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Search - "teach yourself"
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I was a freshman in highschool when I encountered the book entitled "Teach Yourself Visual Basic 6 in 21 Days"
I loved that book so much that it took me 4 years to finish it.9 -
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I've seen a lot of rants about teachers who use an outdated language, or don't accept the preferred framework or library of the ranter, or even force students to use a technology or even worse an OS they don't prefer.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.14 -
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.37 -
Hello!
I'm a member of an international hacker group.
As you could probably have guessed, your account [cozyplanes@tuta.io] was hacked, because I sent message you from it.
Now I have access to you accounts!
For example, your password for [cozyplanes@tuta.io] is [RANDOM_ALPHABET_HERE]
Within a period from July 7, 2018 to September 23, 2018, you were infected by the virus we've created, through an adult website you've visited.
So far, we have access to your messages, social media accounts, and messengers.
Moreover, we've gotten full damps of these data.
We are aware of your little and big secrets...yeah, you do have them. We saw and recorded your doings on porn websites. Your tastes are so weird, you know..
But the key thing is that sometimes we recorded you with your webcam, syncing the recordings with what you watched!
I think you are not interested show this video to your friends, relatives, and your intimate one...
Transfer $700 to our Bitcoin wallet: 13DAd45ARMJW6th1cBuY1FwB9beVSzW77R
If you don't know about Bitcoin please input in Google "buy BTC". It's really easy.
I guarantee that after that, we'll erase all your "data" :)
A timer will start once you read this message. You have 48 hours to pay the above-mentioned amount.
Your data will be erased once the money are transferred.
If they are not, all your messages and videos recorded will be automatically sent to all your contacts found on your devices at the moment of infection.
You should always think about your security.
We hope this case will teach you to keep secrets.
Take care of yourself.
>> RE >>
Well f### you, thanks for telling my password which is obviously fake. I have sent your details to the local police department, shall rest in peace. Don't earn money by this kind of action. STUPID!17 -
It's fine if you're 'not good with computers' and need help. Ask me politely and sure I'll see how I can help and teach you what you need so that you can do it yourself in the future.
It's not fine, however, if you refuse to fucking learn after the millionth time I've taught you how to do the exact same thing because 'It's too hard' and 'I won't understand anyway'. And then proceed to call me a bad and ungrateful friend because I can't come to your rescue the very second you need me and don't seem 1000% enthusiastic to help at 1am in the morning when I'm still doing my own work.
Sure, I'm the 'tech person' amongst our friends. I *do* understand the frustration you experience when something isn't working. But that doesn't mean I'm obligated to be your 24/7 IT support, while listening to your complaints of how I was probably the one who fucked it up in the first place when I helped fixed your phone/laptop last time (for the record, this was *never* the case).
UGHHHHHHHH
ps: I just found this community and I love it already! Thought this mental rant I had earlier would fit right in lol
(Also, sorry English isn't my first language D:7 -
I have just concluded a post-mortem on one of my servers.
Cause of death: out of memory due to a tiny memory leak in a VPN service triggered by 66 different IPs brute-forcing the creds at the same time. Mostly from China, of course.
Dear bot writers: you made me put aside my spaghetti and write iptables rules. I hate iptables. And I love spaghetti. You should be ashamed of yourself! Did momma not teach you basic OpSec? Don't crash the target and never, ever, interrupt the sysadmin during dinner!6 -
Been reading devrant posts for a month or so, this is my first actual post. I'm hoping it will be therapeutic. ☺️ I need something to keep me from killing my boss when I see him again tomorrow..
Some backstory: Currently working in HR for the last 7 or so years with complete shit for brains boss, even worse when it comes to anything related to technology. For almost two years I've been working to get another bachelor's degree. This time in computer sciences, to make a career switch to systems and software engineer. Last week I roughly had the following wonderful conversation:
Boss: we've needed new Recruitment software for a while now. Can't you make us one as a school project?
Me: 'Make us one?' It's not really that simple.. I'm barely halfway through my education, maybe I could do it, but it would take me quite a long time even if I could work on it fulltime.. Combining a halftime job with a fulltime education is taking up enough of my time as it is and I have more than enough school projects btw..
Boss: it would be a win-win. Work a little harder in your spare time and when you graduate you have a real-life project on your resume.
Me: I'm sorry, i'm failing to see the 'win' for me here.. I work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week on average, trying to combine work and studies. I'm pretty much maxed out..
Boss: Your coworker(also extreme dumbass) told me you wrote some quick code the other day that helped him out. Don't underestimate yourself, I'm sure you can do this.
Me(in complete disbelief by now): I wrote him an Excel-macro! They don't even teach me that at school. It's a very very very long way from actual software development! I'm sorry, it just can't be done.
Boss: Thats too bad. I expected you to welcome an opportunity like this and be more motivated towards this company..
