor) and they're beginning to have a good effect. I'm feeling better by the day, and I'm looking forward to seeing a professional and getting better without the medication after the end of the coronacrisis (which isn't something I would have thought sometime ago, so that's encouraging).

Anyway, today I took my laptop and started coding again, and I really liked it, but it really felt like my mind was fucking rusted after all this time. It took me like 3 hours to write 60 limes of code. I know that by keeping coding a bit everyday I will find my old skills again, but I was wondering if you had any tip to ease the start, like doing code exercises, or trying to make a simple project. I'll take any tip to get back on the train again, as quickly and smoothly as possible.

Second question : please comfort me and tell me I'm not the only one who is suffering or has suffered from rusted mind syndrome.

I learned to program with Game Maker, downloading examples and changing variables to see what they did. After that I wanted to make websites so I followed tutorials and just see what happened if I changed variables and functions. Then came High School where we had exercises with Java and just experimented with the possibilities.

Then in Uni I learned about OOP and Functional which opened even more worlds. After a class on design patterns and designing the architecture of a system, programming was never the same.

And even until this day, I haven't stopped learning better ways to code. Oh how I long for those days where everything is new and how I can build a hello world application and be truly excited about it! That is how I learned to program and why I won't stop anytime soon. 😁

I love Rust's error messages, but I think they were trying to be a little too smart with the error reporting here and ended up relying too much on properties of the medium.
How the fuck do I tell which is which?

My hypothesis is that because #3 can only be a lower bound based on the phrasing of the sentence, and because #2 is an upper bound, the correct order is 2;4;1;3. But why do I have to do intermediate level English grammar exercises to read my error message?

Thinking of writing new books

"How to become obese in a week?"

And

"Race between your code and yourself. Who explodes first!"

What could possibly be wrong with me if I had to look at almost every single answer of the Basic Algorithm Scripting exercises on FreeCodeCamp? I spend days tying to solve some of them and just couldn’t. Had to look at the answers. Then I try few days after and maybe remember half of the answer. How can I change this?

Algorithms to Live By: How to Put on a Quilt Cover

1. Sync the orientation of both quit and cover
2. Locate the corners on the cover and add clothes pins
3. Insert the corners 1 by one and attach the pin
4. Stuff everything else inside
5. Walk around and hold each pair of perpendicular corners and give it a toss (Full body morning exercises now complete)
6. When satisfied, removed the pins.
7. Place quilt onto bed

Now watch as the quilt gets twenties inside over the following few weeks and either just give up until the next wash or repeat.

Actually having exercises to try so that the 90% of CS students that learn by doing can learn. Rather than writing down theory

Enjoying the "Algo Yo" exercises in the Dcoder app.

being physically disabled is such a nightmare. i have experienced a whole different personality of being dependent on others , being incapable of basic tasks and feeling incomplete all the times. it's very humbling, and i have found a whole new respect for human body and social conduct.

just want to get whole again. don't know how long its going to take a humerus arm fracture to join back on is own, now that i got a plate screwed to the broken parts to keep them together.
the doctors will probably ask me to remove the external brace after a few months followed by exercises for next more months the complete bends/stretch will probably take 6-9 months and bone will join enough in 1-2 year after which i could get the plate removed (this is the happy case, not considering the high risk of my bones getting permanently twisted or plate getting envolped by bone mass )

everything simply sucks till then. imagine getting pushed back in your life by 2+ yrs in your prime age of 25.
farewell to my dreams of adventure sports, senior goals and gappy marriage .

folks, don't do stupid stuff that can get your body into trouble, you WILL regret.

During the company's Xmas event, we were off-site at a place that does events to do a team-building event followed by dinner party.

An error report came up, it wasn't a showstopper, but it was fairly serious, and the perfect excuse to sit out the BS improv team-building exercises that the powers that be thought would be a good idea to have.

Probably my favorite bug ever.

You know how people are making fun of duo lingo birb getting’ all in your business about learning new language & not missing out on your daily exercises?

Well, our jira just upped the ante.. Boss asks why task xy is assigned to him.. um dunno?! I go check activity, as I don't even remember doing anything with that task recently..

All the dates, 'just now' remarks etc. on activity tab are in Russian.. WTF jira?!
ты пытаешься мне что-то сказать?

First of all, 10 minutes of mobility work and spinal hygiene exercises.

Then, Forest app in browser and smart phone. Music off. Viso energy drink. Natural light through window.

Glance at student loan balance helps from time to time.

Gonna teach someone conpletely new to programming some C#. What are some good exercises I can give them to understand general programming well?

