Things I've learned throughout my 5 - 6 years as a programmer.
- StackOverflow is full of assholes.
- CMS's are for weaklings.
- The best feeling about waking up in the morning is figuring out how to solve that error in your code.
- You no longer think about normal people things. Your mind is full of code.
- You're practically a computer.
- ALWAYS backup and save your stuff or you WILL regret it. Enable autosave if possible.
- RIP your social life (if your friends don't know squat about programming)
- Darkness is better.
- Being a programmer is amazing.

I want to pay respects to my favourite teacher by far.

I turned up at university as a pretty arrogant person. This was because I had about 6 years of self-taught programming experience, and the classes started from the ansolute basics. I turned up to my first classes and everything was extremely easy. I felt like I wouldn't learn anything for at least a year.

Then, I met one of my lecturers for the first time. He was about 50~60 years old and had been programming for all of his career. He was known by everyone to be really strict and we were told by other lecturers that it could be difficult for some people to be his student.

His classes were awesome. He was friendly, but took absolutely no shit, and told everything as it was. He had great stories from his life, which he used to throw out during the more boring computer science topics. He had extremely strict rules for our programming style, and bloody good reasons for all of them. If we didn't follow a clear rule on an assignment, he'd give us 0%. To prove how well this worked, nobody got 0%.

We eventually learned that he was that way because he used to work on real-time systems for the military, where if something didn't work then people could die.

This was exactly what I needed. In around one semester I went from a capable self-taught kid, to writing code that was clear, maintainable and fast, without being hacky.

I learned so much in just that small time, and I owe it all to him. So often when I write code now I think back to his rules. Even if I disagree with some, I learned to be strict and consistent.

Sadly, during the break between our first and second year, he passed away due to illness. There was so many lessons still to be learned from him, and there's now no teachers with enough knowledge to continue his best modules like compiler writing.

He is greatly missed, I've never had greater respect for a teacher than for him.

Uncle: "It must be noisy, programming. I've seen a datacenter on TV, and those computers are loud" — "It is noisy, but that's more my coworkers fault"

Sales guy at the office: "So you see patterns in the code, you can read this cryptic mess?" — "Uh this is PHP, Its not the syntax that makes it hard to read, it's the dimwit who wrote it"

Father-in-law: "Could you reprogram my laptop, I got a virus trying to download por... nature documentaries" — "I'm not that kind of doctor"

Mother-in-law: "How will you sustain a family, you just play video games all day" — "I make your monthly teachers salary in four days"

Girlfriend: "I learned some Lua today because I needed a world of warcraft extension for..." — "I love you too"

Today I learned how to use curly braces in Python for those coming from C style programming languages. I love that this was the accepted answer.

29-year veteran here. Began programming professionally in 1990, writing BASIC applications for an 8-bit Apple II+ computer. Learned Pascal, C, Clipper, COBOL. Ironic side-story: back then, my university colleagues and I used to make fun of old COBOL programmers. Fortunately, I never had to actually work with the language, but the knowledge allowed me to qualify for a decent job position, back in '92.

For a while, I worked with an IBM mainframe, using REXX and EXEC2 scripting languages for the VM/SP operating system. Then I began programming for the web, wrote my first dynamic web applications with cgi-bin shell and Perl scripts. Used the little-known IBM Net.Data scripting language. I finally learned PHP and settled with it for many, many years.

I always wanted to be a programmer. As a kid I dreamed of being like Kevin Flynn, of TRON - create world famous videogames and live upstairs my own arcade place! Later on, at some point, I was disappointed, I questioned my skills, I thought I should do more, I let other people's expectations make feel bad. Then I finally realized I actually enjoy a quieter, simpler life. And I made peace with it.

I'm now like the old programmers I used to mock 30 years ago. There's so much shit inside my brain. And everything seems so damn complex these days. Frameworks, package managers, transpilers, layers and more layers of code. I try to keep up. And the more I learn, the more it seems I don't know.

Sometimes I feel tired. Yet, I still enjoy creating things and solving problems with programming. I still have fun learning. And after all these years, I learned to be proud of my work, even if it didn't turn out to be as glamorous as in the movies.

Boss: Who knows VB?
Me: I once wrote a calculator
Boss: Good enough! You will edit the companies biggest VB Application.

Lesson learned. When your Boss asks if you know a programming language you do not really know, you are like John Snow: Know nothing

I started in 2015 at my current job. The first contract was for a year, very normal in the Netherlands. Also, I had only 6 months of professional experience with programming.
I already knew that I would replace an older colleague who's going to retire and I would get some of his responsibilities.

One year later (6 months ago) I had an evaluation with my boss. He told me he was proud I learned everything so quick and offered me a permanent position and wanted me to take over one of the major products we sell. Even more, he wanted me to decide how to change the framework since it's over 20years old. (Multiple languages combined)

I am currently working on a new design and UX as well, which I presented last year. The love it.

I've never felt so appreciated and valued before.

What my lecturer think I have learned:
- Programming Patterns
- C, C++, Java
- Socket programming, web programming
- Operating system...

What I have actually learned:
1. printf("Hello World");
2. echo "Hello World";
3. console.log("Hello World");
4. Console.Writeline("Hello World");
5. cout << "Hello World" >> endl;
6. System.out.println("Hello World");
7. puts "Hello World";
8. "Hello World"
9. write("Hello World");
10. Display "Hello World"

I apologies for my bad English.

I was 14 and addicted to PC games, I take money from my dad and bought new games every day

One day he got angry and told me: "What's are you doing with your life son? I don't pay for your games anymore! If you can build your own game and play with it!"

My mother had a computer academy, So i ask her to teach me how to build a game! She starts teaching me VB6, It was amazing.
After that, i started programming, Searching for VB6 sample code all day.

We had a local online game and it was a time killer, So i build an auto bot for this game to play for me, wit VB6. It works great, And send it to my friends and they loved it. Then I create a website and put it there so other players can use it, And after some days downloads reach 5000 times! I was shocked! Then I put a lot of time and improve it, Downloads reach 15000! After three years it reaches 50,0000 and more.
Between these years I learned VB.Net, C#, HTML, CSS, JS, Java and Android programming. Just because of some game.
And really thanks to my parent to put me in this path, It's great.
I think I can never get enough of coding!

But haven't created any games yet, So learning continues :)

OH MY GOD, MY TEACHER DOES NOT TEACH MY FAVORITE LANGUAGE!

I've seen a lot of rants about teachers who use an outdated language, or don't accept the preferred framework or library of the ranter, or even force students to use a technology or even worse an OS they don't prefer.

Whats with that attitude?

I absolutely encourage young people to learn technology in their free time and it absolutely helps at building a career and become good at programming. I don't think being around 18 and never having worked in a real job is the time to select "the most superior language and technology".

Actually, that time is never.

Technology is evolving all the time and different tech evolves in different paths for different purposes. Get rid of the idea, that there is a "best" and get rid of the idea, that you will always be able to work with what you think is best.

If you're really really really awesome, you can chose to do what you like most. Not awesome as in "i learned programming in my free time, now i'm better than my programming-for-beginners-course teacher" but awesome as in "start my own company and can afford to only take the jobs i feel like doing", that awesome. Most likely, you're not (yet).

In the real world, you will very likely sometimes be required to work with technology you don't prefer. Maybe with something you think is really bad. Probably, it's not that bad. More likely, you read it on the internet from someone whose self-image is based on on loving TechA and hating TechB. A lot of much hated technology is at least okay for it's intended use. Maybe not the most pleasant time you will ever have, but no reason to jump out of the window. Hey, and if you get used to it, you may even start to like it. At least, learn to retain some dignity when confronted with things you don't like.

You can still think that one thing is better than another, but if you make a huge drama out of it, you just make it harder for yourself. The best programmer is the one who get's shit done, not the one with the saltiest tears.

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

This happened when I was on third semester of the career at university. I had my first boyfriend, the "Python" guy. He has that nickname because he used Python as his main programming language and nobody on the classroom used it.

In a few words, he was a... horrible human being. He talked down to me almost all the time, saying to me that my country was sh*t (he is from United States, and for a reason he never wanted to told me, he cannot go back to his country), that my university was sh*t and he said "you're will be lucky if you rot programming in a chair".

As you might wondering, yes, unfortunately it was a toxic relationship. Once he said he wanted to kill the teacher because he though that he hacked his laptop D:

He claimed that he was going to teach me python and security stuff, bla bla bla, but nothing. I learned python by my own.

I almost lost my faith in dev future because I though that the only ones that could have a real future in programming where people without ethics and only if they have a friend or a relative on a company.

The saddest part was that I dated him because I love smart boys, but he was just an idiot that, furthermore, wanted to change me (he pressured me to have tattoos, dye my hair and have sex, things that, of course, I didn't do).

I found courage to break up with him. I waited until the semester ends (in order not to lose my programming final projects) and, the day after the last day of class, I broke up with him.

I recovered my faith on programming when, next semester, one of the teachers invited me to give a python programming workshop :D and I gave two python workshops, and two of mobile development.

Now I'm working as a junior .NET developer. Thank God I broke up with him before the relationship became even worse. "Python" wanted to marry me after a year! O_O

Although I love developing I always thought that there was something missing.
I learned Java but didn't really like it. I had spent quite some time with web development and enjoyed it but I felt like developing with JavaScript was too high level and I felt the same for Python.

So I started learning the most awesome programming language: C

I just love that I have so much control over everything and that the language is so compact and gives you just the right amount of tools you need.

I also love physics and electronics a lot and it feels awesome to first build something and then program it.

I am looking forward to design a PCB (printed circuit board) and write code for an AVR microcontroller like the Atmega328 (most arduinos use this one).

Picture of the project I am working on.

"Hey nephew, why doesn't the FB app work. It shows blank white boxes?"
- It can't connect or something? (I stopped using the FB app since 2013.)

"What is this safe mode that appeared on my phone?!"
- I don't know. I don't hack my smartphone that much. Well, I actually do have a customised ROM. But stop! I'm pecking my keyboard most of the time.

"Which of my files should I delete?"
- Am I supposed to know?

"Where did my Microsoft Word Doc1.docx go?"
- It lets you choose the location before you hit save.

"What is 1MB?"
- Search these concepts on Google. (some of us did not have access to the Internet when we learned to do basic computer operations as curious kids.)

"What should I search?"
- ...

"My computer doesn't work.. My phone has a virus. Do you think this PC they are selling me has a good spec? Is this Video Card and RAM good?"
- I'm a programmer. I write code. I think algorithmically and solve programming problems efficiently. I analyse concepts such as abstraction, algorithms, data structures, encapsulation, resource management, security, software engineering, and web development. No, I will not fix your PC.

When I was at my lowest, my buddy and me sat in front of the screen, and learned how to code from Bucky Roberts. A few years later, I finally got a proper programming gig, but never stopped freelancing. My buddy on the other hand, studied Computer Science and stopped coding for a while after graduating. 5 years later, today we sat in front of the screen and learned how to code together again. I think he has no idea what he has led me to. If he had not made me code, I would have remained the same boy from the streets. But it is not about me, I have heard so many incredible stories. The more codes you write, the more errors you'll encounter. The more errors you try to solve, the bigger the community grows. It's nice to know, there is a group of people out there, who will spend rest of their lives writing, thinking and interacting. Also, trying to figure out how to centre that piece of shit of a div with CSS! I mean wtf!

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

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

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

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

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

When someone asks me how I learned so many programming languages

Stackoverflow

When I was just starting with programming I used to google a lot (more) of my problems. But just just copying them made me feel guilty, since I could not handle the problem myself. So I decided to analyse a code to the point where i understand exactly how it works. Sometimes it took me a couple of hours to understand a method, which was written 1 or 2 levels over my current level, but it was totally worth it. I learned a lot about Java, how to write cleaner code in general and how to read and understand code quickly.

For my passionate coders out here, I have some tips I learned over the years in a business/IT environment.

1) Don't let stupid management force you into making decisions that will provide a bad product. Tell them your opinion and why you should do it that way. Never just go with their decision.
2)F@#k hackathons, you're basicly coding software for free, that the company might use. Want to probe yourself? Join a community and participate in their challenges.
3)No matter how good you are, haters are common.
4)Learn to have a good communication, some keywords are important to express yourself to other developers or customers. Try crazy things, don't be shy.
5)Never stand still, go hear at other companies what they offer, compare and choose your best fit. This leads me into point...
6)if you've been working for over a year and feel that you have participated enough in the companies growth, ask a raise, don't be afraid...you're wanted on the market, so either they negotiate a new contract or you find another job.

I'm sharing these with you as I made many mistakes regarding these points, I have coded for free or invested so much time in a company just to prove myself. But at the end I realize that my portfolio is enough to prove that I'm capable of doing the job. They don't like me? Or ask me stupid questions that I can google in 5 minutes. I'll just decline the job and get something better. Companies end up giving me nothing in return compared to the work I have put into it. At the end after some struggles you'll find a good fit and that's so important for your programming career. Burnouts happen quite often if you're just a coding puppy.

If some of you still have additional tips be sure to post them under here

It's fucking ridiculous how there's a great deal of websites to introduce beginners to programming and how there's not a single resource to take the beginners and teach them to do something with all the syntax they've learned.

one day my dad brings home an old blade server from work and a centos distro. we set it up in the garage of our hot Florida house and he gave me his old perl programming books and showed me a few things. I was 12 or 13. that summer I moved my bed to the garage and barely slept as I learned everything I could. I've never looked back.

I grew up poor. First time I saw a computer face to face was when I was 11 years old. Back then any other references to computers came through media. I genuinely believed that hacking was as seen on TV, didn't even question 2 idiots 1 keyboard and thought it was genius to unplug a computer during "an attack"

Fact is I arrived in this country when I was 11. By the time I had my first laptop I was around 13-14, as you can imagine it went really poorly for someone who was just awarded a machine of never-ending stories and entertainment with absolute fear that a single mistake can cause everything to crash and burn. Heck, I remember when I went to Vodafone and someone recommended Firefox, it was such a novelty back then, heh.

I didn't understand computers. My IT lessons were replaced to work on my dialect, but truth be told it was an awful waste of time. I've learned more from forums than I ever learned from any English teacher. I just sat there twidling my thumbs in agitation.

With no concept of what IT industry entitles (my idea of programming was cubicles and call centres), I never had a slightest clue programming could be for me. I always thought of myself closer to engineering or physics type, but that never really drew my interests. So I dwelled in depression thinking I'm broken. Useless. That there was no calling for me.

I'm 22. For the past year I dipped in and out of programming, it still felt like such black magic.vLast month or so the spell dispelled and I finally feel like my eyes have been opened. I've spent the past 3 days sitting in front of my computer learning or actively programming, with occasional dips into DevRant reading your stories, frustrations and victories and I truly feel at home.

In retrospect I feel like I made the right decision for not chasing any mathematical/physics/engineering degrees, while certainly a goal of mine, I feel like I'd be miserable in those communities. They're closer to hobbies, really.

I guess what I wanted to say is thank you. Thank you DevRant for being the spark in my null future and giving me a sense of purpose and belonging. For the first time I feel like I can make it, like there was hope somewhere over the horizon.