Me: ***more disbelief and silence, just staring at him***
I'm sorry you feel that way.
***walked away***
WTF, I work my ass off for 7 years for this fucking shithead.. Even before I started this bachelors degree I had at least some understanding of the work developers put in their software. It blows my mind, no, it fucking angers me how people think making software is so simple.. Why do you think it's a 3-year education you fucking cunt?
Please, someone tell me how I can keep myself from ramming his fucking head through a wall tomorrow...6 -
If you need to learn/teach object orientation, these are my approaches (I hate that classic "car" example):
1) Keep in mind games like Warcraft, Starcraft, Civilization, Age of Empires (yes, I am old school). They are a good example of having classes to use, instantiating objects (creatures) and putting them to work together. As in a real system.
2) Think of your program as an office that has a job to do, or a factory that has something to deliver. Classes are the roles/jobs and objects are the workers/employees. They don't need to be complex, but their purpose must be really (really, really) well defined. Just like in a real office / factory.
3) Even better (or crazier), see your classes and objects as real beings, digital creatures in a abstract world, and yourself as a kind of god, who creates species (define classes) with wisdom. Give life when it is the time for them to come into the world (instantiate object) and kill them when they are done with their mission (dispose an object). Give them behavior, logic, conditions to work with, situations where they take action, and when they don't. Make them kinda "smart". Build them able to make decisions and take actions based on conditions. Give them life. Think on your program as an ecossystem. There must be balance, connection, species must be well defined and creatures must work together to achieve a common objective. Don't just throw code and pray for it to run. Plan it.
-----
When I talk about my classes like they are real beings, and programs as mini-worlds, some people say I am crazy, some others say that's passion.
It is both! @__@3 -
Online tutorial pet peeves
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My top 10 points of unsolicited ranting/advice to those making video tutorials:
1. Avoid lots of pauses, saying “umm” too much, or other unnecessary redundancy in speech (listen to yourself in a recording)
2. If I can’t understand you at 1.5 - 2x playback speed and you don’t already speak relatively quickly and clearly, I’m probably not going to watch for long (mumbling, inconsistent microphone volume, and background noise/music are frequent culprits)
3. It’s ok to make mistakes in a tutorial, so long as you also fix them in the tutorial (e.g., the code that is missing a semicolon that all of a sudden has one after it compiles correctly — but no mention of fixing it or the compiler error that would have been received the first time). With that said, it’s fine to fix mistakes pertinent to the topic being taught, but don’t make me watch you troubleshoot your non-relevant computer issues or problems created by your specific preferences (e.g., IDE functionality not working as expected when no specific IDE was prescribed for the tutorial)
4. Don’t make me wait on your slow computer to do something in silence—either teach me something while it’s working or edit the video to remove the lull
5. You knew you were recording your screen. Close your email, chat, and other applications that create notifications before recording. Or at least please don’t check them and respond while recording and not edit it out of the video
6. Stay on topic. I’m watching your video to learn about something specific. A little personality is good, but excessive tangents are often a waste of my time
7. [Specific to YouTube] Don’t block my view of important content with annotations (and ads, if within your control)
8. If you aren’t uploading quality HD recordings, enlarge your font! Don’t make me have to guess what character you typed
9. Have a game plan (i.e., objectives) before hitting the record button
10. Remember that it’s easier to rant and complain than to do something constructive. Thank you for spending your time making tutorial videos. It’s better for you to make videos and commit all my pet peeves listed above than to not make videos at all—don’t let one guy’s rant stop you from sharing your knowledge and experience (but if it helps you, you’re welcome—and you just might gain a new viewer!)14 -
So I met this Professor in my campus recently.. This life-changing conversation followed :
Prof: What are you doing on your laptop?
Me: Sir, I am practicing some coding problems.
Prof : Coding problems? What's your branch?
Me: Electrical Engineering.
Prof: You aren't expected to code. And you aren't taught much coding in your coursework too.
Me : Sir, I take it as a passion and I did learn coding all by myself.
Prof : Rubbish. Learning coding by yourself is similar to saying that you don't require a Prof. to teach you. Just focus on your subjects and stop wasting your time.
Me :Good afternoon, sir. You're right, I did waste my time here.
*Grabs laptop and leaves,hoping he won't be taking any lectures in my next sem. *16 -
Tl;dr
Longest Rant I've written so far.
How to manage a school (by out school director):
Did this student do something spezial to emphasize the school?
-No: Ignore him
-Yes: Did the student achieve this with the help of this schools staff?
-No: Take all the credit
-Yes: Hahaha, just a joke, nobody receives help from the school. Goto -No
Q: Should this class get the 5 day trip, they've been waiting for the whole year?
Director: No.
Q: But they don't even participate in other trips just to go there.