So far I'm thinking FizzBuzz, some progressively more complex math+logic stuff and maybe fibonacci using recursion.

!rant

A few years ago I volunteered to help at a open day of my high school where I would help kids with small programming tasks to show them what the Information Technology subject was about.

During that open day every visitor had a stamp card where they could collect stamps from various subjects to win a prize, in other words, if you wanna win a prize you gotta program something in the classroom where I was.

It was so amazing to see some kids going in overspeed and finishing the exercises without help and even going further by working on the exercises that weren't required for a stamp (we're talking about blockly exercises).

On the other hand there were a few kids who couldn't wait to get out of there once they 'finished' the first exercise.

I wonder how many of them will be programming as a job or as a hobby in the future 😁

So here is my take on a shitty teacher.

I once had a microcontroller teacher, who tried to teach a class of non programmers how to code, from a broken compendium. While he was teaching he would correct errors that he found. Most of the classes would be pure theory on C and no exercises.
Needles to say after the first two semesters none of the students could program, and over half of the class had left the school.

Anyone on HackerRank? I'm pretty new to that site but I already love it!
😊

You can find me at @master11

In addition to the programming language or theoretical concepts. It is also essential to develop good problem solving skills.

Concepts like design patterns and refactoring would be better taught using hands on exercises based on a long running example, such as having the students create a project in an introductory course on a programming language and then take that codebase as a starting point for the assignments on design patterns and refactoring.

It would be unrealistic to assume that developers would be working only on a single programming language in their entire career. So, a few pointers on how to go about learning new languages based on similarities with programming language(s) they already know would also be there.

I wish we could stop to push candidates to do TDD or even asking questions about it during interview. This thing is a lie, has always been and will ever be. It is cool for small coding exercises but nothing else.
Let’s stop gatekeeping with stupid concepts.

Damn, since my last rant where I was complaining about me having big troubles coding stuff when asked by an exercise or given instructions, I feel like I've made huge progress now, by sticking a bit to my "at least 5 exercises a day" routine, now as soon as I code, it comes to me more and more naturally.
I'm so glad I can see the practice really paying off, even thanks to a simple function working great at the first compile makes me feel warm inside even tho it ain't gonna last long.

Well, I've started work a few days ago, and I've got a rant for you as well.

Anyone here ever hear of laughter therapy?

Well my day was normal enough, rattling through the training material, and work was holding an appreciation day with some dogs, cakes, and a crazy laughing woman. She was the instructor for the laughter therapy.
So thanks to my newly found "try everything" mentality, and a senior dev dragging me along to fill seats, I was stuck in a room filled with other devs, being told to smile and laugh even if I was forcing myself to do it. So I did, we went through increasingly embarrasing and insane-looking exercises (e.g. Mime pouring and drinking a milkshake while laughing), until we were told to lie on the floor and belly laugh for 5 minutes.

Anyone here play/see "We Happy Few"? I was stuck standing next to the crazy sow, who looked one bad day away from beating everone in the room to death with a cricket bat!

As is customary for me, have a cute snek.

I'm studying atm and I survived Haskell, SKI, ... now, in the second semester we started with Python (yeay ♡) and Java (that's fine).

One of the first exercises is about installing Jython ('cause it's good, right? /sarcasm off), using the lecturer's module and write some code for it. It's about painting some shitty graphics *gasp*...

I use PyCharm (not really necessary for these crappy exercises) and programming on Windows and/or Linux.

Downloaded Jython, installed it, set it as interpreter - works fine (win10, pycharm).
Some students got weird errors using linux - for me it's the same but meh Idc.

Today I tried using Jython on my notebook, too (win10, pycharm). Downloaded it from the Jython Project website. Can't update pip, can't run modules - error is about fckin charsets...

Some other student figured out - wrong version of Jython. The newer version has some bug fixes.
2.7.1 is the one and only - the download section of their website offers 2.7.0 as latest release...

So - how to know there is a version 2.7.1?
#1 version control website = Wikipedia

So... there is a blog, guy's writing about this release - this installer is hosted at maven central. Yeay. Obvious. Thanks.

Can't describe such stupidity - maybe it's the user again 😂

once upon a time, i get interviewed by a software vendor. i am applied for system analyst because i think i have to level up from previous works as programmer, then i passed the test. after that i get interviewed for the second times and they told me i could start to work immediately. at first day i did programmer tasks instead of analyzing systems flow. i thought it just for exercises more my analytical skill through programming. i did it for 4 months until they add new employees, some of them are system analyst and they are fresh graduated. we chat and ask them about their experiences and they told me they are not programmers or system analyst before and no test!. i dig the info more deep, and i found they could get the job because they are graduated from bonafide university. until i resign i still a programmer and i hate to work at software vendor anymore because their corporate clients are all suck.

