One of the many things my non-programmer friends needs to learn.

One of many things my non-programmer friends needs to learn!

One of the many things my non-programmer friends needs to learn!

Among non-programmer friends:

Me: *opens up a terminal window*
Friends: "Dude, are you HACKING?"

One of the many things my non-programmer friends needs to learn!

One of many things my non-programmer friends needs to learn!

Last night I realized I may be spending too much time programming. Got together with some non-programmer friends, and once I got drunk, all my conversations were formatted in my head as api requests in Json 😅😅

I finally fucking made it!

Or well, I had a thorough kick in my behind and things kinda fell into place in the end :-D

I dropped out of my non-tech education way too late and almost a decade ago. While I was busy nagging myself about shit, a friend of mine got me an interview for a tech support position and I nailed it, I've been messing with computers since '95 so it comes easy.

For a while I just went with it, started feeling better about myself, moved up from part time to semi to full time, started getting responsibilities. During my time I have had responsibility for every piece of hardware or software we had to deal with. I brushed up documentation, streamlined processes, handled big projects and then passed it on to 'juniors' - people pass through support departments fast I guess.

Anyway, I picked up rexx, PowerShell and brushed up on bash and windows shell scripting so when it felt like there wasn't much left I wanted to optimize that I could easily do with scripting I asked my boss for a programming course and free hands to use it to optimize workflows.

So after talking to programmer friends, you guys and doing some research I settled on C# for it's broad application spectrum and ease of entry.

Some years have passed since. A colleague and I built an application to act as portal for optimizations and went on to automate AD management, varius ssh/ftp jobs and backend jobs with high manual failure rate, hell, towards the end I turned in a hobby project that earned myself in 10 times in saved hours across the organization. I felt pretty good about my skills and decided I'd start looking for something with some more challenge.

A year passed with not much action, in part because I got comfy and didn't send out many applications. Then budget cuts happened half a year ago and our Branch's IT got cut bad - myself included.

I got an outplacement thing with some consultant firm as part of the goodbye package and that was just hold - got control of my CV, hit LinkedIn and got absolutely swarmed by recruiters and companies looking for developers!

So here I am today, working on an AspX webapp with C# backend, living the hell of a codebase left behind by someone with no wish to document or follow any kind of coding standards and you know what? I absolutely fucking love it!

So if you're out there and in doubt, do some competence mapping, find a nice CV template, update your LinkedIn - lots of sources for that available and go search, the truth is out there!

!rant
Today I showed some of my non-programmer friends results of a simple program I wrote (very simple but very visual). They really enjoyed it and even thought of alterations I was able to implement.
I really enjoyed feeling that what I do has meaning 😊
Hope you have a good day!

!rant

Chilled out with one of my non-programmer friends over the weekend. We were talking about various projects I had worked on, and he became interested. He started learning js that night, and I was proud.

Cut to today, he sends me a message complaining about some of the weird syntaxes in python. Super proud moment.

Some people just don't get it. When you meet friends who are either non technical or very new to programming, all they ask you is what language do you use.

The language is important but not everything. It's what you do with it that matters. Just because you know python, doesn't mean that you can do machine learning. Even simply asking what do I do is better than that!

The language is just a tool! Learn to be language agnostic please. Be a programmer, not a code monkey

I decided to format party my desktop since I'm working at home every day (got a 1TB ssd to replace 150gb OS drive).

First fresh Windows install in 4 years. I had forgotten how much fuckery windows puts you through to do some basic things. I can imagine being a newbie hobbiest programmer and having to go through this stuff?

So I just embarrassingly spent 15 minutes reading and troubleshooting why you can't run a python script inside of powershell. PS just blips for a moment leaving you wondering if the script executed. So I created a test script to use a logging file handler to see if it actually ran. No.

Turns out you have to register the .py extension by appending it to your PATHEXT environment variable. Before that I was going to add it to the PS profile, but realized it takes more than a quick moment to find out which scope of PS profile is appropriate to create, and on top of that, you have to enable script execution in PS (which I recall is easy, but didn't do yet).

Tangentially, I solved an ssh issue days ago. I would tell you what it was, but I seem to have mentally blocked it due to trauma.

For real Microsoft. Yes powershell has some great advancements--my friends say so.

But this needlessly nuanced bullshit needs a little attention from you guys to save the world a shitload of time. I can only imagine what it's like for non-tech savvy people trying to learn to program and having to face this stuff.

I still haven't solved the color scheme stupidity of powershell. This is 2020 ffs. Yet seems there's no clean or intuitive way to do it.

Other issues omitted for 'brevity'

As the head of the Web Operations team of my college, I managed to compose quite a convincing pitch on college mail, as a call for interns for the team during the summer. The basic idea I explained to people was that even if you aren't a pro, you can still try and apply: you have one week to impress me with your CSS/JS/PHP skills(Really basic stuff in the problem statement; I didn't even make all of it compulsory), and encouraged them to start from scratch, cuz that's how I made it last year.
Last year they had around 30 responses in 7 days - I got 42 responses in 7 hours itself. I could shut down the portal cuz of far more than enough responses, but where's the fun in that. ;)
I'm not a good programmer, I'll admit, but I certainly benefitted in this field of being the head of the web ops team with knowledge and experience my non coding friends keep sharing with me. Not having a lot of code buddies didn't turn out to be so bad.

It's not much of an achievement, geez, there's literally everything left to be done for a whole year, but well, good start!

Nothing gives me the feeling of power like solving my non-programmer friends' problems with a bit of programming.
My girlfriend is an architect, got at her job a task of designing how to cut facade panels. Something nearly impossible to do with her tools and insanely time consuming to do by hand - but it's actually just a subset-sum problem with more steps. After a couple of hours of tweaking the program to properly parse excel files she can export and writing the output in a format usable for her I solved what would be an incredibly tough pickle for her and her whole company.
I'm seriously proud of myself.

//Met an old friend
So I heard you're a programmer now. I need some help from you.

*write something on paper

HACK this fb account unless you are a big fat phony.