D: No
(Good thing she did not have the last word there)
Does the school director need this one week trip to india, just to talk once about stuff, you can talk about via email, to a sponsor?
D: "Of course I deserve it"
D: "We need faster internet in this school"
Network admins: "But it won't be of any use, if the network can't handle it. We'll need better pcs (and network conponents) on top of that"
D: "No, bot enough money available for that one." *browses email with IPad paid by school money*
Teacher: "I want to realize project xy with the students. We'll need around 1200€ (for 20 people)."
D: "Can place xy at our school to as advertise?"
T: "No, but it's be a valuable le-"
D: "600 at most."
(Again denied by people who aren't fcking assholes. We got 1500€, so 300€ per group)
D: So what makes you think you can teach informatics in this school"
Applicant: "Well, I'm friends with one of your teacher here. We went to university together, where I learn't nothing about informatics and I don't even understand the principles of this subject"
D: "Close enough. Hired, you can teach them all the theory stuffy. You don't have to prepare that yourself another teacher has done so. Just read it from his documents."
*In class with the mentioned teacher talking about Threads*
*Le wild code appears*
while (doStuff())
System.out.println ("Thread working...");
System.out.println ("Thread terminated");
T: "... and most importantly, when you have done all the work be sure to terminate the thread with 'System.out.println ("Thread terminated");'"
Should this teacher be allowed to participate in this seminar about burnouts?
D: "No, I can't afford paying the supplenze."
Staff: "We need to talk with the director about this."
S: "Not in her office. The cafeteria maybe"
*Not in the cafeteria either*
S: "Seems like she didn't come to achool today. Let's try tomorrow"
(^ Stuff that happens almost daily. Screw semicolons. I see her only once a month at most)
*Student send 5000 emails by accident* (Shit happens 😂😅😂😅)
D: "You gonna work here for a full afternoon"
*Student arrives for his punishment*
Staff: "Good that you're here. Do this real quick."
*10 min. Later*
Student: "Done"
Staff: "Well, we have no more work to give you, so you might as well leave"
DONE!!! Good job coming so far.
Our school is supposed to be the best, but internally it's one big meme.4 -
Anyone else sick of all the whining about college on here? It’s a CS degree. They are going to teach you science. Not to mention that Stack Overflow did a survey in 2015 and found that nearly half the developers didn’t have degrees. If you’re so much smarter than your professors then you should have no problem finding a job. Of course, if you’re lucky enough to not have to pay for school; you should just be thankful that you’re a step up in going for management positions and shut up. On the other hand, if you’re paying (going into debt) for school; then maybe you should take a step off the safe and well-trodden path and put a little faith in yourself. There is an abundance of free training online. I thought devs were supposed to be free-spirited rebels. Didn’t any of you see ‘Hackers’?9
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TL; DR: please save me from IT hell
Note 1: this is a rant that comes after a couple other rants I'm going to call "family business saga" from now on because I feel like this is gonna go on for a while
Note 2: the following may look exaggerated but it's because of how pissed off I am at said person
So I have to help this one family member with his computer but he's worned me out so much last summer that I can't stand him (it's all tech based). At all. Both in person and via text calls. I dread and become pissy each time he's nearby, just his presence makes me want to jump in a hole and stay there for eternity.
And he's not the smartest cookie in the jar when it comes to tech, so he comes to me for help (instead of going to my brother. Aaagh why doesn't he go for my brother as well, it's mentally tiring having to "help" him - as he doesn't learn what I'm trying to teach him even after several attempts). I don't really mind being sought for help when it comes to tech, but this guy takes it one step further.
He entered my room with his computer in his hands saying this friend of his has installed W7 on his PC (why didn't he handle all the things he wants to do, it would save me a lot of anger containment) and that I *had* (it's always "YOU HAVE" because I'm a tech-ish person and I'm in uni for CS) to help him do a bunch of things.
So he boots up the thing and there are 32 updates to do, so I'm guessing that he didn't boot it up after the OS update until now. He leaves my room and I sigh out of relief. He comes back with the AC remote complaining it's too hot in my room and that he's gonna put it down a degree or 2. Jesus christ do not tamper with my AC settings, it's fine to me. The updates are still going on. He leaves again.
The computer takes its time to update and so does he. I'm happily playing minecraft when he comes back, the computer off after updating. He looks at it and says "why is it off?". I reply back "it finished updating.", trying to keep my cool. Even the most simple questions are irritation inducing.
He reboots it and lets it run. After it boots and it's ready to go he just stays there for like 2' without doing anything because the hard drive light was going off. I think he thinks the computer is going to explode if he touches it while the light is blinking 😬
He goes to connect the computer to the internet and gets all surprised that the computer doesn't recognize our home's internet (he has been here before with his computer, I guess, so he had connected, so I think he was expecting it to auto connect like that). I tell him that the computer doesn't recognize our home's connection because it has had a fresh OS installation and so it didn't have any connection registered. He types in the password and the connection is established.