Errh... I'm sick as fuck, just the day when we should begin the C++ inheritance. I stay at home today so that's good but I would like to work on the C++ concepts, I don't want to be late...

Anyway, I can do the exercises at home but like I said, I'm sick as fuck so, I don't know what I should do : rest or work?

- Promote source control usage especially in group projects
- Teach clean code principles
- Push for commented code in exercises

I've started to program for at least an hour a day minus weekends but I still will program on weekends just I usually take that time to relax and play games or watch stuff but I started so I can practice and learn, it does and doesnt feel like I'm doing a lot cause I'm doing small JS projects (like a quiz which was more in depth than I thought tbh) to build up to bigger ones. I just feel I need to get a better understanding on why i need to do things and when and just somehow learn better from my exercises and examples, which I can see going through making another quiz its helping my understanding a little. Idk I'm just throwing my thoughts down, lemme know what yall think

4 hours of SQL exercises in school...

Make EVERY course have programming exercises\challenges.

Get a girlfriend
Finish the first 200 project Euler exercises
Write some really cool shit
Get promoted

So... I just got to the next fase where I'm being asked to do a technical test. What they ask is for me to develop an Android App with 4 different tabs:

- First tab I need to receive data from a github url, parse it and show it on a recyclerview, save it on a database, and be able to search it.

- Second tab has to show 50 elements in a recyclerview, with a header that has to fill the entire screen and when the user scrolls down, the image has to fix to the top of the screen, and never go back when you scroll up.

and two more exercises with variations but almost same difficulty.

..... to deliver at 10 a.m at the 26th of October.

......It was 07:00 p.m when I got the email

FUCK MY LIFE

Exercise do the pyramid of * and I looked up how to do it but so many people are able to do it without looking it up I dont know why shit to do with nested for loops makes me feel so dumb.

I know it's not a big deal to not know how to do every single thing but I'm always even stuck on the smallest exercises that apparently more people can do than not. Like how am I supposed to have thought about that or figured that out. How am I supposed to learn all this shit. Like for example just look up a list of basic exercises and I cant do any of them. I'm not good at this and its stressing me out because how will I get better or hell even a job if I cant solve these simple problems? How am I supposed to get better at solving these simple problems? I cant just keep looking at the fucking solution because that wont stick or teach me anything

Most stupid thing to rant about by far

Best exercises for lower back pain?
Also, standing desk - do they prevent it?

0. Do all practice in Clean Code
1. Do almost all exercises in Eloquent Javascript
2. Learn Python
3. Be proud of the work done in my current job project (I've just started)
4. Read own code from <wk100 and say: "omg I'm a much better programmer today!"
5. Implement 32 hour days to have time to read all those books, listen all those podcasts, code all those katas...

Today something pretty bad happened (as always at school)
and I'm gonna rant about it to
1) get your expertly opinion on it
2) relieve from it

SOOOOO
today I entered class to paretake in the writing of the much anticipated class test (kappa).

The teacher gives everybody a sheet with the exercises - let alone me.

I tell him to give me a sheet too.

"Put a book between you and xy"

so I do. I ask him again to give me the exam paper. No response.

Again, and he looks at me with a disrespectful look. I look back. And get thrown out of the room - not getting a chance to paretake in the writing of the test yet getting the worst grade one could possibly get in the modest german education system (=> 6)

Now I'm going to pursue any possible legal action against him (I dont care about him. After the lesson I wanted to talk with him; yet he declined my offer for reconsiliation, then he called my parents, even though he had time to think about what he did {any sane person would agree that what he did was wrong <yet my classmates dont agree>}. Also, he is that type of teacher who gives unusually unnessecary homework - which I personally see as punition, since I already know 97% of the stuff thought in [english] classes)

See why I am despising school so much?

It drains my last bit of energy until I am an empty shell with the sole goal to finish education asap in order to be able to fucking work.

BTW: I tried using my best english in this rant to demonstrate my abilities in order for you to be able to see that I honestly dont those "basic" english lessons.

Now solving Java exercises on exercism.io. Nice twist of write-code-from-testcases.

That's something I haven't seen before...