DevRant rant:

I am on DevRant for quite a while now and I really enjoy it here. The overall atmosphere is great, as well as the community. (Yes, that includes you!)
Since I came here I've learned some very valuable lessons regarding work (conditions), annoying coworkers and programming itself. I like to think of DevRant as a huge ball of experience by very talented people, as well as a great place for discussions about a topic we all love: code. But lately I am seeing more and more memes on here, with titles like "I think everybody know this", "I think everybody can relate" and "Soo true". Those posts have no value at all and are (most of the time) reposted from 9gag or similar networks. Sometimes those "rants" don't even have anything to do with devs anymore, but are only here to farm ++'es. In the beginning I really enjoyed funny "rants", but now the majority of them just annoy me. It becomes especially annoying when you see the same meme three times in 15 minutes.
I'd be in for some kind of DevFun section, where everybody is able to post his or hers jokes/memes/etc, but the current situation just really gets on my nerves.

I hope that I am not the only one who thinks like that, because I really feel uncomfortable ranting about something I actually love.

end rant

How did I learn programming?
When I joined college I was literally the dumbest in the class... I didn't even know what is a char and what is a String.. Our lecturer made fun of and humiliated me in front of the whole class....also my parents barely afforded my college tutotion fed...
So one night I sat with myself and reevaluated myself and decided that no matter how hard it is gonna be, I must become an excellent programmer....spent restless nights and days learning the core of programming in c++ then switched to Java *best day in my life* and also learned Android development.. And later JavaScript "mostly worked with jQuery and AngularJs*
In my final year project I built an Android web browser that even the lecturer that made fun of me was impressed by..and my app was rated the best project of that batch.
Now I'm working as a Java web dev and made a promise to myself that I'd learn something new every day.

It wasn't my curiosity that introduced me to programming. Actually, it was my mother.

It was about six years ago, when I'd told her I'd like to make video-games, like all kids do. She didn't just nod and go about her way. She found a free course that taught programming to kids my age and immediately enrolled me. Looking back, it was surely the best thing she'd done for me, because it gave me a purpose and a future to look forward to.

The course was interesting. We learned the basics of C++, then moved on to harder topics like algorithms and data types. But more and more, I was beginning to feel left behind. Like I didn't belong there. It didn't help that I only programmed on the course, with no practice back home.

I felt scared of the future. Thought I didn't have what it takes to become a programmer. I might have broken the last straw when I started playing truant and went to McDonald's to pass the time. Because every time I did go to the course, I felt stupid and anxious. So I simply skipped.

Time passed. I got more depressed, became more antisocial, my self-esteem took a nosedive. And when it comes to depression, people always seek an escape path.

I got my escape in fiction. Started reading books, tried writing stories, and it got to the point where I asked my mother if I could become a writer and not a programmer.

And guess what? She said, "Do what brings you happiness. This is your life."

It's funny, that such a silly line stopped and got me to think. Turned out, I didn't program for fun, for myself or for my career. I'd done it for my parents, for their expectations and I was scared that in failing, I'd become a loser in their eyes.

I dropped out of the programming course. Not because it sucked, but because I wasn't going there for myself, but for my parents. But I didn't quit programming. No, I watched countless tutorials, youtube videos, browsed StackOverflow, read some books, coded every day, and now I can say without hesitation, that I love programming. I'm hooked. And I don't want to stop.

If you've read this so far, I'm sorry for my rambling. I will now leave you with only one tip: If you decided to do something, do it for yourself. Forget about parents, expectations, career, future, time or money and do it only because you want to. Because nothing else matters. Only your happiness.

So I used to be a chef, then I got married and decided my weekends and holidays were better spent than making food for ungrateful shit-wagglers, or getting screamed at in Lebanese by the exec Chef during dinner service at the end of a ten-hour shift, so I went back to school for Computer Engineering. I was so worried because I swore compulsively from day one of classes.
Little did I know way back then, the first programming language I ever learned was swearing.

The Absolutely True Story of a Real Programmer Who Never Learned C.

I have a young friend named Sam who is quite a programming prodigy. Sam does know C! I need to make this clear: he’s not the titular programmer.
But a couple years ago Sam told me a story about a different programmer who never learned C, and I liked it so much that right on the spot I asked his permission to repeat it. (I could never just steal such a tale.)
Sam wasn’t always a programmer—actually he started in his later teens, in part because he was more of a jock, and in part because he was related to programmers and wanted to do his own thing. But, like all great programmers, once he was bitten by the bug he immersed himself completely in it.
One day Sam happened to be talking programming with his uncle, who was also a programmer but from way, way back.
“Hey,” said Sam, “I’m learning this language called C. You must know a lot of languages, did you ever study C?”
“No,” said the uncle, to Sam’s surprise. “I am one of the very few programmers who never had to learn C.”
“Because I wrote it.”
Oh, Sam’s last name is Ritchie.
What I love about this story is the idea of Dennis waiting Sam’s entire life to deliver this zinger. Just imagine sitting on a line that good, watching your nephew grow up and waiting, waiting until the one day he finally starts learning to code. Did he work on the line in his head at night? Like, “Hmm, how should I word it so I can deliver the punch line perfectly? Should I say ‘I never took a class on C?’ Nah, too awkward…”
The great thing about geniuses is how much effort they put into everything.

Courtesy : Wil Shiply.

Just released the side project that made me join programming! :) It's been about five months and I learned a lot: PHP, JavaScript, CSS, Handlebars, Jquery, Git (terminal), I even started building a RestAPI. Its been an amazing journey, and I didn't alone! I met other Devs (now good friends) over the Internet and we did it together :) Thanks to everyone on DevRant for being such a great community!
If you want to take a look at the site is: projectgroupie.com
It's a website to find new projects you like and join them! So if you're a developer and you wanna make a blog, you post your project on PG asking for some designer to help you and if someone like it, he can join! :)

I hope you enjoy it and any feedback is welcome!

I was once at my uncle's 40th birthday party and bored to hell, so he gave me a book that was supposed to be "Python for kids". I started reading it and soon fell in love with programming.
Since then I've often learned new programming languages by reading books or lately mostly the internet.
My books here should be in chronological order:

We are using this book for a subject
"Open Source Technologies"
No wonder how my classmates are gonna learn Android programming from this book.
I'm grateful to myself that I learned it online.

As a high-school student who has learned to program, i can't understand why programming isn't standard curriculim. It makes it so much more fun to learn math and physics. I also think even basic understanding of it improves how we use technology

Remember to teach your youth to program!

!rant

Let's take a moment to appreciate interested and enthousiastic non-developers who really want to learn a programming language.

I am studying Medical IT at my college and most of my classmates aren't coming from an IT background.
We're currently working with Java, PHP, JavaScript and some require Node for their semester projects.

Some of my classmates approach me when they're stuck while coding and I try to teach them as much as possible so they understand what they are doing wrong and how to fix it.
I also show them how they can optimise their code step by step and they love it!

As a classmate told me yesterday:
"It's always so much fun working with you. I come up with a small problem, but I end up learning so much more about programming when solving a problem with you. I appreciate that."

It's a mindset I've learned when I was doing my developer apprenticeship back in the day. One of my colleagues told me: "if they want your help because they need a quick fix, tell them to kiss your ass. If you know they've already tried everything they could and ask you specifically because they want to understand what they are doing wrong, they are future developers with great potential, so go teach them."

May the force be with you, my enthousiastic little non-devs ❤️

Hello devRant,
I'm new in your community. Okay, not completely new because I try to introduce me in the community and now I think, I know how devRant works and what I could do here.

But who I am?

I'm David from Germany. I'm a hobby developer. I develop lots of stuff, Alexa Skills, Google Actions, Mobile Application for Android and Websites. I'm in a one team member "team"🤣. I develop the background and I "try"😉 to develop the foreground. I develop since 6-7 years and I start with HTML (I know it's not a programming language) but next to HTML I learned CSS. Now, I could programm in CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL, JAVA, C++, PHYTON and I hope I don't forget a language.

But the main question: Why I joined to the devRant community?

The main reason is that I want to see jokes meme and interesting topics. The secondary reason is that I hope I could learn English in a different way. I hope I'm not the worst English speaker/writer.

my story so far

Hey guys. i just wantes to share my story becoming something i think is like a dev.
I was always interested in solving problems. my grandfather has a company with a bit over a 100 employees. one day i decided to start working there. he needed someone to build up the erp system (mostly maintenance). about a month after i started he decided to get a new erp system because the one he had would not fill his needs. not knowing how big this got i told him that i want to build it up. from getting the orders over production with machines to billing.
he agreed. after a short time we knew that even this new system does not fullfill our needs. but it was so damn expensive. i told my grandfather: trust me, i am handling this. no further costs. and i started to learn programming. i learned night and day (visual basics.net, sql, c#). since then i wrote about 8 additional modules for the system in coorperation with the users. today, 3 years later we are far ahead our market in terms of transparency and information flow. i worked very hard for this and it is a great feeling to see that the things i do help my colleagues and are used.

i never learned this stuff in school and i know that i cannot tell that i am a professional programmer.

but when someone asks me i tell them i am a programmer because my solutions work and i think i deserve to call me that.

thanks for reading :)

Now that I passed 5k, I think it's time to thank this awesome community.
Literally all of you people are absolutely awesome. I have nobody to talk to about programming stuff in RL, but you really got me back on track. I lost motivation, but this network is...different. It's inspiring.
I learned a multitude of languages and strengthend my skills. So many people are awesome here, I cannot listen them all.

I just want to say...Thank you.

Professor in Programming 1 & 2, 54 years old, divorced, has two kids in our age, golf player

Every time, he came in, we started with the lecture, than he started to talk about politics, greta, the stupid young people, specially the women, always the women. While he was talking to himself or asking us students very personal questions to judge us and recommend how we should do it better, he was talking himself into rage. We never learned something about cs or java longer than 10 minutes, the other long hours he only talked and talked about personal stuff or politics.
One day he asked us about the method of training a dog. You train a dog with pushing his face into his own pee. Than he said with us it is more difficult and that if he would be allwoed he would use methods like this and other very effective stuff on us.
He always starts his emails with
Dear humans
To make fun about gendering.
Another day a student came 1 minute to late, the prof stopped talking became very angry, first he went to a armchair and was sitting there for 15 minutes without saying a word, than he left without a word the room for 30 minutes and when he came back we had to listen to one of his monologues for some hours like usually.

And these are only some samples, he always acted like a little kid, but our university is very poor and i dont think they can effort a better professor for this.

I starten when I was 12 years old. I got bullied and got interested in computers. One day I crashed my dads computer and he reinstalled it. After that my dad made two accounts. The regular user (my account) and the Administrator user (my dads account). He also changed the language from Dutch to English. Gladly I could still use the computer by looking at the icons :')

Everytime I needed something installed I had to ask my dad first (for games mostly because there was no cable internet at that time). Then I noticed the other user account while looking over my dads shoulders. So I tried to guess the password and found out the password was the same as the label next to the password field "password".

At that point my interest in hacking had grown. So when we finally got cable internet and my own computer (the old one) MSN Messenger came around. I installed lots of stuff like flooders etc. Nobody I knew could do this and people always said; he is a hacker. Although it is not.

I learned about IP-address because we sometimes had trouble with the internet. So when my dad wasn't home he said to me. Click on this (command prompt) and type in; ipcondig /all. If you don't see an IP-address you should type in; ipconfig /renew.

Thats when I learned that every computer has a unique address and I started fooling around with hacking tools I found on internet (like; Subseven).

When I got older I had a new friend and fooled around with the hacking tools on his computer. Untill one day I went by my friend and he said; my neighbor just bought my old computer. The best part was that he didn't reinstall it. So we asked him to give us the "weird code on the website" his IP-Address and Subseven connected. It was awesome :'). (Windows firewall was not around back then and routers weren't as popular or needed)

At home I started looking up more hacking stuff and found a guide. I still remember it was a white page with only black letters like a text file. It said sometime like; To be a hacker you first need to understand programming. The website recommended Visual Basic 6 for beginners. I asked my parents to buy me a book about it and I started reading in the holliday.

It was hard for me but I really wanted to hack MSN accounts. When I got older I just played around and copy -> pasted code. I made my own MSN flooders and I noticed hacking isn't easy.

I kept programming and learned and learned. When I was 16/17 I started an education in programming. We learned C# and OOP (altho I hated OOP at first). I build my own hacking tool like "Subseven" and thats when I understood you need a "server" and "client" for a successful connection.

I quit the hacking because it was getting to difficult and after another education I'm now a fulltime back-end developer in C#.

That's my story in short :)

You wanted to hear more about my "glorious" teacher. I deliver. So get a cup of tea, take a seat and prepare for insanity.
As I already told in a comment my programming teacher is one special snowflake who lives in his personal bubble. We have final exams in less than a month and he spents at least half a lesson talking about vanishing bees and missing plants from his garden. Other topics he likes to talk about (and tries to turn every freaking conversation into at least one of these):
1. Other students and their stupidity
2. Diesel scandal
3. His sick wife
4. "Why does noone read newspapers anymore?"
5. Why he can't teach Java but really really really wants to and everyone hates him and forces him to do C#.

Even if I try to interrupt him he'll go on until he thinks we gained some "common knowledge" - this is how he justifies these topics.

Everytime he introduced us to a new command he compared it to Java and sometimes he even falsely corrects code because he confuses them.
We are only 6 people including me (another story for another time) and he is not able to help everyone during a 90min lesson. He normally sticks with one person for at least one hour and just talks to them or even do their tasks. This is really annoying if you have a simple question. He won't answer you until he's finished whatever he's doing.

Most of the time he doesn't seem to understand what he's talking about/trying to teach us. He's muttering statements from our textbook to himself switching halfway through to another sentence while drawing not decipherable shit on the blackboard.

Another gem are his "guidelines" for classtests. We are allowed to use any command we know. Except the ones we learned not in class. And the ones he doesn't like. And the ones he doesn't want to exist. And of course not the ones which make you're life easier. So basically we are bound to use his favourite commands or we won't get a good grade. Example: use an array. List is not allowed. Never.
He has some weird fetish with arrays.

I once presented him perfectly fine code I wrote in my freetime and asked what some warnings meant. (Was because of different Visual studio versions as I learned later.) He scolded me for using things he didn't taught us yet and ranted about how I'm pressuring him into rushing these things now - I never wanted to show this to my classmates nor was this anything else than a project for fun and learning something new. (FYI the "new stuff" where classes and objects because i was tired of kilometers of spaghetti code). His rant went on a good 20minutes and - obviously - he didn't answer my question. I asked my fiance that evening and he explained it to me.
This should it be for this time. I'm sure I have more stories to tell for another time!
Thank you for reading. ^^

Another non programming related rant although kinda tech related.
So I work in a distribution center and today I learned box packing.

1. THEIR LEGACY ASS SYSTEM ONLY RUNS ON IE (FUCK ME IN THE ASS SIDEWAYS PLEASE).
2. SYSTEM CONSTANTLY FREEZES.
3. THE HAND SCANNERS RUN ON AN OLD FUCKING LEGACY WINDOWS (PRE 2000 I THINK) SYSTEM AND IS SLOW AS MOTHERFUCKING HELL.

Yes, it is VERY frustrating to have to work with this FUCKING SHIT THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING DAY.