He them starts going on about that he wants to get these pics on the business' website and how does he put them in his computer and all that. I do that for him and he's all like "how did you do that?? 😮" like it's a magic trick
And he's always going on at everything as if it's all a big undoable thing. "How do I do this? You know what, do it yourself and show me because I don't wanna fail". Dude. Bro. Everything - EVERYTHING - you are afraid of doing is undoable. EVERYTHING. Good christ.
I swear I've never felt so glad I'm going back for uni next week9 -
I had just started as an SDE intern, and was fiddling around with the code base.
Me: Hey, can you send me the link to our version control system?
Mentor: Umm, what!?
Me: You know, where we keep our code backup...
Mentor: Hmm, is there a need for that?
Me: Yeah, I mean, my past experience tells me to always backup code, just in case something goes wrong.
Mentor: Ohh, that's easy. I'll teach you how I do it.
So, he comes to my workplace, and does this:
1. Go to your workspace folder.
2. Right click it.
3. Zip it.
4. Open outlook.
5. Compose email.
6. Attach the zip file.
7. Mail to yourself.
8. That's how it's done!
I was like what the hell!?!?! Is this really happening?? And then he started basking in his glory, as if he had taught me some secret hack! Seeing this, I couldn't even get myself to introduce him to git. That was the worst part.8 -
Woohoo!!! I made it to 1000++s :) Now I feel less newbie-like around here :)
So... I don't want to shit-post, so in gratitude to all you guys for this awesome community you've built, specially @trogus and @dfox, I'll post here a list of my ideas/projects for the future, so you guys can have something to talk about or at least laugh at.
Here we go!
Current Project: Ensayador.
It's a webapp that intends to ease and help students write essays. I'm making it with history students in mind, but it should also help in other discipline's essay production. It will store the thesis, arguments, keywords and bibliography so students can create a guideline before the moment of writting. It will also let students catalogue their reads with the same fields they'd use for an essay: that is thesis, arguments, keywords and bibliography, for their further use in other essays. The bibliography field will consist on foreign keys to reads catalogued. The idea is to build upon the models natural/logical relations.
Apps: All the apps that will come next could be integrated in just one big app that I would call "ChatPo" ("Po" is a contextual word we use in my country when we end sentences, I think it derived from "Pues"). But I guess it's better to think about them as different apps, just so I don't find myself lost in a neverending side-project.
A subchat(similar to a subreddit)-based chat app:
An app where people can join/create sub-chats where they can talk about things they are interested in. In my country, this is normally done by facebook groups making a whatsapp group and posting the link in the group, but I think that an integrated app would let people find/create/join groups more easily. I'm not sure if this should work with nicknames or real names and phone numbers, but let's save that for the future.
A slack clone:
Yes, you read it right. I want to make a slack clone. You see, in my country, enterprise communications are shitty as hell: everything consists in emails and informal whatsapp groups. Slack solves all these problems, but nobody even knows what it is over here. I think a more localized solution would be perfect to fill this void, and it would be cool to make it myself (with a team of friends of course), and hopefully profit out of it.
A labour chat-app marketplace:
This is a big hybrid I'd like to make based on the premise of contracting services on a reliable manner and paying through the app. "Are you in need of a plumber, but don't know where to find a reliable one? Maybe you want a new look on your wall, but don't want to paint it yourself? Don't worry, we got you covered. In <Insert app name> you can find a professional perfect to suit your needs. Payment? It's just a tap away!". I guess you get the idea. I think wechat made something like this, I wonder how it worked out.
* Why so many chat apps? Well... I want to learn Erlang, it is something close to mythical to me, and it's perfect for the backend of a comms app. So I want to learn it and put it in practice in any of these ideas.*
Videogames:
Flat-land arena: A top down arena game based on the book "flat land". Different symmetrical shapes will fight on a 2d plane of existence, having different rotating and moving speeds, and attack mechanics. For example, the triangle could have a "lance" on the front, making it agressive but leaving the rest defenseless. The field of view will be small, but there'll be a 2d POV all around the screen, which will consist on a line that fills with the colors of surrounding objects, scaling from dark colors to lighter colors to give a sense of distance.
This read could help understand the concept better:
http://eldritchpress.org/eaa/...
A 2D darksouls-like class based adventure: I've thought very little about this, but it's a project I'm considering to build with my brothers. I hope we can make it.