I literally was fucking around in Python thinking I was doing some good, learned basics, kept switching languages, read about two books that did teach me a lot of stuff, stopped jumping between languages, still reading books, still learning, internet, exercises, books... YouTube had like 8% of participation in my learning process (Which is still going)

Fearful I have the onset of carpel tunnel! My wrist is killing me today . Any suggestions for exercises and braces that worked magic for others ?

Well I never got to program in a group during school, but the coolest stuff I learned in general was a bunch of networking exercises.

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>

Today is thursday. Oh no.

At thursdays I have a 8h30-19 schedule (I have 1h30' of free time to go home and cry after I finish a class at 15h30 though) and there's this one class I DREAD. It's a 2h class at 17h and it's an exercise class. This wouldn't be so bad it I actually understood the code behind the exercises, because they don't teach us code in the theory classes (btw it's C. I hate that language because of all this). The teacher pretty much tells us "do this exercise", waits like 10' and then starts to (try to) explain what we're supposed to do. Oh my god.
The other day he was like "write "exec ( ... "text" ... )", compile and execute". It didn't work. Of course it didn't why would it? I was switching around between terminal, manual and text editor, to no avail. In the end he explained but I don't think I got it.
Every time I think about this class I die a little inside and start to become somewhat anxious to be honest. The theory is not that that hard, the practice part is what is killing me (I have test in 2w but I'm just gonna start studying earlier so I can go watch this match LoL).
Does someone know a good book (preferably online, if possible) or a good website on C? I really need to read that, that language is killing me.

Bonus: the other day I had to do a homework that was to be delivered. We had to write a program that read the program and its arguments like this:

./program_name
numArgs
arg1
arg2
etc

I wrote the code, had some bumps in the way, asked a colleague for help because we needed to have a custom function made that was to be done in the class but that I couldn't make because of the reasons above. Then it came the time to test. My VM broke (I think I'm gonna format my PC to try to fix that. Have installed some other versions of the VM but the installations fails or the machine doesn't start) so I sent it to said colleague to test. She said it did OK and so I sent the work to this website we have to send our works to.
"2 errors".
What? What happened? She said it worked just fine.
Looked at my code, couldn't see anything wrong.
Asked the same colleague for help.
Turns out I missed a space. A SPACE. I don't think I've ever felt so frustrated in my life. A presentation error in Java is a good thing, at least we know the program works fine, it's just the output that's wrongly formatted. But C? Nope, errors all around, oh my god. I'm still mad about it.
And I owe her a chocolate.

Aaaaarggghhh

Having to think about what and when to eat is such a fucking pain in the ass. I don't want to search for recipes. I don't want to think about nutrition. I don't want to count calories. I just want something to tell me exactly what to eat, when I should eat and what to buy. Same goes for workout routines. Just tell me what to do I'll do it. I want an autopilot for that sort of stuff so I don't have to ducking think about it anymore. It's such a giant waste of time to have to manually plan this shit through, I want to use my brain for other things like math or chemistry or Programming. In fact I don't even want to cook because I am alone and cooking for one person is so ducking pointless. I lost over 40kg in the last years. I learned my lesson, most things taste like shit now because I associate food with all the pain and depression that I had to overcome to achieve a normal weight and fit body. Food went from being a joy to being an annoying necessity. I got fit and I want to work out even more but I really don't want to think about this shit. The exercises and pain and hunger are all nothing but planning is my true enemy. It bores me to death, it's more painful than running until I break down I absolutely fucking hate it.

I am really close to start some kind of open source food planner where you can type in your goals ( weight loss, muscle gain etc.) In great detail with all kind of options ( vegetarian, vegan, allergies, budget, country where you live in for local recipes etc.) And it generates a food plan for you with exact details of where exactly to buy the ingredients how to cook them etc. No fancy Ui No bullshit ads for some kind of wonder drug nothing annoying. Something so easy that it can be used as an autopilot for ones fitness and life. Do what it says and you'll look decent, don't think about the rest. Having that would be so great and I could finally think about more important shit than this. Less overhead more time for things that can't be automated.

And Yes I know that this is exactly what a personal trainer would do, but I am not going to spend 600€ a month for someone to tell me exactly what to buy, what to eat and how to work out.

I have an interest in methods to make myself smarter. At times some ideas seem to be just out of my reach. I don't always know the reason why. Eventually with persistence I am able to figure things out. However, I always wonder if there are techniques to learn things faster, better, more completely, with less struggle, etc. Would being smarter help with this. I wondered, "Can I create a program/method to increase IQ through training?"