Plus side today, the locations I had to pick from today included 200, 403 and 404. Had loads of inside jokes about not being able to find locations and not having permission etc 😆

It all started in the year 2013.
I was 13 years old back then. I was a fan of Minecraft and so I learned how to setup a bukkit server and ran it. Installing plugins was fun, because I could be a "hacker" and change the configs.
After a while, (~2014), when I was in the 9th grade of elementary school, I saw Unity. A free game engine. Of course, me being a 14 year old I was intrigued and so I downloaded it, made an account and a new project. I had absolutely ZERO knowledge of programming. Didn't even know what languages existed, so i resorted to presets and poorly put together characters + weapons.
After some time fiddling around with Unity, I've gotten a hang of the basics (not programming related).
My actual programming started when I started High School (year 2016). It's a computer engineering school and for the first part of the year, I've learned from my teacher in C# (Console.WriteLine/ReadLine/Loops/Variables). At the second semester I started to gain interest and motivation to program at home. I did the programs we made in school (random number guessing game) but better. Improved it, added colors.
After that, I started developing in Unity - Actually learning something and having the ability to develop something all by myself. It keeps driving me on. In the second year (the year I'm visiting right now) I tought myself HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP. I'm very happy and also can't wait to discover and learn new things in these languages!
My latest project was an Android application for my father that he asked for (it calculated the price of the 3D print he would make).

// Sorry for the long post!

EDIT: Forgot to add a fun little detail. All my classmates make fun of me because I program so much !
Also: Tabs > Spaces

After a long time just reading your posts, here's my first post:

Just for clarification: I'm studying electrical engineering in Germany. During your time at university, you have to work half a year as a intern to get some practical experience. So I'm in a position where I mainly have to say "yes" to work that is given to me. Also I'm working with a lot of PLC programmers, so I'm nearly the only one who programs non-PLC stuff at the department.

But now it's time for my rant (and also my most satisfying optimization ever). In the job interview for the internship, my task at the company was described as C# programmer. I only programmed C and Python before, but C# looked interesting and so I learned C# from ground up in the summer before the internship. I quite liked it and I was really happy on my first day of work. Then I was greeted with this message: "I know you are hired as C# programmer, but could you please look into this VBA program, it takes 55 seconds until it finishes its task and that's to slow". So I (midly angry because I had to do VBA and not C#) started the program and it was really horribly slow (it just created a table with certain contents from a very big imported symbol file). I then opened up the source code and immideately saw bad code. The guy who wrote it basically just clicked on the macro recording button and used the recorded mouse clicks in the source code. The code was like: Click on cell A1 -> copy cell A1 -> move to sheet XY -> click on cell A2 -> paste copied stuff and so on... I never 'programmed' in VBA before, so I used my knowledge of 'real' programming languages to do this task. After using some arrays and for-loops, which did not iterate over all the 1.000.000 unused cells after the last used one, the program took only 3 seconds after it finished the new table! Everybody was quite impressed, which led to much more VBA optimization... That was clearly not my goal haha :)

An un-rant on Universities. (UC Irvine)

A lot of my friends and I are about to graduate 👨‍🎓 from UCI, with Computer Science degrees.

Most of them are complaining that they don't know any current frameworks, and all that we learned is outdated.
And that pretty much any bootcamper knows more tools that any of us do.

I totally disagree. I don't think it's the university's job to teach you tools (node, tencerflow, ...), rather, I think they made us into programming Swiss Army knifes. I can pick up any framework (I wanna be a web dev) real easy, and when shit breaks down, I can easily figure out the issue.

I think that's the major difference between Computer Scientists and Bootcampers/Programmers. We know "why", while they know "how".

What do you think? Is the current price of a CS degree worth it?

I helped a homeless man with a really bad foot condition down the stairs to get to the subway platform along with bringing down his wheelchair. Just his luck that the elevator was out of service. The man cried and said that he wished more people like me existed in the world but the world he knew was long gone from his grasp.

My problem with that situation was that people just ignored him and look disgusted at him....since when did we as humans lose faith in each other to the point that we ultimately care about differences, status, and appearance before anything else?

Such a sad fucking world we live in today and I had just learned that he used to be a programmer and worked at IBM back in the days (he had a really old decrepit badge too and we shared some programming woes before we got on separate trains).

Bless him and fuck everyone else who stood by and watched the poor man suffer. Those people are worse than shit, they are the scum of the Earth in my eyes.

After months and months of slaving away, I quit my start-up job and feel completely amazing- here's what happened:

Met a classmate in grad school and he talked about starting his own company and he had full funding and etc. After graduation, moved to the new city where the job was located.

There were all these promises of us being co-workers and working on cool things and many other promises made. Soon after starting the job, most of these promises we're just smoke and mirrors.

Started working day in day out. Worked from 8am-9pm most days and worked on weekends too. Treated me like a I was a dog, talked down to me, gave unrealistic deadlines, pressured me with attitude and threats of losing my job. Hell, they thought they were the smartest person to touch the earth basically- example being that they mixed jQuery with VueJS in our Django template.....who the F*** does that. Another thing being that they had issues with me soft deleting records since they wanted them completely hard deleted and we had gotten into a giant argument about that fml.

What led to me leaving the job was that I had gotten sick one of the weeks, and I still showed up to work. Each day I was gradually getting sicker and sicker. Still tried my best to get work done. Saturday morning I get the most passive aggressive and bitchy text from my co-worker. "if you don't complete blah blah blah by Monday, we are going to have issues. Then on Monday you will work on blah blah blah". They blew the fuse with me. They would always punish me for being sick or taking a vacation. I'm not a dog, not a machine, I'm a f****** person. Went into his office when the work week started and gave my resignation on the spot and felt like it was the best decision I've ever made.

Now I just feel like a giant toxic cloud has disappeared from my life. I did walk away with so much experience and knowledge but now I just feel extremely burnt out from programming. Is this what I even wanna do anymore?

Few lessons I learned along the way:
1. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is
2. Free lunches aren't worth it
3. Unlimited PTO doesn't really mean unlimited- there's always stipulations
4. Start-up life isnt as cool as they say- don't take TV portrayals as the real thing
5. Your mental health is extremely important
6. It's okay to admit to yourself that you're burnt out
7. Take a break
8. STARTUPS ARE NOT FOR EVERYONE

This is just my experience and what I learned, so telling my story. Phew, feels so good to get that off my chest

Okay so this is just a rant about my personal life because if I post it any where else no one will really care.

So I graduated from a vocational high school where I learned about basic IT and networking skills but I mostly focused on my programming. and I LOVED that school honestly the environment was so amazing and everyone and everything about it was amazing. then I started college recently hoping for the same thing and its just depressing me, and my depression is coming back and I cant stop it because I cant distract myself from it. My friends are always off playing Monster Hunter Ultimate and Im just wishing theyd hop back on Warframe so we can play again.. They say they will but they really wont so im usually just playing alone or going online which is sometimes fun if you have people that talk back.

so i took myself to the official warframe discord to find people that would help but everytime I ask I just get ignored. So Im stuck playing alone.

while thats happening Im not really getting any messages from anyone besides my girlfriend which is nice but she isnt able to really keep up a conversation and shes often busy with school as well. when I try to talk to any of my friends they arent really interested to talk or just send short replies that obviously tell me to go away. one friend in particular she and I used to talk everyday not even in a romantic way just straight up besties for life, but after one of my relationships ended she basically took her side and never talks to me now. Ive just been really lonely and wanting to just have my friends talk to me again or just have some programming friends I can chill in a discord server while we code but I cant bring myself to ask anyone on the specific server im in for programming..

Honestly idk if anyone on devrant really looks at my posts and thinks "oh look Bubbles posted again". I feel like im not good enough to be here because Im not nearly as good as all of you, Im mostly just here asking questions or posting extremely fucking long posts no one wants to read. and yet this is still where most of my interactions are and I love that this devRant community makes me laugh or feel better about myself sometimes. and I thank all of you for that and I remember your @ 's all the time.

honestly the only real highlight of my week was when my teacher of my vocational class asked me to come back as an unpaid intern to help teach his new programming class and It made me happy but other than that I havent been too happy.

if anyone actually got through this holy shit youre awesome and thank you a lot its appreciated.

I could bitch about XSLT again, as that was certainly painful, but that’s less about learning a skill and more about understanding someone else’s mental diarrhea, so let me pick something else.

My most painful learning experience was probably pointers, but not pointers in the usual sense of `char *ptr` in C and how they’re totally confusing at first. I mean, it was that too, but in addition it was how I had absolutely none of the background needed to understand them, not having any learning material (nor guidance), nor even a typical compiler to tell me what i was doing wrong — and on top of all of that, only being able to run code on a device that would crash/halt/freak out whenever i made a mistake. It was an absolute nightmare.

Here’s the story:

Someone gave me the game RACE for my TI-83 calculator, but it turned out to be an unlocked version, which means I could edit it and see the code. I discovered this later on by accident while trying to play it during class, and when I looked at it, all I saw was incomprehensible garbage. I closed it, and the game no longer worked. Looking back I must have changed something, but then I thought it was just magic. It took me a long time to get curious enough to look at it again.

But in the meantime, I ended up played with these “programs” a little, and made some really simple ones, and later some somewhat complex ones. So the next time I opened RACE again I kind of understood what it was doing.

Moving on, I spent a year learning TI-Basic, and eventually reached the limit of what it could do. Along the way, I learned that all of the really amazing games/utilities that were incredibly fast, had greyscale graphics, lowercase text, no runtime indicator, etc. were written in “Assembly,” so naturally I wanted to use that, too.

I had no idea what it was, but it was the obvious next step for me, so I started teaching myself. It was z80 Assembly, and there was practically no documents, resources, nothing helpful online.

I found the specs, and a few terrible docs and other sources, but with only one year of programming experience, I didn’t really understand what they were telling me. This was before stackoverflow, etc., too, so what little help I found was mostly from forum posts, IRC (mostly got ignored or made fun of), and reading other people’s source when I could find it. And usually that was less than clear.

And here’s where we dive into the specifics. Starting with so little experience, and in TI-Basic of all things, meant I had zero understanding of pointers, memory and addresses, the stack, heap, data structures, interrupts, clocks, etc. I had mastered everything TI-Basic offered, which astoundingly included arrays and matrices (six of each), but it hid everything else except basic logic and flow control. (No, there weren’t even functions; it has labels and goto.) It has 27 numeric variables (A-Z and theta, can store either float or complex numbers), 8 Lists (numeric arrays), 6 matricies (2d numeric arrays), 10 strings, and a few other things like “equations” and literal bitmap pictures.

Soo… I went from knowing only that to learning pointers. And pointer math. And data structures. And pointers to pointers, and the stack, and function calls, and all that goodness. And remember, I was learning and writing all of this in plain Assembly, in notepad (or on paper at school), not in C or C++ with a teacher, a textbook, SO, and an intelligent compiler with its incredibly helpful type checking and warnings. Just raw trial and error. I learned what I could from whatever cryptic sources I could find (and understand) online, and applied it.

But actually using what I learned? If a pointer was wrong, it resulted in unexpected behavior, memory corruption, freezes, etc. I didn’t have a debugger, an emulator, etc. I had notepad, the barebones compiler, and my calculator.

Also, iterating meant changing my code, recompiling, factory resetting my calculator (removing the battery for 30+ sec) because bugs usually froze it or corrupted something, then transferring the new program over, and finally running it. It was soo slowwwww. But I made steady progress.

Painful learning experience? Check.
Pointer hell? Absolutely.

I already talked about it in another rant but here it is !

This year, I got the chance to teach PHP to my fellow students in my uni.
PHP was the first programming language I ever learned (5 years ago) and this year I had a PHP class in my uni. I knew that I would not learn anything new (as I'm more competent than the teacher). So my teacher let me help the other students when I had finished the exercices. Then my teacher got sick and I, kinda officially, replaced him during 3 weeks.
I'm very thankful that he gave me that chance and thanks to him I discovered a new part of IT that I didn't knew. And even if I didn't learn anything new in PHP, I learned a lot by troubleshooting others projects and trying to understand how they reason. I really developed a new soft skill that I never knew I would have.

That also really helped me to trust myself and I got more confident about my programming skills.
This is one of the best experiences I got during my studies so far.

Why I quit playing video games 15 years ago, and how that impacted my life.

In a land far far away (probably from where you are) on a distant planet (probably for aliens reading this) In a typical city, in a typical apartment, I woke up from a deep deep sleep, the kind of sleep that you can only have if you've been up the previous 2 days binge playing final fantasy 7.

It was a day like any other, except, on this day, I had a haunting thought:

"What if I played my LIFE, like I did video games"?

Long story short. I couldn't play video games anymore. Instead of "working" I saw it as gaing exp points. Instead of "failing" I saw it as necessary to build up character flaws.... etc.

I haven't looked back. I created 3 businesses, I learned psychology, marketing, programming, law, etc etc.

I look at my current status, strength points, charisma points, intelligence points, etc.
And I'm proud.

You get the idea.

Later, I realized something else. If I work all day in front of a computer, how can I play in front of a computer too?

This could be a better post, but you get the gist.

Know the role video games plays in your life, and don't let it play YOU.

So I'm 17, I go to a vocational school and I'm in a computer IT and networking class as a junior. We have learned programming in HTML and CSS and whenever I'm programming I'm having the most fun, so I am teaching myself C++! I don't really feel welcome due to my age but I hope all of you can help me in the future!

Just curious... what was the first programming language you learned?

Mine was Java.

Hello, I'm now gonna rant for a bit. I'm usually not a ranty person (wait, why am I on this site again?) , but here we go. I sometimes feel misunderstood about my side projects.

I don't know about you guys, but when I program on my free time, sometimes I just want to grab a glass of wine and explore things I think bout during the day. So, during the start of my CS-education, when I started to get my programming feet a little warm, I wrote this tic-tac-toe game (as you do...), and I thought "Well I know how to play the game. Surely I can program an AI to play against". So I thought hard for an evening or two and came up with something that wasn't too shabby (I can't win).
Then another time when learned about creating GUIs we got to do simple menu based stuff with buttons and pulldown menus following a certain structure, but we also learned that positions of components can be set freely. So I thought "Well, if I can freely change the positions of components, surely I can animate stuff and if I map that to some keys I can create a real time game!". So I wrote a small platformer with two squares that ideally succeed in killing one another. After animation I started fantasising about 3D rendering, so I created a small application which creates the illusion of 3D, which was cool and all, but that got me dreaming of creating a real 3D engine. It became almost like a cause of mine; to understand how it all works and create a 3D engine from scratch.
So now I've written a 3D engine. A simple one, mind you, without all the bells and whistles, but still a 3D engine.

So, after all this rambling, what is this rant about? It's about how people react to all this. The reactions are divided. Some are impressed, mostly people who cannot program, but others are like "hm...". For example, during job interviews, when people ask me if I've done anything on the side and I mention this, people usually go like ".... hm... :| Well that's great. So mostly just done your own stuff?". Well YES! What is that supposed to mean? That I've not created shippable applications? I've explored, which I myself believe is valuable! I believe I've learned something along the way. And most importantly I've enjoyed it. Maybe I'm over interpreting this, but sometimes it feels like people don't even understand the joy in it, like it's illogical. Why create something that in the end won't create any real value?

Am I alone in this? Or perhaps, have I just written far to long and uninteresting a rant for anybody to read this far? I don't know. You tell me.

PROCEDURAL PROGRAMMING
You write a list of instructions. The machine reads this list and runs your commands.

OOP PROGRAMMING
Quite similar to procedural programming but you group your functions via objects.