Imposible/distant future projects:
History-reading AI: History is best teached when you start from a linguistic approach. That is, you first teach both the disciplinar vocabulary and the propper keywords, and from that you build on causality's logic. It would be cool to make an AI recognize keywords and disciplinary vocabulary to make sense of historical texts and maybe reformat them into another text/platform/database. (this is very close to the next idea)
Extensive Historical DB: A database containing the most historical phenomena posible, which is crazy, I know. It would be a neverending iterative software in which, through historical documents, it would store historical process, events, dates, figures, etc. All this would then be presented in a webapp in which you could query historical data and it would return it in a wikipedia like manner, but much more concize and prioritized, with links to documents about the data requested. This could be automated to an extent by History-reading AI.
I'm out of characters, but this was fun. Plus, I don't want this to be any more cringy than it already is.12 -
Forgot to post a book yesterday, so maybe I’ll post two books today...
Anyway, this book, I found it recently never seen it before. But boy is it great.
It’s similar to the programming pearls book as far as what it’s about. Think of the refactoring book, clean code, programming pearls, and the mythical man month books, thrown in a blender, added some new spice and some new things, and filtered down into 100 or so page book, simple quick and enjoyable actually.
This book the references staple books by Sedgwick, knuth, Brooks, Myers, and so many others. It’s funny how things come full circle.
My favorite quote from the book. I’ve been essentially saying this for years, but to see it on a book, it’s lovely... more people need to realize it too.
“Understanding how things work at a low level becomes a base for making good decisions at the high level”
Followed up with if you’ve never built a computer from scratch your missing out... get yourself a breadboard and some TTL logic.. and build a 4 bit CPU, once you know how to program in assembly the next step is building your own computer ... if your university didn’t teach a class that did this they ripped you off....
Don’t bitch at me.. the book said that.. and I agree! 100% because it’s true, you can’t debate that.
Oh and btw this is another book written by a female developer.. kudos to her for nailing so many topics in such a short book!35 -
Greatest lesson I learned from myself. Work for yourself. Create your own business while you are working. Be your own boss. Don't rely in employment alone.
I got laid off today. My boss business is a digital agency. Our client stopped working with several agencies including us because of an order from their mother company to only use 1 agency. My boss has no choice but to let me go.
Even if you got the skills and you're doing good in your work, these things can happen. It is beyond our control. I like my company and my boss but reality hits hard. I thought I will be with this company for a very very long time. I want to settle here and build my business but still work together with my boss. I have so many plans that instantly disappeared.
Oh well just be strong and move on. Happy job hunting to me again. Maybe this is God's plan to teach me some things. For me to create my own business seriously while working.5 -
The other day a non-programmer colleague asked me:
"How do you know what to type in, like, did you write all of that?"
As I responded, he asked me another question; "but how do you know wuat to type".
I use to have those same thoughts years ago.
It occurred to me that through constant bugs, errors, bad (team) projects and failures that its become second nature, like breathing.
So, as an experienced developer to people just learning the craft and juniors. Don't give up on your collabs, don't be disheartened by group projects, don't be discouraged by your peers who seemingly try to make your life harder.
Take it as an experience to better yourself and teach them something.
These are the experiences that will make you a better developer.1 -
"How useful was your CS degree and why?" - I studied CS at university, my education always was incredibly useful.
Firstly, the knowledge you gain in itself is useful. Furthermore, we explain and understand the unknown in terms of the known. Thus, the more you know, the easier you learn new things.
But secondly and more importantly, university teaches you *how* to think. In a structured way, like a scientist or engineer. To see the bigger picture.
I originally wanted to end here, but I've read a couple of entries doubting the usefulness of any CS degree.
Our profession isn't all that different from others. It is, however, relatively young. How's this for an analogy: We're still in the stage of building sand castles. That's fine, and can be self taught. But in years to come we'll want to build bridges and sky scrapers, which are not just "sand castles scaled up". Our sand castle knowledge won't help us here. Sky scrapers need entirely different materials and a good understanding of architectural statics.
Can you still teach that yourself? Maybe. Will a formal education with a degree be useful and generally more trusted? I bet.3 -
I'm getting convinced that some areas are not teachable. You have to learn it by yourself. Databases (sql), for instance, the teacher never manages to get the class attention. Even I that consider myself a very interested guy can't handle 2 hours of his explanations. I tried to think in a better way he could teach the content but don't really think there is one ..Do you guys faced issues like that in school?3
-
Seriously, why are so many companies caught up with if there developers working from home or not? Maybe it's where I'm at, but my last boss said ...
" I know you don't have any problem making deadlines and your a good worker, but you still need to come to the office in order to have face to face interaction."
Me: "This is the first face to face conversation I've had with someone in over a week."
Boss: (shrugs)"our goal is to build an office friendly environment where people will enjoy coming into the office"
Me: in my head "your an idiot"... Out loud "Ok"
...
In reality my custom built machine is better than yours, and I'm more productive in my Sealy Posturpedic chair and pajamas than your wack office chair with you popping your head out of your office every couple hours to "manage" me when you haven't written code in years and i have to teach you things that you bring to your boss to make yourself look smart.15 -
Student here.