So I found an interesting book called "The Neuroscience of Intelligence" by Richard J. Haier.
Very quickly I was engrossed in this book. It is written in a very accessible way and slowly trickles in the jargon. The book is basically the culmination of 40 years of studying the subject. The main point of the book is: you cannot increase your IQ through techniques and tricks. The only realistic avenue for increasing IQ is through genetics. Your IQ is based upon nature, not nurture. This is a result of the data, not opinion. The writer of this book follows what the science is telling him. This was not what I wanted to hear. He also went on to explain that the statement "You can be whatever you want to be if you work hard enough." He said this is false. Some people, no matter how hard they try, will not be able to get past certain limitations in aptitude. This statement will probably make a lot of people mad, but the data led this researcher to this conclusion. Though I sense he found this disheartening (my opinion). I know I did.

So after reading this book over the weekend I am a bit perturbed that there are not recognizable techniques to increase IQ through mental exercises. Websites all over will say otherwise, but it isn't a thing.

What to do? I decided I am going to find ways to maximize my potential. I will create a set of mental exercises that help me use what I got to the full potential. I know when I see different ways to think about things I get a bit better at solving problems. So learning and experience is still a way to improve your intellect, if not IQ. If I feel like I have made progress in this endeavor I will definitely share.

If you have any interest in neuroscience then I recommend the book I read this weekend. It is very accessible for the reader not versed in the subject. I knew virtually nothing about the topic and now I feel I have a good grounding in the state of the art. It has some neat info on some potentially better approaches to AI as well.

I'm still a beginner for programming, I got the basics (for JavaScript) down but I don't really know how or where to use it, like loops(for, do while), return, and stuff like that.

Going through the books and online exercises they just make you do the basics like loop a number 10 times to print out 0-9 or something like that. And the return keyword I usually forget about because I've never been told how I can actually use it for something.

I want to learn how I can use all of these and when I can use them, is there any books, videos, or courses I can look into? I'm sorry, this is probably a Sinbad question but I am just trying to get as much help as I can

I like many Apple products but if there's a thing I hate about that company its their aspirational marketing: they doesn't sell computers, phones, tablets, earbuds and stuff anymore, they want to sell you a "perfect lifestyle" (perfect from the perspective of Californian tech-bros) where you'll be super fit, super organized, devour self help content like no tomorrow while taking pixel perfect notes, do mindfulness and breathing exercises, juggle 5 social events a day... and all it takes to achieve that is buying "just one more device".

I love the logic that underlies algorithm. But nowadays I fear that this is almost disappeared, now programming a software is 5% logic and 95% read system specificactions, documentation, implement third part solutions, think about who developed the system thought it had to be and rant because you don't understand it. I like to solve math problems using algorithms rather than deal with user interactivity, for example. Yes, all this is pointless, but sometimes I miss the exercises that I did at school or in "IT Olympiad"

- Stop procrastinate;
- Start a open-source project;
- Go deep in math and logic;
- Perfect my English;
- Learn some soft skills;
- Get a hobby outside dev;
- Get some exercises;
- Master Javascript and CSS.

It's all I can think of now, but I have so much more goals for this year that I will be very busy, and in the end of the day it will all come together.

How do I help a software engineer student be better at developing software?

Background: I have this friend that started university with my young brother, two-or-so years ago my brother finished the career and got his degree while she is still there trying to finish the same career (!), we were looking the chance of changing careers but due to her low grades this is not possible and according to her U's counselor is better that she just finishes the career and gets her degree.

We scheduled a Zoom meeting for Sunday next week, to talk about her pain-points and see what improvement we can chase; issue is that I've never mentored anyone ever in my professional life (my brother from time to time drops a question to me or so, but that's different).

My plan is to either see if she suffers from lack of practice (meaning: she does not write software more often in order to improve her skills) or if it's hard for her to think in abstracts, either way, I believe that the latter improves if you do the former (just correct me if I'm wrong), thus the plan would be to assign her a bunch of programming exercises and have meetings at least once a week during her vacations.

My plan would be for her to actually learn game development with Godot, since the final result is always a game my hope is that having something to show encourages her to do the thing, but, who knows.

Have you ever done something like this for someone with the same issues? What was your experience and what nuggets of knowledge can you lend me?

P.S.: We don't live in the States but in Costa Rica, she does not have to deal with crippling student loans.

I honestly have come a long way. But I still have these moments when I just lose confidence In myself, and while grieving it can be worse/more frequent.

I’m being taught some networking programming from this person I befriended and it’s going wonderfully! But I don’t know how much I’m taking in. I don’t know if I’ll be able to completely understand while I’m using what I’m learning, but I guess part of the learning is by using and doing. But what if I need to change it up for a different purpose but I don’t know how?