RANDOM PROGRAMMING
Learned of this new paradigm quite recently working with Blue Prism, which is essentially the program doing whatever it wants from crashing, freezing, returning wrong results, sometimes working properly, with no reason whatsoever other than the sheer malice of those beasts of burden who designed it in the first place. Mark my words, BP devs, you will be held accountable for your crimes against God and humanity.

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

How did you break through your own barriers to finally learn programming?

My SO is constantly complaining that we don’t have enough money. I make a decent amount as a full-time dev at a large company, but we live in an expensive city and are currently going through a time of few funds.

He started driving delivery food orders, he likes it okay, but it pays very little. He still complains about money.

I want him to learn JavaScript.

He was once asked to make a website for a company he’s involved in. He only used SquareSpace, but he was never satisfied with their stock code. He went digging for JavaScript snippets he could use, and he made one of the most beautiful and responsive websites I’ve seen.

Since then, I’ve been encouraging him to learn JavaScript. I’m trying to convince him it will be a great source of additional income, he can make his own schedule while doing contract work, and he can ask me anything he wants while he’s learning. How many beginners have someone they can ask anything of, at any time?

He doesn’t want to learn. He doesn’t think he is capable. I remember this feeling before I learned to code. A chunk of someone else’s JS does look genuinely terrifying if you don’t know what it means. I want him to give it one honest try before he decides it’s “not for him,” but he isn’t open to it enough to try.

What can I do to help him understand he is capable? He’s in his mid-30s and insists he’s too old to catch up. He’s smart, detail-oriented, and I know he would write code that’s a million times cleaner than mine. He absolutely has a programmer inside of him, and I want to encourage him to simply try.

Is there something I can to do introduce JS in a non-threatening way? Or should I just accept his refusal and let it go? Thanks for any advice.

My first learned programming language is Pascal. Really enjoy the feeling of using the blue Editor to code. Just like the hacker described in those movie. And the most satisfying things of programming in Pascal is to make a GUI interface. Using the draw command, and write every buttons and layout. And amazed with the setfillstyle options.

I was once using an app, made by my friend which could be used as a handy reference for programming topics. It crashed every time i clicked the last entry of the list. I told him that the app has a bug, probably some position mistake and he denied, saying that he doesn't need feedback from a guy who didn't code applications. I learned to code java and started android that night and knew I needed to give him a reply, a good one.

Worst advice about programming...
My discussion with my company sistem admin :
Me : you must always think that users are dumb and will make mistakes (like putting letters when db saves as number)
He : users must learn, if they make such mistakes its their fault.

My claim: I learned early in school to always assume that users are stupid and will always find bugs and exploits by coincidence. So protect your code from bad imput

Programming helped me realise, that I'm growing.

Since I've learned git long time ago, all my projects are archived and I can get back to them. When I look at my old code, I can see, how much I've learned, and how much more of a developer I've become.

And it motivates me to keep going.

Just read an article that really grinds my gears. Its about coding in other languages. Not programming languages, but literally other languages.

Btw I learned to code in Spanish and I'm not against coding in programming languages using variable names in other languages.

That's fine.

What pissed me off was that the author claimed that we should be able to code Fucking JavaScript in SWAHILI or other languages available. What kind of PC bullshit is that!

Coding is barely fucking readable and now we have to make standards for Multilanguage support. Just learn the less than 60 reserved words you lazy fuck and code with them! I leaned to code with shitty tutorials in Spanish and theres no 1000x resources out there and this author claims you can't code unless you know english.

Granted. It's easier but wtf not just learn it. When I coded in Java in Spanish, I didn't know wtf a Class was or ags meant. So what. I memorized that shit. How? By coding!

Why bring this PC shit to programming? The author thinks there are few programmers bc we don't support fucking SWAHILI in JavaScript. Fuck no!

Now if you want to support this initiative. Think of this,

...legacy code

...in 32+ languages.

Have fun debugging this thing.

Boasting you know programming just because you watched some programming videos doesn't help in any of the case, I learned this the hard way because I tried to show off in front a girl and turned out, she knew more and better. This was when I was 14, very bad memory

I FIXED THE FINAL BUG WITH MY OWN SOLUTION AND NOW IT WORKS, I EVEN SENT MY 5GB FUCKING TXT FILE.

ALTHOUGH IT TOOK FOREVER BECAUSE I FORGOT TO INCREASE THE BUFFER SIZE FROM 1KB SO IT TOOK A BIT.

BUT NOW ALL I NEED TO DO IS POLISH, MAKE SOME QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES AND I CAN PUT THAT SHIT ON GITHUB!

THIS IS MY SECOND FINISHED PROJECT! But I do gotta thank an online friend that has been teaching me the concepts of network programming without him I couldn’t have done it. Also I’ve learned so much about how shit works thanks to him/and the project.

I just learned that linux shouldn't be called linux but GNU (or GNU/Linux)

I am a student and currently learning programming but also I looked into history and saw this interesting fact.

Basically, there was a guy who wanted to make operating system similar to unix but free to use and distribute. He called it GNU. After few years, it was getting finished but it was missing few parts. One of those parts was kernel. So people glued together this low level kernel called Linux, mid level GNU and some other stuff on top of it. It was first known as GNU/Linux and slowly GNU was kicked out of the name even though 'Linux' - the whole OS constisted more of GNU than Linux kernel.

Doesn't this seem like injustice? Am I wrong somewhere?

Before I became a Computer Engineer, (actually, this job is where I learned I loved programming) our manager would pull us into a team motivational meeting.
Except she was a bit of an airhead, so her idea of motivation was having a sing-song and listing our favorite movie quotes.
It was even funnier because there was lots of drama surrounding "how she became our manager," and one of our teammates felt as though she should have gotten the job.
Anyway, none of those were the most ridiculous meeting.
The most ridiculous meeting was when the VP of marketing came to town from Florida to address the brewing drama.
In this meeting, all of my teammates suddenly had the delusion that we were in a union and thought they were protected from getting fired. They threw our manager under the bus. I was the only one who could see that he was there to see if our department was worth saving. They thought they were going to get rid of our manager by shitting on her, but they were just confirming his suspicion that there was a bunch of bullshit going on all around.
So I approached the VP after the meeting, and long story short, I was the only one who got through layoffs with a job offer in Florida a couple weeks later.
I didn't take it, because by that time I decided I wanted to go to school for Computer Engineering.

I have been creating mods for Skyrim and Fallout for a few years now. One day another modder wanted to make his own game using Unreal Engine 4. I wanted to learn UE4 anyway and the other members have made many mods before, so I joined in.

Well, it turned out I was the only one with a professional programming background (this is where I should have run). The others were all modders who somehow got their shit working. "It works, so it's good enough right?" On top of that UE4 has a visual scripting system called Blueprint. Instead of writing code you connect function blocks with execution lines. Needles to say that spaghetti code gets a whole new meening.

There was no issue board, no concept, no plan what the game should look like. Everyone was just doing whatever he wants and adding tons of gameplay mechanics. Gameplay mechanics that I had to redo because they where not reusable, not maintainable or/and poorly performing.

Coming from a modding background, they wanted to make the game moddable. This was the #1 priority. The game can only load "cooked" assets when it got packaged. So to make modding possible, we needed to include the unpacked project files in the download. This made the download size grow to 20+ GB. 20 GB for a fucking sidescroller. Now, 1 year after release we have one mod online: Our own test mod.

Well we "finished" the game eventually and it got released on Steam. A 20 GB sidescroller for $6.99. It's more like a $2.99 game in my opinion. But instead of lowering the price they increased it to $9.99, because we have spent so much time creating the game. Since that we selled less than 5 more copies. And now they want to make it work on mobile. Guess who will definetly NOT help them.

I have spent ~6 month of my freetime for this project, my rev share is < 100€ and they got me a lot of headaches with all their dumb decisions. Lesson learned. But hey, I am pretty good with UE4 now.

"took you long enough" gave me a computer at five - was programming at 6, learned Python and Ruby by 10.

First rant!

The first time I got in touch with programming was when I was about 14 years old. I started a private server for a game called Maplestory (yeah you know it, I know you do) and had one of the most popular servers.
Topping all the rankings of best servers, getting lots and lots of traffic...
Anyway, I started modding the game and implement new features and quests. Right until my father saw our bandwidth. Because the server was running on my computer in my own bedroom 24/7 and blowing nice hot air in my room.
Our bandwidth limit was reached in just a couple days in to the next billing cycle and had to shut everything down from that point. And this happened a few times.
I was devastated shutting it down but learned so much from it. And it introduced me to programming.

Up till now, I'm almost graduating in computer science, already have 2 companies that are willing to hire me, and probably even going to work with my dad on a huge app soon

Today I experienced cruelty of C and mercy of Sublime and SublimeLinter.

So yesterday I was programming late at night for my uni homework in C. So I had this struct:

typedef struct {
int borrowed;
int user_id;
int book_id;
unsigned long long date;
} entry;

and I created an array of this entry like this:

entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(arr) * n);

and my program compiled. But at the output, there was something strange...

There were some weird hexadecimal characters at the beginning but then there was normal output. So late at night, I thought that something is wrong with printf statement and I went googling... and after 2 hours I didn't found anything. In this 2 hours, I also tried to change scanf statement if maybe I was reading the wrong way. But nothing worked. But then I tried to type input in the console (before I was reading from a file and saving output in a file). And it outputted right answer!!! AT THAT POINT I WAS DONE!!! I SAID FUCK THIS SHIT I AM GOING TO SLEEP.

So this morning I continued to work on homework and tried on my other computer with other distro to see if there is the same problem. And it was..

So then I noticed that my sublime lint has some interesting warning in this line
entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(arr) * n);
Before I thought that is just some random indentation or something but then I saw a message: Size of pointer 'arr' is used instead of its data.

AND IT STRUCT ME LIKE LIGHTNING.

I just changed this line to this:
entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(entry) * n);

And It all worked fine. At that moment I was so happy and so angry at myself.

Lesson learned for next time: Don't program late at night especially in C and check SublimeLInter messages.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How many of you learned your programming languages from courses/study and how many of you from just grabbing a project and bullshitting your way through until it stuck

The best teacher that I've had is one of the teachers at my university lab.
He teaches Data Structures. We had some programming assignments and I was good at it, but whatever I'd do, he'd always find bugs, ask me to resolve it and he'd always give me challenges in the lab which is fun in the lab environment. University labs usually sticks to the sylabbus. I actually learned alot from that experience..

'Trail and Error is the best method to learn programming.'

A while ago I found one of my old notes. It was from around two years ago. I had written down my programming long term goals and what I wanted to learn (more like a wishlist). While I was reading it, I realised that throughout these two years, without me being actually aware, I had learned all of it. It had been a slow progress but eventually not only had I reached it, but I had also surpassed it. It made me feel pretty good about myself. 😊

Got my first laptop while I was overseas.

It was a windows hp laptop with Vista.

It was an absolute piece of shit.

Decided to find the people responsible of it.

Got to what a software engineer was.

Boss told me to look in the library to see if i find some books on the subject. Got a Java and C++ book.

Shit was hard af cuz I had no clue what I was doing, but I liked it. Decided to look more into an application wise platform of study rather than doing basic CLI shit. Got into web development with Java. Got a hold of more JS. Liked JS more cuz shit was easy, found about server side JS with classic ASP, did VBScript as well.

Eventually found Python, fell in love but hated the whitespace ussage for block level code etc. Found Ruby, to this day the most beautiful language according to me. Read about why's poignant intro to Ruby.

Dug it, but wanted some other things. Found out about the study of data structures ans algorithms, then harvard's free cs50 course, then mit courseware, rice's python class. Took all of them. CS50 introduced php, liked it, sounded like a drug, was easy to use, for whatever fucking reaskn my ass decided to use version 4 even though 5 was already out. Learned to appreciate advancements in programming language even more

Hipster phase, while studying php got more into JS and web design with more css concepts, wanted my shit to be pretty. Somehow landed with Common Lisp. Mind fucking blown.

Continued with php. Got into uni, math made sense through programming, ok so I am stupid, but not that stupid, python is the best calculator ever.

bring it bitches.

Graduated.

Still don't know what I am doing.

Me, when I realize I just learned 1% of all programming languages.

When I just started my software engineering course in college, we had a group project every semester where we would use the skills learned during that semester to make a certain product or program.

For the semester in this story, we were tasked with making a reservation system for a campsite. Visitors would be able to select a free spot, and reserve it.

The spot reservation screen would be a map of the campsite, and visitors would click on the desired site on the map to select it. Sites were neatly laid out in a perfect grid.

My task in the group for this project was my favourite position: yelling at people for poor code quality. And boy did I get to yell.

Any semi competent programmer would probably come up with two simple loops to generate all the buttons (something like 144 buttons), one loop to fill a row, and then another to go down the rows until all were filled. Some other similar functionality in the program was solved this way.

However, my classmate that was responsible for this part of the code wasn't a big fan of concise programming. So instead, he wrote 144 functions aptly called `generateFirstButton()` all the way through `generateHundredFourtyFourthButton()`.

*what*

I called him out on his horribly smelly code, and his retort was "But it works, and now you don't have to think about complicated loop logic".

I rewrote the class and reduced it from ~1150 lines to about 20 lines.

He didn't pass the exam.

As for programming: (will do a cyber one later)

Don't *ALWAYS* only study/learn programming solely for learning it as this can be demotivating at times, find a cool project to do and learn while developing that!

This is how I learned programming in a fun way :)

*at work*

co-worker: what are u doing?

me: programming and learning

co-worker: but school has just started... u guys havent learnt anything yet

me: thats the great thing about programming, everything is already in the internet waiting to be read and learned. try it next time ;)

co-worker: learning out of school, no thanks

I’m new to programming. I first learned G-Code and M-Code for CNC machines and being a machinist got boring, so now I’m in School for computer science. But I swear, the amount of motherfuckers that act like they are the programming gods and they know everything there is to know just because they’ve been a programmer for so and so amount of years just grinds my gears. They act like some knowledge is important while other knowledge is useless, and generalize it and push that belief on everyone. But fail to realize that some people, such as myself, just love computers in every facet. I don’t give a damn how many years of programming experience you have and how many people you’ve taught. If you act like a stuck up know it all and walk around like your shit don’t stink, I wouldn’t work with you even if I had the same amount of experience as you.

University, first year. I went to my Java/OOP teacher's office to about the course (I had started programming C++ ~5 years ago).

I wanted to discuss the fact that some parts of the course seemed too theoretical for beginners in my opinion. Rookie mistake : do not criticize the cursus of an academic if you are in your first year, even when you are right. I learned it the hard way...

The teacher started to tell me that I was just a first-year student, I had no experience yada yada...

To that I replied "I'm doing C++ for 5 years. This is OOP so yeah I do know a little more than you think".

I will never forget his reply "LOL C++ is not Object-Oriented !"

I never went to his course after that. I learned a few years later that the teacher was a well-known a**hole along his peers and got fired by the University...

After 4 years of professional programming the most important thing that I learned is "user is stupid".
Once I modified old code that was summing salaries (I added extra column to the result), nothing else. My result was rejected because all salaries was empty. Period of data was from first day of the month from user selected date to user selected date. It turned out that user was selecting 27th day of the month (it was 27th then). I responded that salaries have full month period, and you'll have to choose end of the month... And then shitstorm began, that I messed up previous functionality. I tried to explain, but it wasn't working. It ends up with user selecting any date and I'm doing end-of-the-month in the background^^
It's my first rant, welcome to you all :)

One of my weirder(?) quirks now is to use '//' for things that aren't even programming related. Just to make random comments here and there. So, my little sister just learned some basic coding. She told me that now she finally understands why I kept adding random '// ' while texting her.