For those who got a degree in CS or similar, what is some advice you can offer to a sophomore in school?
The education I have gotten so far for a Software Engineering degree seems like it isn't enough. So far, I only know C++ and front end web development. Besides the little tiny projects they give us, they do not teach us how the field works.
One of my most lingering questions of all is.. what technologies should I know before interning and/or job hunting?!?! There are dozens of languages for everything; I'm lost. I feel the pain for developers in the future who have to catch up on technologies.
I have heard that learning C++ will make it easier to learn other languages. I won't know until I start another language (too busy working in the summers).
What regrets do you have? What do you wish you could've known while studying as a student or self-teaching yourself?8 -
Once again I have loads.
My best teachers were...
The contractor that taught me C#, ASP MVC and SQL Server. Dude was a legend, so calm and collected. He wanted to learn JQuery and Bootstrap so at the same time as teaching, he was learning from me. Such an inspirational person, to know your subordinates still have something to teach you. He also taught me a lot about working methodically and improving my pragmatism.
The other, in school I studied computing A-Level. 100% scored at least one of the exams... basically I knew my stuff.
But, as a kid, I didn’t know how to formulate my answers, or even string together coherent answers for the exams. This dude noticed, first thing he did was said “well you’re better at this bit than me, practice but you’ll be fine” (manually working out two’s complement binary of a number).
Second thing he did was say “you know what man, you know what you’re on about but nobody else is ever going to know that”.
He helped me on the subjects I wasn’t perfect on, then he helped me on formulating my answers correctly.
He also put up with my shit attendance, being a teenager with a motorcycle who thinks he knows it all, has its downsides.
As a result, I aced the hell out of that course, legendary grades and he got himself a bit of a bonus for it to use on his holiday. Everyone’s a winner.
Liam, Jason, if you guys are out there I owe you both thanks for making me the person I am today.
The worst, I’ve had too many to name... but it comes down to this:
- identify your students strengths and weaknesses, focus on the weaknesses
- identify your own and know when to ask for help yourself
- be patient, learning hurts.
You can always tell a passionate teacher from one who’s there for the paycheck.1 -
80% of the YouTube tutorials that I've watched suck and only wasted 10 minutes of my time each. Sometimes, I can work well with doing shit myself. Discovering errors yourself teach you more than following along someone else.2
-
It’s been so long since I posted but this time it’s juicy again.
I got a coworker, no prio experience but already a year and few months into the job. He’s bad.
Magnitudes of bad!
We’re trying to teach him but to no avail. Everything about him sucks, major ballsack to be exact.
His attitude is to avoid every task, finishes nothing and then starts something new.
„Did you do X like we told you to?“
„No I started on Y, because I thought it [looks better, seems more interesting, thought that X is useless…]“
When you ask him much is done he is always „almost“ finished and needs your help on the „last 5-10%“. Yeah fuck that!
But that guy has a talent, his talent is to always give you technically correct answers which actually are complete bullshit.
„What are you doing at your job?“
„Staring at a screen and typing things.“ dude what?
That guy used the excuse „I can’t do maths“ on everything.
For an exam he had to calculate how long it would take to reach a certain amount if you would get some interest in that every year.
He asked the teacher for the formula. During the exam! And when the teacher didn’t want to give it to him he wrote plainly „can’t do maths“ on the paper and left
His code is of a quality as if he would write his first line in a week and then has the audacity to blame me and the colleagues for not explaining it right.
Ok you might think now we’re teaching him bad, or are too impatient. But honestly if you have to explain how to do a for loop for over about 15 months and get that attitude I think you get the right to be angry. I don’t mind explaining on how things work, even for the hundredth time, but then don’t tell me you understood, go behind my back, complain at a colleague how bad I explained, get explained by him and then do it again until you whored yourself through the whole staff!
It’s like he got the mind swiper from Men in black at home. Every day he hits the reset button.
He had a week of just changing indentation on a html file. Why? Because he wanted to find his style.
Yeah his style
if(a==b){
console.log(a);
}
else {
console.log(b)
}
And to produce code like that it takes him atleast 4 hours of trial and error.
And at the same time he goes arround and boasts what a super good programmer he his and that he can do some project work for them.
How we found out? Because he started working in those projects during work time at the office and asked us how to do things.
And he does so like a complete bastard!
Broken sql query? “No that query is perfect as it is, it’s supposed to show no results! But, just in theory, if I wanted to show some results, what would I need to change?”
I’m so mad about it and pissed on a personal level because he goes around blames everyone and the world for his short comings5 -
"Can you teach us how to do x? If not, how much would you charge for doing it yourself?"
Bitch, my time is valuable, if I teach you, I'm gonna charge you anyway... -
I previously said I had no issues with dev teachers, but in fact I DO have them..