What if I’m not programming enough? When working on this project/learning the stuff from my new teacher friend to actually make some of the stuff I usually work on that for 30 mins to an hour and a half maybe even 2. Relax, do some college, play games, then later I’ll try to work through a few exercises of my C# WinForms book.
And before you say it I’m not balancing too much on my head. I’ve learned GUI’s before with Python I’m just reflecting that to C# and it’s easy and I’m always in a separate headspace for networking. But it all just doesn’t feel like enough?

It also doesn’t help that i don’t feel like I’m doing anything special that I can boost my confidence with. Usually in a project I won’t feel like I’m doing anything until a cool or special feature is made and I know that’s bad I hate it but I can’t avoid it and I want to feel good even when nothing completely out of this world is made that day.

And I’ve definitely come a long way I’m proud of myself but I just hate getting these feels. And It happens a bit when I’m learning because I’m afraid I’m not learning and I’m gonna keep copy pasting the same code snippets for different projects and I don’t want that I want to be able to fucking edit and change it or make a completely new one of whatever it is but my design but I guess that takes experience with it first.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk

Team building exercises... Curious to hear your opinions....

They annoy the hell out of me personally and I can't see the value in them...

Have bonded way more with previous teams by simply working on a project together. No BS exercises, or even scrum for that matter, we just respected each other and that seemed to effortlessly let us make each other better at our work.

people with fit muscular bodies, was there a time in life when you mainly focused on working out and gaining muscles? like doing it for 4-8 hours everyday and not focusing on work/life/studies?

or did you always kept fitness/workout a small part of your routine, like 1-2 hours everyday during free time?

I want to get fit, and i have started to like working out 1 hour everyday . but haven't started taking supplements or mass cutters or stuff like that. recently one of the trainers gave an offer to give me personal training at additional cost. sounded a little shady deal coz am already paying the gym owner a fees, and he wanted to keep it between us.
He emphasized on how he is going to give me a complete 1 hour time each day, but that's what i already expected from him (which he does not. he just tells me the exercises and rarely see me doing them ).
well, if its just about the time, i am still okay with that. but if he started pushing me to workout more, or do those steroids/supplement stuff, i am just not interested completely.

However i am interested in getting a good body. so maybe this intense workout , if done in limit could help. so just wanted to know that have you ever did intense workout or just gradually gained more strength/mass/muscles?

I feel compelled to figure out how to use software in a gaming setting to teach skills like CS and Math. But do it in a way that is fun and not feeling like a "math game".

I want to spend more time learning about algorithms, architectures, design approaches, etc. Writing such a game would force me to understand what I present in a very intimate way.

I can see a way to create algos in game using very visual ways. Then allowing someone to make superstructures combining those algos to solve tasks.

I was inspired by how some algos require data to be sorted a certain way before starting. As the algo as a side effect resorts the data to know when it has completed. I realized if an algo is generic enough it can be combined just like functions or objects.

I also want to learn math better, especially in conjunction with code. So making a platform for learning these would be a lot of fun. I would definitely want both visual and textual interfaces to the code. I have to imagine a real programmer being frustrated with a visual interface unless it was really compelling.

I find it interesting that a lot of algos are represented visually when trying to show how it works. I realize some probably cannot be visualized so easy though.

I also want to use software like this to teach someone to think more deliberately and help people be more disciplined in their thinking. I know I could use this.

I have a secret goal of being able to use such software to help someone become a math/programming wizard. I don't know if this is achievable, but having exercises that help solidify root concepts in a fun way would be really useful IMO.

Anyone familiar with codewars or codingame? Know of an iOS app for similar? I like to work through short exercises when I have a few minutes to burn and the sites aren't exactly pretty on mobile.

Building up me getting off my break of programming by doing a few small exercises each day testing new small front end stuff (since that's what I'm learning rn)

Why do company culture initiatives feel like marketing exercises?

I have been an armchair neuroscientist in my interests. I am fascinated by the brain, how we believe it works, how it really works, and what different research has shown. I have found books written by real neuroscientists that talk about how the brain works and what the research they have shows about intelligence. I am also fascinated by the idea of rewiring your brain. I just found another neuroscience book that has research from some neuroscientists that have challenged the established belief that adult brains have little to no neuroplasticity. This is the ability for the brain to rewire itself to accomplish new tasks or repurpose different parts of the brain. I didn't know this was a limiting factor in the theory of neuroscience. The book also includes information about how Buddhists and neuroscientists are working together to unlock more knowledge about neuroplasticity. The traditional neursoscience belief is that the brain affects the mind solely. However Buddhists have long believed that the mind can affect the brain physically. I am just starting to read this book, but so far the experiments that have been performed seem fascinating. It also has not gotten to the part about the Buddhism influence on the research yet. So far I have just read about how scientists have shown that plasticity can be shown to occur with normal everyday tasks. I don't know where this will lead, but its really cool to read about.