So like a year ago I decided that I was gonna learn programming. And the thing that popped into my head was HTML and CSS. So I browsed some websites where you could learn some HTML and stuff. But I never really got into it and eventually stopped and moved on. Now I just kind of got a sudden urge again to learn programming and build a website again. So I started browsing some sites and found a suitable one. Since I'd already kinda learned the basics it was all kind of just repetition. And now I've got a very basic site set up with Apache that I was thinking I'm gonna use as my homepage. And I also got my very first experience not understanding what the fuck is wrong and browsing stack overflow for an eternity. Turns out it was a simple missing semicolon. Welcome me to the dev world!

Had a laptop on which i learned programming. bought a new convertible for uni, so i passed my laptop to my younger sister.
-> time to move data from old to new device. thought i didn't have that much data, mostly installed programs, so i thought alright i'm fine.
sister doesn't know how to reset so i do it ...
halfway through the reset process i realize i forgot all my programs i had written, including many java, a c#, and some written android apps i was kinda proud of ... plus my neural network i had finally finished with much struggle😥
there goes my history *poof* when i got worse in school 'cause of programming ... smth in me died in that moment 😑

It was not until 20 that I had access to regular computing. In school I had to take up Finance as my Maths was weak. I couldn't take Sciences including computers and how could I , my childhood wasn't as fortunate as my peers.

When I entered college I got my brothers old gaming pc as we had a couple of work laptops at home. I was always the inquisitive one. I got interested in web development just because of curiosity while I was on my first job and I hated it. I used to write article and freelanced and ran a website for friends where I learned a lot by trial and error. I single handedly learned mySQL, PHP and basic web development.

The main job was a core night from 11pm -8 am . Drained me and my social life drowned. I lost my brother in an accident. Silver Lining: I quit my job.

I understood I was interested in computers like nothing else. I single handedly learned a programming language. After leaving the job I took up classes to learn from root level in a structured manner: Web design and Development.

Now though I am jobless and I am searching for my second job it is for something I love. :)

!rant

I put programming on a long hold a few months ago, but after I browse the playstore and randomly get recommended this app and install it I re-discovered my love for programming. I've been so motivated like I was pretty much never. I learned C#. I've completed my projects that sat around for way to long.
I'd like to just THANK YOU guys. You are an amazing community.

Lesson learned: never drink during programming

My last successful project was a small project I did together with my gf in javascript. She needed to make some algorithms for school for transfering
freight containers and picking them up. I made some visuals and buttons for her to press. And she added a file with algorithms based on the helper functions I created. such as: GetFirstEmptyPosition() or PlaceContainerAt(x, y)

She learned a bit of programming. And I learned a bit of javascript.

!rant
So, Rust again.
When I learned that Rust doesn’t support inheritance, only traits (interfaces), I was shocked at first.

Then I tried to remember when the last time was that I have used inheritance in the code that I write (not the code that I use).

And I could remember an instance some months ago. But I also remember that I was very unsatisfied with that design and refactored it to use composition instead. And it was much better.

One of Rust’s properties is that many good practices in other programming languages are enforced rules in Rust.
And in case of inheritance, it seems like Rust decided that composition over inheritance is such a good practice that it should be a rule.

I’m not 100% convinced that there never will be cases where inheritance is better. But I still like this radical idea of forcing the devs to do it "the right way" in the majority of (if not all) cases.

I think many devs will disagree.
What do you think?

So happy right now!

I just finished a project which I started today.
It is a java bytecode class/method/field renamer. You can rename those things inside a jar file. It has a nice dark-themed GUI and it works great :)

I'm just happy because I couldn't find something like this on the Internet and wanted it since I started learning programming. Also I am happy because I did it in 1 Day and learned so much about the Java Bytecode!

It's using ObjectWeb ASM btw.

...programming class at school. First of all, we have to fucking write that shit on paper. >.<

Then, my neighbor just copied my code, but Karma reks him, because the teacher asked him to explain why he used what he wrote. He couldn't explain anything. Just so you folks know why I'm ranting about my neighbor:

You were supposed to output this using a for loop (lets take 10 as an example):
"10 * 2 = 20
20 * 3 = 60
...
720 / 8 = 90
90 / 9 = 10"

He couldn't do it, even though we learned how to do it before and he said he understood it.

TIL Python doesn't really give a fuck about semicolons -.-

So after spending the past couple years almost exclusively using C# and Unity I decided to come back* to Python for no real reason except wanting a change of pace.

I almost ripped my hair out backspacing semicolons I kept putting in out of force of habit after having worked in C# for so long

Well guess what... I just learned (purely by accident)... Python couldn't care less. I feel internal conflict if that makes sense.

TBH now I'm randomly putting in semi-colons at the end of some statements just because I can and I want to abuse this freedom ^_^

Yeah yeah it's not very "pythonic" or pretty but screw that

* I started programming in Python back in high-school but switched over to C# + Unity after graduating and pursuing indie-gamedev.

Note: After some searching I realize you can use semicolons to have multiple statements on the same line but I never really needed to do that during my time with Python so I didn't even remember it was even a thing

So recently I needed to make a little Tic-tac-toe game with Node.JS for an university project. I previously learned Java and C# so Javascript as a non-compiled, script based language was something new for me.

Now during the programming process I reached the point where I needed to implement a function to change the player who's playing.

I was testing the game and... It seemed like the player was changed twice so it immediately switched back to the previous player.

Using a lot of console.log's I finally stumbled upon the error... (since Javascript or at least Visual Studio Code, I honestly don't know, doesn't have any kind of debugger or something).

Why the fuck does js allow to make allocations in if conditions?

I accidentally wrote one '=' instead of three '==='.

No error, no warning... Nothing.

Since then js and me are not friends anymore.

This happen to me once when I was a young kid walking home from school.

There were two other guys with me, older than me. They were talking to each other about programming languages. I have been programming from a very young age so I knew a lot about programming and I knew a few languages back then, but they were taking about Java, a language which I wasn't into yet back then, so I just listened for a while to what they had to say.

The first guy told the other, "You know I'm great at Java." The other guy responded "I can do anything in Java." Then I said as a joke "Oh, can you do hello world?". The guy said "Hello what? What do you mean?" The other guy said. "Is that a retro game?" I just laughed. Then I told them to go learn how to output text in Java.

A bit of current history about these guys:
The first now works in C# for a quiz test company, he never learned Java or languages other than C#. The second one owns and works at a scrapyard. They are both great guys, but they like to brag.

Need to rant. I am doing programming 2 at university with java and the assessment is to make a card game. The subject is shit and is basically going over loops, variables, conditionals ect which we learned in introduction to programming and programming 1.

This leaves little time for oop principles, design patterns inherentance and all other useful stuff.

I am dedicated to making a career in programming and want to do my assessment the correct oop way. Although the lecturer doesn't care and is instructing the class to do it procedurally and shit.

I could do the program really quickly the shit procedural way and still get full marks but I feel dirty as hell coding like a scrub. So I'm 60 hours in on this assessment and there are so many classes and even more because of unit testing (we don't have to unit test) and I am spending way too much time.

My code is beautiful, my classes are tiny and maintainable, easy to modify and I'm learning so much about how to code oop the correct way with the help of a mentor and someone I look up to. But god does it take forever to code this way. And soo many iterations and redesigns because I'm still learning.

It's almost done but now I have another programming assessment for another class I'll have to do the dirty way because of time restraints and other assessments.

Sorry for wall of text but this is stressing me out 😛

Today I had a problem with a JS framework. The only person who was available who could help me was the one I avoid, because he always knows everything better.
Well, after I asked if he had time for me, he sits next to me and I started to explain.
After looking around, he started blaming my backend code.
(I belong to the kind of dev that tries to write small and simple code. But I also often use the more complex features of the languages.) He suddenly started accusing everyday things in the backend like inheriting a class or using objects and basic data types together as parameters of a method (WTF???) Hell, all I could say at that moment was that I had a problem with this JS framework and not with the backend that worked well. He probably tried for over an hour to find the bug in the backend and just wouldn't listen, after that he gave up. I wonder what this bitch has learned over the years. Can it really be that he forgot the basics of a programming language? Or has the fool never worked with an inheritance before? I think he's an incapable piece of shit, he hasn't even patched my reported vulnerability in his project in the last half year, which allows to inject own code onto the server.
Because of such fucking morons I get a headache when I think about it. How can it be that he's got a higher degree and earns about 50% more. I should leave this company!

Next week I'm starting a new job and I kinda wanted to give you guys an insight into my dev career over the last four years. Hopefully it can give some people some insight into how a career can grow unexpectedly.

While I was finishing up my studies (AI) I decided to talk to one of these recruiters and see what kind of jobs I could get as soon as I would be done. The recruiter immediately found this job with a Java consultancy company that also had a training aspect on the side (four hours of training a week).

In this job I learned a lot about many things. I learned about Spring framework, clean code, cloud deployment, build pipelines, Microservices, message brokers and lots more.

As this was a consultancy company, I was placed at different companies. During my time here I worked on two different projects.
The first was a Microservices project about road traffic data. The company was a mess, and I learned a lot about company politics. I think I never saw anything I built really released in my 16 months there.

I also had to drive 200km every day for this job, which just killed me. And after far too long I was finally moved to the second company, which was much closer.

The second company was a fintech startup funded by a bank. Everything was so much better than the traffic company. There was a very structured release schedule, with a pretty okay scrum implementation. Every team had their own development environment on aws which worked amazingly. I had a lot of fun at this job, with many cool colleagues. And all the smart people around me taught me even more about everything related to working in software engineering.

I quit my job at the consultancy company, and with that at the fintech place, because I got an opportunity I couldn't refuse. My brother was working for Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wallstreet, and he said they needed a developer to build a learning platform. So I packed my bags and flew to LA.

The office was just a villa on the beach, next to Jordan's house. The company was quite small and there were actually no real developers. There was a guy who claimed to be the cto of the company, but he actually only knew how to do WordPress and no one had named him cto, which was very interesting.
So I sat down with Jordan and we talked about the platform he wanted to build. I explained how the things he wanted would eventually not be able with WordPress and we needed to really start building software and become a software development company. He agreed and I was set to designing a first iteration of the platform.
Before I knew it I was building the platform part by part, adding features everywhere, setting up analytics, setting up payment flows, monitoring, connecting to Salesforce, setting up build pipelines and setting up the whole aws environment. I had to do everything from frontend to the backest of backends. Luckily I could grow my team a tiny bit after a while, until we were with four. But the other three were still very junior, so I also got the task of training them next to developing.
Still I learned a lot and there's so much more to tell about my time at this company, but let's move forward a bit.

Eventually I had to go back to the Netherlands because of reasons. I still worked a bit for them from over here, but the fun of it was gone without my colleagues around me, so I quit last September.

I noticed I was all burned out, had worked far too much, so I decided to take a few months off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I even wondered whether I wanted to stay in programming.

Fast forward to last few weeks. I figured out I actually did want to work in software still, but now I would focus on getting the right working circumstances. No more driving 3 hours every day, no more working 12 hours every day. Just work close to home and find a company with the right values.
So I started sending out resumes and I gave one recruiter the chance to arrange some interviews too. I spoke to 7 companies in the span of one week. And they were all very interested. Eventually I narrowed it down to 2 companies and asked them for offers. And the company that actually had my preference offered me significantly more than I asked for, which settled the deal.

So tomorrow I'm officially signing with them, and starting next week I'll be developing in Kotlin, diving into functional programming and running our code in serverless environments. I'm very excited!

Tried to reply to @Fast-Nop who had replied to someone wondering if C would be a good first language.

IMHO C should have been put to sleep ages ago. A few years ago I downloaded the latest, greatest C Standard. For a language billed as small and simple (by many) it was over 800 pages long. Still there's a lot that's unspecified like order of evaluation of function arguments. Int etc is implementation dependent. And error handling, let's not go there. The macro assembler throws away all the semantics leaving behind a cryptic value. It's a complex language due to the innumerable interactions possible.

It's been called assembly language for the PDP-11 minicomputer. Recently learned that even the VAX-1 was built from SSI chips like the 4-bit 74181 ALU. The VAX.

Anyway I had several excellent books on programming style written by Henry Ledgard. He despaired of making C look readable. I commend his books which are so old that the code is UPPERCASE A lot of he wrote had to do with program design, naming things, writing good comments and that the visual shape of a program assists mental clarity.

PHP...
When I first learned to code - like everyone - I felt the need to try as many programming languages as possible. After the comforting syntax of myClass.MyProperty/myClass.MyFunction()/C#, the $ symbols everywhere made me want to vomit...
Fast forward 2 years later. I learned a bit and wanted to make a website backend. Checked my hosting - which was purely a frontend thing at the time - free PHP hosting or £15/month for ASP .NET hosting...
I begrudingly wrote my first .php file, hating my life.
But by the end of that night my relationship with PHP was already cemented.
And that's why I like PHP.

Hello !

I'm a fresh school dropout (against my will) without any diploma. I've learned programming from self teaching since three years; mostly doing web and apps development with golang, and c#.

I've already done some small projects, helped a lot of people with code, do some freelance and I'm now trying to build a SAAS.

I don't know what I'm supposed to do now, I'm completely lost for my future. What would you do if you were in this situation ?

Yesterday I almost ended my programming Carrier

Long story - I am enrolled in EC course which I cannot face for a single moment. Web development is something that had always excited me, and i wanted to make a room for myself here since childhood.

I cannot study what doesn't interest me. But that does not mean I hate learning. I have strong interest in learning things. Hence, I skipped two end-sem exam in the last semester. And utilized thar time to work on my project. I've been working on it since last 6 months. I learned more things in last one year than what I did in last 3 years at college.

My brother came to know I failed two exams in the last sem, yesterday. There were clouds flying over home for hours. What my family thinks is, I should get my degree. Whether I learn anything or not, but I should I get it. I must do graduation and what ever stuff I am working on can be done later. They don't understand the value of time and how fast things are changing.

I even got a client, who is willing to pay large amount for my platform. What my family thinks, is I am running for money, which is merely true.

What world we are living in. Parents and families don't want their children to get educated or well equipped with knowledge and values but want a printed degree in hand, which they think is enough to get a job.
The colony where I live, more than 80% graduates, that graduated in last 5 years with good numbers are unemployed.

I started to get interested in programming at the age of 13. I was started spending a lot time in our school library and read mostly technical books (beginner/hobbyist stuff) about electronics.
Some book was about Quick Basic (hence my username).
On Windoze 95 in a DOS mode IDE I started trying stuff out and soon I had my first tiny console game.
A bit later I started with HTML and CSS stuff, made a website about ongoing jokes in our class and some rants, later I got into VB6 (I hate VB nowadays!) and wrote for a personal school project a learning software (relatively simple one) to learn vocabulary for foreign languages.

At about 15 I started with C++ and later C# .NET, which I liked the most, and started on some new Windows.Forms stuff, created some small websites.

Now I'm working parttime as a professional developer (mostly web, but VR & .NET too) and studying EE at a university.

My parents had no experience with computers at all, so I learned everything myself an with the help of the allmighty internet (the black box with the red dot on top).