I want to get two things off my chest..
First: Last year I waited like 6 MONTHS to get my grades!! 6 FUCKING MONTHS!! And I wasn't even the only one who didn't get their grades!!
Second: Those dev teachers in high school are actually teachers who normally teach about physics, math and we even have a teacher who normally teaches history!! HOW THE FUCK AM I GOING TO GET A PROPER EXPLANATION ABOUT THE STUFF I SHOULD LEARN IF YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW IT YOURSELF!!
In defense for my teachers:
After 6 months of long waiting, I got my grades and they all were (and still are) an A!! Happy as fuck!!
My teachers at least TRY their very best to teach me something I don't know about the basic stuff.. And that's worth something right..2 -
MENTORS - MY STORY (Part II)
The next mentor was my first boss at my previous job:
2.- Manager EA
So, I got new in the job, I had a previous experience in other company, but it was no good. I learned a lot about code, but almost nothing about the industry (project management, how to handle requirements, etc.) So in this new job all I knew was the code and the structure of the enterprise system they were using (which is why the hired me).
EA was BRILLIANT. This guy was the Manager at the IT department (Software Development, Technology and IT Support) and he was all over everything, not missing a beat on what was going on and the best part? He was not annoying, he knew how to handle teams, times, estimations, resources.
Did the team mess something up? He was the first in line taking the bullets.
Was the team being sieged by users? He was there attending them to avoid us being disturbed.
Did the team accomplished something good? He was behind, taking no credit and letting us be the stars.
If leadership was a sport this guy was Michael Jordan + Ronaldo Nazario, all in one.
He knew all the technical details of our systems, and our platforms (Server Architectures both software and hardware, network topology, languages being used, etc, etc). So I was SHOCKED when I learned he had no formation in IT or Computer Science. He was an economist, and walked his way up in the company, department from department until he got the job as IT Manager.
From that I learned that if you wanna do things right, all you need is the will of improving yourself and enough effort.
One of the first lessons he taught me: "Do your work in a way that you can go on holidays without anyone having to call you on the phone."
And for me those are words to live by. Up to that point I thought that if people needed to call me or needed me, I was important, and that lessons made me see I was completely wrong.
He also thought me this, which became my mantra ever since:
LEARN, TEACH AND DELEGATE.
Thank you master EA for your knowledge.
PART I: https://devrant.com/rants/1483428/...1 -
Do anybody remember when i wrote a rant about the IT teacher in my high school?
Few months ago we got the results from final exams! (we have precentage based grades)
Another thing to remember:
You can pick basic or extended version of the every test you take.
Everybody has to get at least 30% on basic exams (they are nessesary for everybody) to graduate from the school. The extended exams give you more points at university and they are not mandatory.
In addition to that extended ones dont have the lower limit
The IT exam has only the extended version (because its not mandator, you pick it yourself). It is pretty easy: just basic algorithms, basic C++ programs and general PC things.
I didnt take the IT class because i thougt i can learn much more at home. My friend took it. He is very good. He uses linux he wants to become a pen tester. I know he is worth getting 100% on that extended IT exam. (We did a lot of projects thogether)
Well... NOBODY GOT MORE THAN 20% on that exam! WTF!
That POS teacher should die in that win xp IT class with all ethernet cables stuck in his ass!
He didnt teach anything useful about algorithms to anybody! And that was the easiest and the most important part on the exam!
In addition to that people had to do few tasks on pc as well! And one of those tasks could been a picture in gimp BUT THE GIMP DIDNT EVEN WORK ON THOSE PC'S!
Algorithms are easy! That son of a twat didnt even understand it himself! That is why im telling everybody in my town to NOT go to that hight school for IT exam!
I dont want anybody to waste their life trying to learn something useful when that fucking bitch dosent understand anything!
That teacher is lucky. My friend got rejected from studing CS on university (due to the shit score) but he at least got accepted to study math.
I hope he will be able to continiue his dev dream.3 -
I hate the fact that our university is hiring ex-developers from the year 1990-2000 to teach us. They are knowledgeable about many stuff like datastructures and algorithms, but when they force a project on us where we have to use some new tech, the students become the teachers. Heck, one of the requirements of the project was to set up a continuous integration server and we had to explain to them that we needed a server and how git was part of it. (classmate even had to explain how git worked to them).
I know that adapting and learning stuff yourself is part of the education, but why are we the ones who should explain the stuff we MUST know to get our degree to the teachers who are supposed to actually, in my opinon, be experts and knowledgable in what we have to know and learn..2 -
Somebody ranted about his teacher showing windows presentation and teaching nothing. I wanted to comment that post but i have enough material to make the whole rant out of it.
Well at least you have those presentations! In my school we have 2 IT classrooms one with win xp, 1ghz cpu, 0,5gb ram computers and one with win vista, 2 core 2ghz cpu and 2gb of ram PCs.