Okay, great, so what?

The why was I looking for this is interesting. I have been looking for some time ideas on how to improve my thinking. I had the idea that I could help myself think better by training my brain with mental exercises. I want to create a program that runs on the computer or phone that one could use with visual and audible cues to play mental games. These games would be designed to make one better at solving puzzles, remember things better, and more. If these exercises could be made in such a way that they were fun to do then we could use our own addictions to improve ourselves. The research I had before frustrated me because they always said you couldn't make yourself smarter. Maybe you cannot increase your mental capacity (not sure if that is true if we can grow neurons, also mentioned in the book), but reorganizing what you have might be possible. Maybe if there is a finite capacity to the brain that reorganizing might cause you to drool. I don't know, but if I could create a puzzle game with the purpose of helping me visualize algorithms, I would find that useful. Also, helping me remember short strings of data would be helpful as well. It seems like I have trouble when it is more than 7 numbers (ten?). Which is also why phone numbers are that long. To make them easier to remember.

I just don't know where this will lead. It might be a wild goose chase. But I think I will learn something about my mind and myself in the process. It also sounds like a great deal of fun.

Hey peeps! I might have an opportunity to get a job working with Java in the near future. I used Java when I was in University (5 years ago), not lots after... Any resources you’d recommend? I like demo & practice style of learning - I struggle reading books about coding, etc. I appreciate any help, concepts to look into, practicing exercises, videos...! Thanks in advance! :)

Great practice/skill sharpening idea for my fellow mad dogs that like to get down in multiple languages/syntaxes:

Pick something simple that won't cause too much stress, but will make you sweat a little bit and put up a good fight, ha!!!

For example, I picked the classic "Caesars Cipher" and picked 5 languages to create it in! I picked Dart, Java, Python, CPP, and C. Each version does the same thing:
1. Asks for a message
2. Runs the logic
3. Prints the message cipher.
4. To decrypt, you just run the same program again and enter the cipher text at the message input prompt. The message gets deciphered using the same logic an shows up as the original text.

The kicker:
Only dox/books allowed for reference. Otherwise it wouldn't push you to get better!!!

Python, C, and CPP were EASY, even with me never having used C before. I am great at using Dart, and that one really challenged me for some reason, but I finally got it. The previous 3 langs took less than 40 lines of code each (with Python being only 18 I believe). Dart actually took somewhere around 50, and Java took about 371784784. (Much love to Java though for real!)

Kinda boring as shit, but I gotta tell you it felt fuckin GREAT to look at all 5 of those programs after completing them, no matter how barbaric... especially when you complete 1 or 2 in a language you've never used or maybe felt really challenged by. Simple exercises that hold a lot of important, relatable logic no matter the subject is our lifeblood!!!

Does anyone work at IBM? I saw open Front end engineer position in my country and I was wondering what the interviewing process might be. Does it involve leetcode exercises (never done those and I’m afraid they might give those to me)?

Bosses and managers out of the office for 2 days. Kan Jam, cornhole, and Xbox all day at the office!!

I'm feeling guilty.
I've a lot of fun hearing the flautolence wich comes out from the mouth of my brain farters collegues in my university. I usually fake being a mediocre student who never worked nor programmed anything else except the stupid exercises related to the exams. Yesterday a collegue come out saying: WOAH, YOU'RE USING LINUX!
Good, nice deduction my dear Sherlock.
The best had to come.
The genius decided to mocks me up telling: YOU KNOW IF YOU TYPE sudo rm -rf / IN THE CMD YOU MAKE YOUR COMPUTER FASTER?
Before I processed that he's not serious i answered "no, rm just remov..." and I saw the beaten look in his eyes because the joke misersbly failed. So i proceeded: "hahaha, fun. Anyway i could rm -undo to fix the mess".
As soon i finished the sentence he ran on him laptop and boots up the VM to try...

Am learning python programming; any pointer to exercises, challenges or projects i can use for practice.