That's my story. ;)

Insert your rant about this below this line:
-----------------------------------------

Am I the only one who enjoys learning low languages like C/C++ and absolutely hate Java (seriously FUCK Java so much I hate using it)

Working with pointers and just having the compiler completely explode in your face because you forgot a semicolon or an index out of bounds maybe a bracket just disappeared and you are frustrated but then you fix it and voila it works like magic.

Maybe it's just a thing of mine because C++ was the first programming language I learned and I miss this feeling of hopelessness (I think I might have done BDSM fetishes) and it makes me feel nostalgic.

When I was first learning them all I thought about was how cool this stuff is.

!rant
Warning : This rant is long and is a rant asking for help and suggestions. If you will read and dont leave any comments, please go search other rants. Thanks.
-----------------------------------
Hi, fellow ranters. In our community, we have a tech class where teens (teens here mean 14yo -15yo) come to learn computer stuffs. Teens here are selected by a test and an interview. There are some teens who are f***ing awesome. One of them are proficient in scratch. (yeah, the orange cat) Another is awesome at PhotoShop, and the other loves windows xp. The teacher uses Microsoft Visual C++ IDE made in the 1990s. The kid sitting to my left made flappy bird with gamemaker. About 10 to 11 teens doesnt know what ctrl+alt+del does in windows and never did programming before... 3 among them always brings coke and oreos and eats super loudly. CRACK! And I bet no one knows about git.
Ok. Enough for the awesome teens. Now what we learn.
We learn C! Yes, C. We learned for, if else, switch and all those stuffs, then learned variables, which made other students who never did programming before be (―,.―).
Next class we will learn about functions in 3 hours. Then array and pointer in 3 hours. Thats it for c programming. Then we do some unnecessary stuffs and time for the finals.
We need to make a project with up to 4 teens as one team. Now I am asking you awesome ranters to suggest some projects for about 4 pros and 16 noobs can do. 10 hours are given in class and we can do in other times by ourselves in home. What should we do? I bet many of them will say to make ascii art in c which is dull and I have no thoughts of doing that.
Any thoughts will be appreciated.
Thank you for reading.
To see my skills, go to my profile page.
| Comments below
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Last completed (so not something which is still going on) project i have learned a lot was for "digital- and microcontroller technology" classes.
I designed a tower which fits on a pc fan. In this tower there is a tabletennis ball and on top of it is a infrared sensor. With a Potentiometer you can set the height at which the ball shall float.
As microcontroller i took an arduino uno. For visualization i used SerialComInstruments.
Learned lots of microcontroller programming, pid controls and how the fuck a serial port communication really works.

I don't know what to do with my life anymore, as a self taught web developer, I started like anybody doing HTML, CSS and js, and then I met PHP and WordPress.
why the fuck PHP is ugly ? and why WordPress is uglier ? I tried to learn how to build a simple plugin in WordPress but the hooks system make me want to kill my self, how the fuck PHP powers 80% of the web ? every time I write PHP I wish I was never born, the problem is that I can't change job because I am old and I live in a fucking country who is technologically primitive, they fucking know only PHP and JAVA, no Node, No Ruby, No Python, only fucking PHP.
I learned React, I learned Node but you know what I did this last year ? I raped a themeforest theme for about dozen plus websites, A SINGLE THEME FOR MORE THAN DOZEN CLIENTS, my boss does not care, only me who is not sleeping at night because a tried to customize a Prestashop theme and it gave me cramps in the stomach, I feel depressed and useless, I want to quite my job but I can't, I have mouths to feed, WHY THE FUCK DID I FELL IN LOVE WITH PROGRAMMING, I was happy fixing computers, what can I do if the only project that I have are WordPress and Prestashop?
how did you do to stay sane when working with wordpress and prestashop ? are you not human ?I can't take it anymore.
I need a new road map, fuck it I will focus only on JS and Node and fuck PHP.

I'm working part time as I'm a student and I always thought working in a company would be awesome as I learned programming all by myself and could actually do things now.
30% is updating, compiling
50% is using google to find out if I can even use 27 .net frameworks together and make it work on Android and iOS
15% is finding out what the error code is supposed to mean
And 5% is actually using a programming language.

I started with C#at the age of 12, it was way too complicated and I learned Lua for Computer craft instead. Next I learned Ruby for RPG Maker and finally Javascript for web Dev stuff.
Now comfortable enought with Javascript but put off by its quirks I learned Java for compiling faulty minecraft mods, but I only fully learned it in school.
At the same time I learned python and quite liked it for scripting, but ultimately it was not a good match for my projects.
Disapointed with Java I returned to C# and liked it quite a lot, but started learning C++. After touching my first Microcontroller I learned C and I've stuck with it as my favorite language.
Along the way I picked up Kotlin, in case I need to do some Java shit. Much better.
But how did I come to an understanding of programming. Well I got better after each time I got a layer deeper until I hit silicon.
I had tinkered with electronics since I was 15 so I just had to study some boolean mathematics in school and some vintage computers architecture and instruction sets and...
Then I finally understood how that shit I wrote in Lua way back when was actually executed by my hardware.

Allways dig deeper and you'll find enlightenment eventually.

Hi everyone, long time no see. Hope you're all doing fine! 💙

Here's an actual rant: I don't know if I chose the right university course, anymore.
I chose "Informatics", but there are so many subjects that aren't even related to Informatics, and still I have to do them because that's how it is. I just wanna do programming, because I like the creative aspect of it.
I'm getting sick of this to be honest... I'm at my second year, now, and I feel like maybe... I should've just studied programming on my own, and seek a job without going through university.
Though, that being said, I may just be temporarily having a bad time. I don't know, ok?

It seemed I did okay, in my first year, I completed 4 exams out of 7, but now I don't know anymore.
The exams for this semester's subjects are coming up in a couple months, and I haven't exactly learned much, y'know...? I couldn't follow most of what the professors said in the lessons, for whatever reason (some professors talk too quietly, some don't explain well, etc.).

What was your experience with university, if you ever went there? Did you find it helpful, or was it a waste of your time?

Thank you for reading. I hope my next post will be more joyful, sorry for being like this. Love you all! 💙

I have been a software engineer for about 14 years now, in the beginning, I thought to be smart meant writing methods that do everything and more. however as I matured in the industry, I learned. keep it simple. 1 method 1 responsibility. One should trail my code and never have to find themselves where they were before in the journey. a journey should have one purpose and not pivot (context disclaimer here) as it goes. good programming is simple programming, its a story not a case of multiple endings.

Working on big project during summer paid intership. A lot stuff I have learned there, not just programming, but also model design, team planning etc.

~ The Feelings ~

The feeling when someone thinks you can fix his laptop/phone/other electronic device because you know how to program.

The feeling when someone tells you that you can't program because you are bad at math, but you realize majority of the time that breaking down mathematical formulas into code requires no mathematical skills, in fact you learn it better that way.

The feeling when someone calls programming 'legos for autists' and you can't legally lock him up in your basement for few months.

The feeling when one of programming languages finally gets an update with a feature that existed in all other languages you didn't learn for few years now and they call it a big 'breakthrough'.

The feeling when someone learned basic programming and says he'll make a game, with his own engine and starts listing features he can't have any clue about.

..I'm done, for now :)

Hey guys, I've hit a major snag in my dev life.

My backend/frontend Java project has hit a wall as the material I was using from Udemy on advanced Java programming was boiling down to copy and paste programming without the learning. That doesn't really work for someone with 2 years programming experience but only a good 2 months of Java knowledge. I need to learn not just follow along what's written on a screen. Thankfully I learned to give in about 2 weeks in so I didn't waste a ton of time on it.

Would books be a better option? I self taught C++ mainly from books and preferred that over videos, but when I did C# videos were mostly better than books.

And...I guess I'll open the floodgates to recommendations for other stacks. I like Java and I'd like to keep using it but I know you don't want to get married to a way of doing things. My end goal is to make an E-commerce website that I can show off in interviews about a year from now.

Please be kind, I'm feeling a bit like crap right now. :(

For as long as I can remember I watched my dad at his computer doing work and programming, so I got interested in computers. I started using and mastering computer skills when I was 5 and helped people with their computer problems. I was hesitant to learn how to program because it looked hard, but I eventually have I'm and started to learn Java at 12. I started by making Bukkit plugins for Minecraft (1.7.10). I learned to program, because I knew that computers will one day help people, and I wanted to help people too.

I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.

TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.

I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.

I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.

So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.

I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.

So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.

I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.

Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.

The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).

So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.

If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.

I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.

Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.

I just learned today that GitHub is used for stuff other than programming

This is real rant, not one of these funny stories!

So, I spent 4 years to get a Computer Science degree, and did two specializations, 3.5 years more in Uni. I have 6 years of experience working in IT, from support to programming. I also speak 3 languages.

I'm from a South America country, and now I'm living in EU.

I'm 30 now and earning a little more than a MacDonald's cashier earns in the US. I have to live in a shared apartment like a fucking Uni student. I have nothing, no car, no house, no girlfriend. WTF!

IT is a fucking lie! Profession of the future my ass!

In Uni they said that finding a good job was easy, that companies would literally grab us by the neck to work for them. LIE!
I did found a low paying job though, where at least I could learn a lot more.
People were really satisfied with my work and I even received a proposal of one of our clients to work for them, but the offer wasn't good enough.

I tried entering some big companies as a Trainee, but it was so ridiculous, they said they were looking for an IT person, but they asked things related to economy and other stuff that had nothing to do with IT. I always failed in the group work/interview, it was so ridiculous, I remember one candidate saying her dream was to work for the company since she was a child, SERIOUSLY!

When the opportunity came, I moved to EU and now I'm working as a dev. But as I said, I'm not satisfied with it! In the US the yearly average software engineer salary is about 100K, I earn less than 1/4 of it. And don't come saying that US pays more because of the cost of life, here the cost of life is the same or even more expensive, a super small apartment/loft is at least 180K, a simple new car 18K and a Big Mac costs 4€.

In the US, the average salary of someone that just graduated from uni is 60K to 70K! LOL

In EU, it's super hard for someone to earn 100K, that's why many companies are creating offices here, good workforce, 2 to 3 times smaller salary!

IT also sucks because it's too volatile, there's new stuff all the time. Someone always has to come with a new language, new framework, new library, etc etc. And you have to keep learning new stuff all the time.
Also job openings always ask for experienced people, like you must have at least two years of experience with VUE.js, or something.

Do you remember the last time you went to a doctor for a checkup, did they use a new tool, or did something different during the checkup? Probably not, the medic don't have to learn new stuff all the time, he is still using a stethoscope, he is still placing a wooden stick in your mouth to check your throat...
But in IT, almost no one nowadays is going to create code using CoffeeScript, they instead will use TypeScript.

I read an article saying that an IT professional must study 20 hours a week to keep up with new trends. So I must work 40 hours and study another 20? LOL
It's not that I don't like learning new stuff, but this sucks, I want to maybe learn something different or have a hobby.

Today I regret going to uni, I feel it was a waste of time and money. They taught things like calculus and physics that I never had to use professionally, and even programming stuff like linked lists I never had to use.

If instead I had studied dentistry or studied to be a ophthalmologist I think I would be earning more, would be working more independently and wouldn't need to keep up learning new things so much.

Also to work in IT you don't need a diploma, I read an article by a dude that learned programming by his own, did some software for his portfolio and got a job at Google.
When I read these kinds of story I regret even more going to uni, It really feels I wasted my time.

For these reasons I can't recommend going to uni to study IT, if you want to go to uni go study something else!
If you want to study programming do it on your own, there's everything you must know online for free, create a portfolio, and look for a job or even try working for yourself!

Living the life I have now, there's just no incentive to keep going.
Should I keep learning new stuff so maybe I can get a better job that will still pay low, or quit and try creating something on my own?
Or even ditch IT all together and go back to uni? LOL NO!

Sometimes I would like to be those guys who learned programming without the helps of books and docs and just tinker until it works...

Objective-C is an awful programming language that nobody should ever use for anything.
Also you dont know how important unit tests are until you have to deliver an enterprise level application without them.
Biggest one Ive learned recently, managers will promise you the earth to keep you around as long as possible, and they will go back on every promise and call it a "change in priority"

Apparently my learning style is more rote memorization than learn-by-doing and I've been trying to learn by doing for years as a hobbyist.

It took a fucking *national quarantine* to get me to try something different and I'm blown away.

What would have taken me many months to learn I've all but grasped in detail in a matter of 20 hours of study over the course of a week.

Fuck you javascript. I WIN THIS ROUND. No more looking at the documentation for stupid shit like how to write a regex, or why everything is wrapped in fucking parenthesis (IIFE), or why
I keep getting a uncaught reference exception.

The important thing to realize about learning is NEVER be obstinate about it. Try many things, and don't get stuck in one way of learning unless you know thats what works for you.

This is why having study partners and mentors are important.

I think experience/practice and rote learning work in tandem. Rote learning lets you skip the much longer step of grasping the fundamentals, bootstrapping the process of learning the abstractions that are composed of those fundamentals.

I'm still adding cards to my anki flash card deck, but if anyone wants it I'm willing to share. It's mostly just 1. practice questions, 2. detail questions (what are the types? What does this regex do?, etc), 3. implication questions (heres this bit of code. It's XYZ, why did it fail? Correct it.), combining core details to memorize, and the application of the facts learned.

It helped me to learn and I'm apparently retarded, so if you're new to programming and want to learn JS, it can probably help you too. Unless you're more of a tard than me lol.

What was your first programming language which you learned?

- Played with and learned Scratch
- Learned some Python, made some weird little programs
- Learned C, using two good books: K&R C and Zed Shaw's "Learn C the Hard Way" (back when it was still in development and was free to read on the internet)
- Made LOTS of programs in C
- Came back to Python when I wanted to learn network programming
- Learned some Racket/Lisp, Bash scripting along the way
- Now I use all of the above, minus Scratch

One crucial lesson I learned while diving into programming:

Use various learning resources. Everyone explains things a little different.

You can understand stuff much easier.

Back in grammar school we started programming in TI-Basic on a TI89 Titanium as it was part of math class (calculus and geometry). I didn't really understand much because the teacher thought it was a great idea to start with recursively calculating GCD (and we were in a sort of "linguist profile", nobody had ever touched a line of code in their lives before). I still liked it though and by some coincidence I got an old Win95 compaq notebook to play with from a friend.

I started playing around with the CMD prompt and batch files and could apply some of the things I had learned on the TI, like GOTO or If statements. I still didn't know what I was doing of course, and so it happened that I used the > file pipe when trying to compare two values. Suddenly there was a file with some code fragments and I started to get what I had done. I put the file pipe into an endless GOTO loop and was amused how those few lines filled up the whole desktop with nonsense files. I went on to refine this a little so I could control it with another file that acted as a kill switch when present. Over the next weeks I played some more with it and made it write out and start another batch file that would check whether the original script was still there and recreate it if not.

That notebook was so large and heavy I could not bring it to school, so I wrote all code by hand on paper and typed it in when I got home, that way I could still code in class when I was bored and no one would notice.

So my first ever "program" that I wrote myself was some lousy malware.

I hate my coworker. I'm currently working in IT, but both my former full-time programming and my IT work has taught me how to dig for things and find them. He has learned this, and is CONSTANTLY bringing me things that have NOTHING to do with my job because he's too fricking LAZY to do it himself.

"Hey, there's a credit memo on this Amazon statement. I'd like to know what it was for, thanks."

SO LOG ONTO AMAZON AND LOOK FOR IT WITH YOUR OWN TWO EYEBALLS. I've got my own work to do without doing your AP detective work for you. THAT'S PART OF YOUR JOB.

But unfortunately I REALLY hate conflict and so I just do it for him, seething the whole time and knowing I've just reinforced the behavior.

EDIT: Before anyone says it, no it is not because he's stuck. If someone is at the end of their rope I'm glad to help them. But I've taken to asking him "so what have you tried?" And every single time he says "nothing." It's gotten to the point he'll literally say, "Hey can you do this for me? I haven't looked at it at all or tried anything." But he just doesn't catch on.

Oh,I have learned a lot, I would not say from programming but from the career as a whole

Never get peer pressured
Always show empathy
If in a leading position, taking care of people is your top priority
Overconfidence will destroy a lot of good work
People by definition will always remember your mistakes
Never get over involved in the company you are working for, it's just a job
Your health is more than important
Nobody knows everything
Always be humble
There is a lot of bullshitters out there
Success is relative
Competition is high and there is always someone with better skill set, so you will suffer if you don't accept that

I want to program everyday for a whole year because I want to use the programming knowledge that I learned and use it in ways that will make me think outside the box. Hopefully, I can grab freelance work as a Web Developer, which has been in high demand these past few years.

I'll be documenting the process on my YouTube channel, which I'll share when I publish the first video.

I will NOT procrastinate... I WILL DO THIS!!

13 weeks of internship turned into 2 github folders in a master repository for the next intern to pick up on wow I feel a little insignificant but I also know that I'm definitely more prepared for my next programming adventure with the skills I learned from this experience

Is the way people solve problems intrinsic to the native language they learned growing up? Can the shape of our thoughts be optimal for solving certain kinds of problems? Like sentence structure, grammar, etc.

If the pattern of thoughts a language promotes can help us solve problems. Then is there a spoken language that can help promote solving computer science problems?

I know I have to work to think differently to program in different styles of programming. I wonder if we can learn from different spoken languages patterns of logic that are applicable to engineering.

Mathematics, while not a spoken language, has helped me re-frame things in programming. I think programming has also helped in other areas. Like using binary search to find the end of a pipe in the ground.

!rant (all ranters should read)

Today I was at university, doing some C low-level stuff. Then I looked my Professor.

Holy fucking shit, this man (and obviously the others) learned programming without google, stackoverflow, youtube and online doc/forum/examples/explanation.
I also believe that some of them could not compile and run at home their software.

MASSIVE RESPECT FOR YOU ALL !

I've seriously learned more about programming in 2 months at my internship then I did in 2 years on my own

So glad my high school gave me this opportunity. But currently I'm bored because I can't start the next step of my project yet. -_- So bored

What I'm doing now, writing a JS library for a simple kitchen timer (like, something that can be wound up, is ticking, can be paused, etc). Here's a list of neat stuff I've learned:

Polyfilling as a lib author (I decided against it).
Packaging the lib (using Rollup, ES6 modules are totes cool).
Using flow to add static typing in strategic places (started appreciating types in JS since reading up on functional programming).
Modelling state and transitions using an explicit state machine. (Fucking finally. There's usually an implicit state machine somewhere, only spread out all over the app...)
Using mostly side-effect free methods, being very explicit about when and why things are mutated).
Test-first/TDD (ish) using Jest and the awesome Wallabyjs.
Freeing up mental capacity by letting Prettier format my code for me (it was hard to let go but totally worth it).
Started using git.

Did all work on Ubuntu after pretty much a lifetime of Windows (initially to separate work from gaming) and finally swapped MS Visual Studio for Atom.

When it's finished I'm going to publish it on GitHub, which will also be a first for me. Might try out some CI platform while I'm at it.

tl;dr: wrote some js, felt good

I’m one of those who learned in adulthood. I had lost track of my life and tried to find something to grasp on to. I found inspiration from two friends I have. One who’s been a very gifted software engineer since his early years, and the other who one day unexpectedly turned to university and computer science and started a good work life right away after the studies. After failing miserably at my previous attempt at university I decided to jump ship and give CS a try. It was the best decision of my life. To my surprise programming very much matched many of my personality traits and how I think and make desicions in games and everyday life. After my first few lectures It all came very intuitively to me. Then thruout most of my education (and this is one of my less ”grown up” thoughts) it felt as though I could as well have been a student at Hogwarts and my professors were witches and wizards. Anything was possible and each day we learned new tricks to create the unimaginable. That aside, I now work as a software engineer, but I feel as though the list of things left to learn is endless. I don’t think I’ll ever stop learning.

1) Never be afraid to ask questions.

There are so many instances of situations where assumptions have been made that shouldn’t have been made, resulting in an oversight that could have been rectified earlier in a process and wasn’t.

Just because no one’s asking a question doesn’t mean you’re the only person who has it.

That being said, it’s really important to figure out how to ask questions. Provide enough context so that the audience for your question understands what you’re really asking. If you’re trying to troubleshoot a problem, list out the steps you’ve already tested and what those outcomes were.

2) When you’ve learned something, try to write about it. Try to break it down as though you were explaining it to a child. It’s through breaking down a concept into its most simple terms that you really know that you understand it.

3) Don’t feel like you have to code *all of the time*. Just because this is what you’re doing for a living doesn’t mean that you have to make it your life. Burnout is real, and it happens a lot faster if it’s all you do.

4) Find hobbies outside of tech!

5) Network. There are a number of great communities. I volunteer for and am a member of Virtual Coffee, and can vouch for that community being particularly friendly and approachable.

6) Don’t let a company pay you less than industry standard and convince you that they’re doing you the favor of employing you.

7) Negotiate salary. Always.

8) If you’re a career transitioner, don’t be afraid to talk about your previous work and how it gave you experience that you can use in programming. There’s a whole lot of jobs that require time management, multi-tasking, critical thinking, etc. Those skills are relevant no matter where you got them.

9) If it takes a while for you to get a gig, it’s not necessarily a reflection on you or your abilities.

10) Despite what some people would say, coding’s not for everyone. Don’t feel like you have to continue down a road just because you started walking down it. Life’s not a straight path.

This basically is me rambling all my thoughts that have been clouding my mind.

Learning other programming languages after learning the first is harder than I expected. I learned python first but that's making learning others (which I know arent similar but ) C, ES6, PHP, etc. I need to figure out what makes each one special and get a proper path instead of learning them all the same way. Which is easier for the web dev languages but fuck man I just need a good path for them and I'm good. Like learn this this this this that and that and I've got a basic understanding of the language I dont need to stress and I can casually build my knowledge from here now that I understand all this. Cause I love programming and I want to be the best I can be and just get to the level I am with python. And at some point I have to learn about basic electronics and learning how to program Arduinos with C so I can do stuff with that because I really really REALLY want to.

It doesnt stop there. I want to learn another language and no I'm not talkin bout programming anymore I mean I wanna learn Japanese and German (but japanese primarily) but it doesnt help that I'm always either in school, studying, programming, or playing games. I just cant find time to practice Hiragana&Katakana (two basic writing systems in japan) and it doesnt help that I'm a lazy procrastinating piece of shit that doesnt have or can keep a proper schedule and hell I barely can English and Its my native tongue. Ugh. Itd be better if I had a native speaker to help me tbh.

And finally I want to learn basic pixel animating I have dreamed as a kid to do some kind of animation and programming and I want to do both for games I want to program for fun but it doesnt help that I cant draw sprites or anything for shit. I cant get it and I just am fucked but I'm going to ask some people I know and a few subreddits for advice/help/resources with that

Welp that was the Bubbles Power Hour none of you probably are keen followers of mine and if I had any I'd be shocked and honored but thanks for reading anyways and any advice on anything is always appreciated!

This is a sad story of bad recruitment in my school.

One day I had my computer class in school and my teacher was on leave so the substitution department sent another teacher to our class.

I have 3 computer teachers in my institution, let us assume their names for this rant as A, B and C.

A - The most learned teacher who has a lot of experience and also writes books. This teacher is the head of the department and wants students to explore coding.

B - A teacher who sticks to books and writes books on Excel and Powerpoint for small children.

C - The youngest teacher who has almost no experience at all.

What happened was that during the substitution, teacher C was sitting and doing her own work. I thought she might know java and other fundamentals of computers. One of my friends asked her about some bug in his program. She went to his seat and said that teacher A would come and help you out. To this, the student said ok.

I thought that the teacher had something fishy going on.

A few months later teacher B and A were talking about some coding competition and I was alone in the lab cause I am the only one in 11th with computer science.

The problem here was that C came to the room and quietly asked what is an object and class in java. I was shocked! I mean how could that happen, she is supposed to know everything in the comp sci syllabus. This was a disaster, teacher A was explaining to her about classes and objects. It was clear to me that she didn't know anything about programming in Java.

This is the fault of our school.

My school wants a good rank in the lists and for that they cut down the budget of teachers and remove old, experienced teachers for cheap, newer teachers.

This was shocking as a person who doesn't know much about something can't answer the doubts of children, this is a wrong way of teaching.

Hope you have a good day :)

A couple nights ago I was thinking how can absurdly incompetent programmers exist out there (based on stories I read here), and I think I know the reason. They just don't like doing it, to them it's just a job. They get into the building, work and go home. They learned programming in college but probably never wrote anything for fun. Because of that they don't dedicate themselves to learning new tech, don't try to improve and be good at the job, all they want is the money to be able to survive and that's it. Since they don't have the curiosity to drive them forward, they just don't and keep writing shitty code.

I'm not saying you need to have a bazillion side-projects, work an 8h shift and then go home and spend 3h on personal projects, or that you have to breathe programming and tech. All I'm saying is that, to be competent and good (this probably applies to most jobs) you have to like what you do and have at least some interest in it.

When I was young I'd play games and around age 11 received an Xbox for my bday. Hated the case, so I painted the case. Since I had it open looked into getting a replacement fan.Thats when everything changed. I discovered the modding scene and without having any computer background/literacy got to studying.

The program that caught my eye ran on Linux. *shrugs thinking how hard can it be? * Read about Linux and discover dual booting. To do that I needed to resize windows partition. Learn more about partitions and get to it. Finally prepped... Backup in case of the worst, resized windows partition, working Ubuntu bootable USB, and printed install tutorial. Check, check, and check. Install was good. Sort of.

While Ubuntu worked, the broadcam wireless chipset driver did not. Fast forward a week and I feel that i had mastered the terminal basics. And WiFi worked! Go download the aforementioned program and FTP into the Xbox and BOOM... It doesn't work. More days and hours spent researching. In the end it all chalked up to not setting a static IP address on Xbox.

After all was said and done I had a bitchin Xbox. I think the only thing I didn't put on it was some gold spinning rims.

Sad part about that Xbox is that I never used it after. Instead I just kept messing around with Linux and learning more about computers. Taught myself HTML/CSS. Learned more about shell scripting. Then Windows cmd basics. Tried programming languages but felt a little overwhelmed. Only messed with <10 lines of code to tweak existing programs.

Now I'm learning C# and loving it. Planning on C++ or Java next!

Little brother wants learn programming and asked me if I could help him learn it.
"Sure, I'll show you how I learned it."

Gave him a book for starters to go through it. To have a slightly better time, I'll read his code and recommend some ways to go.

In my opinion it's important to learn to learn by yourself and learn to help yourself. Therefore I think this is kinda a good way to start with a bit of supervision from me.

What do u think of it, or how would you have done it?

I mean sure I could be some kind of teacher, but with a fulltime job + uni I don't really have time for that.

My "dev specialty" when I first started was Flash and ActionScript. I just wanted to make funny games and shitpost animations on Newgrounds.

Eventually I got steered into building basic websites. Those were the Dreamweaver MX days. JavaScript + jQuery were all the rage.

Then I got a job building SharePoint modules, got exposed to legitimate programming languages like C# and learned more about enterprise software architecture, design patterns, yadda yadda. I started hanging out more with the front-end guys, who taught me SASS and SMACSS and all that jazz.

Eventual jobs kept leaning me towards front-end, so I guess that's the hole I find myself in lately. Sometimes I get a sprinkle of devops, some infrastructure stuff, maybe a little solution design here and there.

Now I maintain shitpost enterprise applications built by other devs who like spaghetti and meatballs. At least I put in funny ASCII art for strings in my unit tests.

I had very small experience on programming and applied for a dev Job kind of accidently.
But having good mathematical Background I convinced the Interviewer to give me the chance of learning during an internship. So I started a console Tool for special testing purpose with good success.
After the internship they asked me if I'm willing to lern Javascript and HTML. Though I had a lot of fun there, the answer was easy 😏
Now I'm a senior there having a team of 4-5 devs
And I still enjoy coding a lot 😎
So basically I learned coding during work

A few years ago I worked at company specialized in Magento(eCommerce) and Magento was changing their licensing model. At the time they had 3 Versions. Community(free), Pro and Enterprise.

They decided to ditch Pro and either make all migrate to Enterprise(with a discount) or go community which wasn’t really compatible. So some shops were in need of a more or less complete rewrite.

My hdd crashed literally the day before but hey no big deal everything is 99% done and on staging. So I had a Trainee at that Time and thought the last few crappy things could be done in pair programming so he can learn a few things.

But fuck him! That motherfucker! He managed to WIPE the staging server and no that was at a time without gut and no SVN. That dipshit just deleted 2 months of work because he thought it was a good idea to SYNC his empty project to the staging system.

Oh god I nearly stabbed him. He did that shit out of his own mind even though I told him a dozen times what would happen... we had to do the whole thing again with me sitting next to him watching every stroke he made.

Guess he learned something while inward silently raging the next weeks.

When I was a child I was allowed to use my dad's PC (my parents are divorced) (~1995-6, 3-4 yrs) - back then I played blockout and space Invaders on that windows 2.0 machine. My mum later got a win 3.1 box and I often played around in paint - so did I on my dad's new windows 95 pc. Back then I wasn't able to read (which usually isn't uncommon for a 4-5 yr old) but I was so fed up with those constant "do you want to save this thing dialogs" that I started to learn reading with the help of my parents. (Thanks to that I was able to play Monkey Island 2 :D )

Fast forward to the first years of school: we had two PC's in the classroom and I somehow fixed basic errors so my teacher signed.l me up for the computer course in the second year - usually only students in the third and fourth year may attend this course. I was so thrilled and that was the time where I learned basic DOS stuff and how to build a PC. Again fast forward some years to the 6th year - again another teacher saw my interest in it and asked me if I'd be interested in the basic programming course where I then learned basics in HTML, CSS and JS but that was not enough for me and so I did some research and learned php. In high school, my major was science and IT and in the last year, my IT teachers sat in the IT class and I held the courses as my knowledge was greater than theirs. And yep, that's pretty much how I started coding

My first rant. Woohoo!

Honestly I do the whole shebang ussualy depending on what the needs are from network to servers to coding because for some reason nobody has any technical experience where I work.
I just started app development for a gamedev startup and I am in sheer awe of the amount of transpiling/compiling etc that needs to be done for an multiplatform app for iOS and android with js(x)/typescript, html, css.

I remember when I could just write some spaghetti code to make it working by following a couple of tutorials. Then refractoring and testing it for a couple of hours and be done with it. push it into production.