Ummm, maybe it's a little bit offtopic but could anyone help me with pointers in C language? The best would be some free exercises or tutorials from the internet that I didn't find...(I was looking for a long time before this desperate post...:/)
If it does not belong here, pls, let me know and I will delete this post!
Thank you so much :)
(Ps: I will have a big exam on Tuesday so I want to practice..)

Anyone know of tutorials which use...unconventional project premises? Usually you see To-do apps, sample blogs, and other such generic offerings. Not that those are bad, but I'm interested in finding more outlandish, unconventional examples. Like, say, developing a mock GUI for a spacefaring vessel.

I'm personally interested in examples pertaining to React, VueJS, and Laravel, but if it fits the outlandish and unusual criteria I'd love to see it all the same!

Get back into regularly maintaining OS projects I used to actively maintain.
And resume the daily Disc Golf Strong exercises/stretches.

I was put into pair programming for writing code in BASIC in my 5th grade. I did all the exercises while my pair simply watched. It was simply natural to me, and a bug in code helped me to print my name in a infinite loop. Amazed with what computers can do, and my story with computer and software development started there.

Hey guys! I'm a self learner in PHP and now I need some project exercises using non-framework approach. Could you guys give me 2-5 pages excercise projects?

6 hours to listen explanations about my school after they teased us with the explanation of what's the "pool" (it's where students work for almost 14h by day on exercises during a month to make everybody have the same level)... I can't wait to start the pool! I don't want to listen anymore!

I'm thinking on working something with Godot Engine and React to form a platform that allow people to register, categorize and explain exercises

like Wikipedia but for fitness, but with data to use for free

My SO want's to learn javascript do you guys have any tips on any great sites where she can get exercises from? Maybe some that are interactive?

Heard some good stuff about codecademy but wanted to see if you guys know something better or more interactive.

For the first time, I will use “developer rant” for learning sth.

I am trying to learn concurrency in cpp. I tried CPP Concurrency in Action but the book is dry, no examples. Can you suggest a book with good examples and exercises, like CPP Primer?

I learned Python3, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and Bootstrap 4. I also did some web design project. But I think I need more practice for being a good programmer. Now, I need A platform that will give me some design or programming exercises for practicing. The platform can be any website or android app. I don't looking for something that will say, "design a calendar or make a calculator" or something like that. I'm looking for more specific task. Example for html:- I need all tags and attribute based task. so that I can learn everything properly. something that will say do the array task in JavaScript, do the h1 task in html. I want to see the result of an exercise if I failed in that exercise. So that I can learn from there. I want to make sure that the exercise will cover all topic of that language. so that I can learn everything topic of a language.

IF YOU KNOW ABOUT THAT KIND OF APP OR WEBSITE THEN PLEASE HELP ME. I'M NEW IN PROGRAMMING.

Don you hate when someone from {gender}coders or any other group post photos to all social media channels "coding", inspiration quotes for that specific {gender} , and what not, they even posted their github .. but then .. see pic.

And all you see in their github are exercises from courses and books, nothing else.

Looking to get a good understanding of the fundamental ideology and math behind neural networks and support vector machines. I am well versed with math so I can deal with heavier stuff if needed, I would like to see formulas but an explanation to their conception would be nice. Does anyone have any resources like this? Practical hands on practice exercises would be a plus

this is my first actual rant. I am trying to learn es6 right now and have encountered switch statements for the first time. after a 26 minute video explaining how to do switch statements (which is literally just the same kind of information on them that you can get from w3 or mdn I am given a large task with no practice to create a switch function that hold four values two values containing positive integers and two values accepting strings. then I have to be able to pass days and minutes through it.
an example solution after input would be:
addTime(1,"hour",3,"minutes")
I feel like this is too complicated with 26 minutes of information and no practice exercises to prepare for that.
-end rant

Drawing pictures in your mind. This is something I have always struggled with.

Is there a set of exercises a person can do to develop imagery in your mind?

I have had times when I closed my eyes that I experienced what I would call imagery that rivaled or was more detailed than what my eyes fed me. But I only experienced this and did not create what was in the imagery. It has only been once or twice. I know that when I start to dream I can start seeing things with imagery, but I still cannot control this directly. I had one lucid dream where I woke in my dream and was able to construct things for a short period.

What I would like to be able to do is construct shapes and diagrams in my head. Perhaps visualize how an algorithm might function.

Is there a way to learn this?

Hello word!
I'm in the middle of a C# reflection study session.
Anybody have exercises ideas to share? (:

Leverage online code platforms for exercises/assesments. Something like qualified.io for educators.

Teach algorithms with code challenges with sample test cases. Builds confidence, makes learning fun, and gives immediate feedback.