Now I am lost having to learn OOP, functional programming, reactjs, react native, express, webpack, mongodb, babel, and the list goes on and on...
Why not just make a new backend that does all of that in another language which supports all of that.

I have no formal education in programming/coding and the last time I learned JS it was just some if else, switches and simple dom manipulation.

I just want to get to coding a freakin' game but I have to learn JSX for the front and typescript on the backend.

I am this close to going back to ye ol' lamp stack and quitting this job. 😥

I’m stressing out man. I can look at let’s just say a sorting algorithm for now. I can look at that insertion sort and I can understand what’s happening, but if you were to tell me I was supposed to be able to write that just based off a description I couldn’t. I need to be able to design and understand algorithms but I don’t know where or how to start. There was some course I was gonna try and see what that does. I put aside JS completely to focus on C# but I’m just stressing out over here. I learned the basics of C# although I feel like I’m learning it wrong but I’m moving on to SQLite and it’s my first Database experience and it’s confusing me and I also don’t know how I’m going to be able to use it for my future applications yet I’m just expecting too much out of me idk I love programming but sometimes it’s a cruel mistress

While in Mec engineering university program I was in a robocup team (small robots playing soccer against an other team of robots using AI).

I designed the mechanical structure of the robots. After 2 years of development (while all those years our goal was to participate in the upcoming international tournament) we realized the software part of the project was mismanaged and really far behind. I couldn't accept that and learned how to code over night. Couldn't let the project I put so much time in die because of someone else.

With the help of others that came from other backgrounds than software, we made it the to tournament and the following two others after this one.

Now my job involves programming more than standard mec engineering. It also pushed me to do a masters in robotics in which I developed my coding skills even more.

!!!rant

Most exited I've been about some code? Probably for some random "build a twitter clone with Rails" tutorial I found online.

I've been working on my CS degree for a while (theoretical CS) but I really wanted to mess with something a bit more practical. I had almost none web dev experience, since I've been programming mostly OS-related stuff till then (C). I started looking around, trying to find a stack that's easy to learn since my time was limited- I still had to finish with my degree.

I played around with many languages and frameworks for a week or two. Decided to go with Ruby/Rails and built a small twitter clone blindly following a tutorial I found online and WAS I FUCKING EXITED for my small but handmade twitter clone had come to life. Coming from a C background, Ruby was weird and felt like a toy language but I fell in love.

My excitement didn't fade. I bought some books, studied hard for about a month, learned Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, SQL (w/ pg) and some HTML/CSS. Only playing with todo apps wasn't fun. I had a project idea I believed might be somewhat successful so I started working on it.

The next few months were spent studying and working on my project. It was hard. I had no experience on any web dev technology so I had learn so many new things all at once. Picked up React, ditched it and rewrote the front end with Vue. Read about TDD, worked with PostgreSQL, Redis and a dozen third party APIs, bought a vps and deployed everything from scratch. Played it with node and some machine learning with python.

Long story short, one year and about 30 books later, my project is up and running, has about 4k active monthly users, is making a profit and is steadily growing. If everything goes well, next week I'll close a deal with a pretty big client and I CANT BE FKING HAPPIER AND MORE EXCITED :D Towards the end of the month I'll also be interviewed for a web dev position.

That stupid twitter clone tutorial made me excited enough to start messing with web technologies. Thank you stupid twitter clone tutorial, a part of my heart will be yours forever.

Oh shit it's a !rant, if you don't like !rants then scroll past this please.

When out of all my dumb classmates there's actually one that never learned much about programming before going to my school, got interested and is right now developing a library of CLI games... Of course I help him if he has any questions, and I will probably review his code after he's done.

Mine was not CS but software engineering. I had been programming for 5 years, and I think anything before my degree was just so bad. No patterns or anything. It was really good in the way that I learned how to do things well, not exactly learning about the technologies. I also have an internship that I must do for at least 3 months before getting the degree which also helps.

Just finish my last Programming 1 class for the semester! I lost count of the amount of times I learned something throughout the course that blew my mind. I’m enjoying learning how to program way too much. On to programming 2!

TL;DR I fucked up my life with a D in APUSH

Alright so I'm a sophomore in high school and I really really like programming. Like really. Maybe a little too much.

Cuz I spend all my time on it and while that's gotten me a 102% in AP Computer Science, my other classes aren't looking so good.

Especially History.

Now I'm in all the AP classes I could take, besides English cuz I hate that shit. And I learned something new this year: I also hate AP US History

And with how it all turned out, I failed my second quarter of APUSH. Fuck. Luckily I had a B first quarter so I ended up with a D. Still not great.

Still got like a 3.9 GPA but I think that's weighted.

Anyhow, how bad did I fuck up and how can I overcome my strange addiction? Thanks for listening, if anyone did

I learned C with a K&R copy a friend gave me years ago. Now at University we in CompSci get taught in Python the first year and Java next while the engineers start with C and (I'm guessing) move on to assembly later on.

This friend comes to me all worried because he has to submit the next day a working Reversi game for the console written in C. Turns out the game was divided among two labs and he failed to submit the first one.

The guy is smart but once a week or so, when we met to smoke a joint and relax with some other friends, he was always talking about how he would prefer something like law but that would be bad business back in Egypt.

Back to the game, I get completely into it. First hour checking all the instructions he was given, then reviewing the code he wrote and copied from Internet. We decide start from scratch since he doesn't really get what the code he copied do. It took us 10 hours only stopping to eat but we get all the specifications of both labs perfectly.

A week after that he comes to me: "my TA said your code is the ugliest shit he's ever seen but he gave me a perfect score because it passed all the tests". I'm getting better (the courses I'm taking help me a lot) but what really made me happy is that he solved the next lab by himself (Reversi wasn't the first time I helped him, only the first time he was absolutely lost). Now he actually gets excited about coding and even felt confident for his programming final.

No more talking about being a lawyer after those 10 hours, totally worth it.

My elementary IT teacher whom I owe all my enthusiasm to introduced me to MIT Scratch, and I found the concept of chaining dumb operations to accomplish tasks fascinating. Later I learned c++ which I hated vehemently for a couple months until it clicked. After that I studied C#, which I managed to use for over a year before realising what copy by reference actually means. With that realization my understanding of programming languages was essentially complete and since then I have only learned techniques and tricks and languages that add few new ideas, and I don't expect anything to fundamentally change my understanding of programming. All of that was 5 years ago BTW.

First job was as a student, but paid, which was great! Started with some training which taught me more about programming in 7 weeks than I'd learned in 4 years at school/college. Started with some proprietary systems, then moved on to proper web dev/browser based apps using tech you're all far too young to remember. I was instantly at home. So became my career (with lots of full stack experience picked up along the way).

About 3 months in, my team lead said to me (the n00b student) "I'd ask and trust you to do things now that I wouldn't ask people who've worked here for years to do." Meant the world to me... (thanks DH!)

At the end of my time as a student I was invited straight back full time.

at the very beginning of League of Legends (I was freshman in high school) my friend and I wanted to create a team. we needed a website for it and I learned the basics. I stop playing but I never stop programming

A friend suggested that I'd start learning a scriptable language like Ruby, Python or JavaScript instead of beginning with HTML and CSS, until I feel comfortable with programming.
I want to be a web developer and Ive learned some HTML.
So, any opinions?

If you're subscribed to me only because of my jokes, feel free to ignore this rant. You won't miss anything.

If not, bear with me.

I was wrong about almost everything I can remember. Preaching so-called “conceptual thinking”, I invented a fantasy world of random anecdotes, which turned into a completely false worldview that shaped my reality. I bashed magical thinking, yet succumbed to it. What I believed to be true was just as magical, wrapped into what sounded like science. In the Dunning-Krueger scheme, I was right there on Peak Stupid.

Random hear-say, stupid concepts I invented, random “knowledge” I picked from YouTube videos, all that was rotting inside my head, one anecdote contradicting another. Ultimately, I think this was the reason of my constant anxiety and pointless, never-ending thought process in background.

If you learned anything factual from me and didn't fact-check it, please forget that immediately. The list includes but is not limited to everything on brain structure, everything on philosophy, almost everything on engineering and architecture, almost everything on systems theory and programming meta stuff (declarative, imperative, etc.)

I admit bashing unit tests. The only reason was me disliking writing them in uni. I wrote like three test cases, disliked it, and the rest was history. Everything else was a rationalization on top. If I was right about something, I was just lucky.

I'm not a CSS prodigy. I know stuff that earns me money and impresses my colleagues, but my knowledge is just one step above basics, in one thousand steps ladder.

I started fully exploring different aspects of tech in a middle school technology class where the teacher gave me a good grade as long as I did something that could be useful or interesting. I learned how to design webpages by playing with inspect element, and then decided to make my own with Notepad. One of my friends showed me how to use Sublime Text, and I found that I loved programming. Other things I did in there included using two desktops with NIC's wired directly to each other with an old version of Synergy and a VNC server, and at one point, I built a server node out of old dell Optiplex desktops the school had piled in a storage room.

Last year in high school, I took a class on VB.net and made some money afterwards by freelance refreshing legacy spaghetti, and got burned pretty badly by a person offering $25,000 for a major POS to backend CMS integration rewrite. The person told me that I had finished second, and that another dev had gotten the reward, but that he liked my code. A few days later, I was notified through a *cough*very convoluted*cough* system of mine by a trigger that ran once during startup in a production environment and reported the version number as well as a few other bits, and I was able to see that *cough*someone*cough* had been using my code. I stopped programming for at least six months straight because I didn't want to go back.

This year in high school, I'm taking the engineering class I didn't get into last year, and I realized that Autodesk Inventor supports VBA. I got back into programming with a lot of copy-paste and click-once "installers" to get my modelling assignments done faster than my classmates. Last week, one of my friends asked me to help him fix his VB program, which I did, and now I'm hooked again.

I've always been an engineer at heart, but now I'm conflicted with going into I.T., mechanical or robotical engineering, or being a software developer.

A little long, but that's how I got to where I am now. (I still detest those who take advantage of defenseless programmers. There's a special place for them.)

Hi im Nika call me Phazor , i got into programming when i heard on discord about html, then i learned html, css, still working on JS (Hard), im only 27 percent and i skipped the functions because the string interolocation / perameters were too confuseing, also after i finish js (might not) , im going to see if i can create a Tampermonkey user script for a game! =D and probably use repl.it to see what projects i can create with JavaScript

I learned coding the best way: While getting paid. I was an Excel junkie (still consider myself as one) and a colleague taught me PHP. This gave me the skills to apply for real programming jobs. Eventually I was hired at a company as a PHP developer who would need to be flexible enough to transition into a C# developer within the next 6 months. It wasn't easy, but after about 8 months and a 1-week course later I was programming in C# .NET with grace. Not looking back at PHP now at all. Naturally, today I can apply for a whole bunch of different jobs that I definitely could not three years ago.

I have the dearth of good programmers to thank for this of course and I am grateful every moment when I understand how lucky I've been.

So some of @ewpratten's rants just inspired me to tell my story of a somewhat ignorant teacher.

So we had an english class, it was abou Nelson Mandela or something, but I was sitting and learning about apache2(well I first learned about ncurses in python but since there was a command for restarting the apache server it got me curious, as usual). When she said something along the lines of(translated from.my language): "Then you read the text about Nelson Mandela, but other people are programming!". I was about to say that I was actually not programming, but setting up an apache server, but that would have been a dick move since she at least didn't accuse me for hacking.

I didnt. Programming learned how to handle me.

After playing et and wow a few year it all started when I hosted my own ts2 server with npo license. Rented a server for 90 bucks as a highschool student (13) with no job. (Who the fuck rented to me? I had my own bank account and lied about my age. Had a credit card at 14 but that's another story)

*Shit is expensive*

How does one get some value out of a server? Oh right, let's host Webspace and ftp accounts.

That got me into server administration and bash.

After dropping wow in bc i started playing on private servers.

*Shit is buggy*

How do you fix wow server? Let's learn c++ and push patches to arcemu. Why is this part crashing on this one server? Let's look at the binary. Wtf is this? Oh assembler?!? Ok let's try to read this. Ok I get it now. Let's fix the code.

Ok let's host my own wow private server. We need a website for account creation.
Let's learn php. Wait php is easy compared to mastering c++? I need an app for my first smartphone (iPhone 3g) to manage the server on the go. Let's learn how to do that. Why is this so easy? Switching to Android: wait java is even easier?

And that's how I learned that if you start with the hard part and grasp the concept, everything more abstract is significantly easier. If you start to read code to learn any language it's easier then following books (for me at least). If you get an error, track it down, you might learn amazing things in the way.

And if you want to get into reverse engineering, start by being passionate for the thing you want the reverse. It will be hard before it gets easier and you will need all the willpower you can muster not the just stop.

Programming for me is not a job but my passion. It's like I'm on vacation every day of the year (expect meetings, fuck meetings)

I have always been interested in computers. when I was in second grade, I decided I was no good at electronic circuits, and decided I wanted to program instead. My dad told be to check out free basic, and I immediately downloaded FBIDE, and followed tutorial videos on YouTube. once I finished the videos, I started to write mad libs programs. I made various types of calculators, etc. and loved it, so later I learned a bit of VB. I messed with that a bit, but didn't like it too much, and started web developing. The moment I saw some JS code, it was like an instinctive second language to me. I learned js and started making some ugly, but cool interactive web pages. When computercraft came out for minecraft, I learned lua and got a deeper understanding of programming. Now, I am using node to build a personal-use IoT server and currently making a drone flight program using a raspberry pi

So... Here we go again.
For the ones who doesn't know I'm a cnc worker / future .nc programmer ...
Today because my machine broke I finaly whent to the (cam) programmers den to learn, even was lucky because my usual programmer was starting a new piece from scratch...
But my fuking boss must really not like me... I'm the most promising programmer between the noobs but everyone else is already programming (talking about the ones that learned in the last months)
Today because I was learning, got fucked again, was expelled and ordered to do the work of a rookie while he (who has half of my company time) would program the work for me...

So... I always do overtime because others don't (and someone /me must stay till the last coworker lives)
Cant learn how to program... Because shit. while others are taking time from the old ones, while I can learn only by watching...
Have a burn out (it's getting worst) because of the time I only slept 3 /4 hours to do overtime while I was finishing my course...
Oh and flunked two times because I had to chose between overwork or getting fired (my boss didn't want me to finish the course, don't know why)

Didn't make a complaint because I would get lots of people fired (basicly there are legal and security violations behing committed, if I made a complaint most of the tools we use, chains, magnets to lift cargo and such would have to be thrown away... Plus lots of other tools that don't obay regulation... And there would be a heavy fine for every worker that does overtime... That means that half the staff would have to be fired because the company would stop for months)

So... I'm stuck... Must wait till I burn out, fire myself or call the authorities and fuck such a good company...
Only because two bosses have problems with me... (my dad works in the company and there is lots of envy towards him, probably because he came after and got a place they would never get ...)

So, there was an Internship and Recruitment training seminar held in my college yesterday, by a firm that's very well known apparently. Some wonderful new things that we learned:

*There are 4 types of loops, not 2. (Okay, maybe on a technicality, but still not conventionally)

*You aren't asked to write code when interviewing for a programming job. (Well, what?)

*A rolling stone has no mass. (Probably the worst mutated proverb I've ever heard)

I'm not going to sign up for this program.