Guess what room our teacher is using... of course the worse one! The second one is fine, few years ago another theacher had been using it!
I tried to convince him to change rooms but he is coming up with silly exciuses! (like "server is not working here!", well i fixed it with my friend but why are you even talking about it when you are not using yours in old class!)
PS. That server is useless anyway, every pc is connected to router that is connected to internet so supervisor pc is not mandatory, only acces restriction is enforced by win accounts.
I heard from students from my class (that picked that optional IT course) (i'm in high school) that gimp is not working because pc's are so bad!
Sometimes even notepad frezzes.🤔
Not only class is shite but teacher clearly has no idea what is he doing. (in order to pass the final from IT you need to learn simple C++, up to simple foo objects) and of course he isn not even talking about that! On one lesson about sorting algorithms he gave everybody 10 small pieces of paper with numbers on them and told everybody to sort them manualy, because he didnt know how to do it himself! So there is no doubt they wont be able code it.
I need to mention that i volontered to "clean, fix" that classroom (in order to convince teacher to move). And in that class i saw programms written in c++ on every computer! That means somebody was teaching propely before! 😣
I feel sorry for those guys, they are just waisting time. I would fall for it as well but i decided i can learn coding in home ;).
Well, results are shocking, after 1 month of coding i learned C# and i can basicly make any algorithm i ever wish. I learned about computer operation so well that i can nearly teach computer science. (i helped my friend in usa that is a electronic student with that and i'm very proud of it 😁) and it class still can't even use all 3 loops correctly... 😥 Ok i must admit i have been coding for a looooong while so i had time to learn basic c,c++ and pc operations before, but point still stands.
Why the hell are you wasting life of those studends? Why are you giving them a choice to learn coding WHEN YOU CANT EVEN USE PC YOURSELF?! (that it course is optional so you can apply if you want so)
I dont regret not bothering about it.1 -
Question: What do you guys do when you are not working? Do you have personal projects? Do you teach yourself new stuff?8
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Apparently, a lot of people here are complaining about the fact cs classes (and I'm talking about uni here) are way too much theory and far too less teaching practical things. And don't get me wrong, I don't like viewing cs only from a theoretic point of view either, BUT I think cs education is made to teach you how solve complex cs problems by yourself and give you the tools on how to learn about these things in the future. And this is very much theory.
CS is the science part, so don't wonder if there's a lot of theory in it. If you only want to learn how to program, maybe you should take programming courses instead.
In school though, cs education should be less theory and more doing practical (funny) things, programming, "how does the internet work", "why I should not give my credit card details to random strangers on the internet", things like that.2 -
FFS! Can I get a remote job as soft-dev?? I know a little bit of java, I mean I have a GitHub repo for a project if anyone wants to see what I'm doing.
If anyone knows or feel that can help me, please lend me a hand, I need to start working (to get real experience) and earn a little (prevent from starving in this fucking shithole country).
I'm not asking for money, I'm asking for a freaking job, a task, anything.
Little brief of my situation... I'm from Venezuela... Done!
Now for real, I'm a freelancer IT technician for almost 8 yrs, now I'm studying software engineering (8th Semester), I'm 31 years old, have a family (7 yrs old daughter, newborn baby boy), work is not flowing since the hourly price got high due to the economic crisis and clients are hiring people instead of outsourcing.
I'm not expecting to earn the minimum wage of UUSS, 150$/month can do the job! This due to the black market price of the USD (10X.000BsF so far), where 1$ represents the 1/8 part of the minimum wage here, to put it in perspective, toothpaste cost 200.000Bsf, 1/4 of the minimum wage.
Perhaps you will be asking yourself "Damn! so how do you do to survive!?" well, at least once a week a client calls and that saves the entire week, this isn't life my people, this is surviving... And if you don't believe me, I can show a receipt from the supermarket, and show you the average salary or my incomings.
Anyway enough drama and whining for today, I'm not doing this again in my life, I'm a person who achieves goals and earns what deserve (even this situation, I know that I deserve it for not thinking properly in the past, but we can't be victims of our past or do we?)
Here I leave my repo link, see the develop branch https://github.com/ajfmo/Sislic
I have touched HTML, CSS, JS, nodeJS, yarn, bower, Ubuntu both desktop and server, but what I really like is Java.
"Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." - ancient Chinese proverb.6 -
Although I didnt get my degree yet i can say that i already knew that university wont teach me shit. Im already at second semester and im currently planning on skipping (passing early) half of the courses.
Most of the knowlege i will gain surely will come from personal projects and research. Some people forget that uni just gives you the oppurtunity and the tools and that is your resposibility to use them and learn by yourself as well.2 -
Alright fellow sweaty programmers, mama Kiki is here to teach you the basics of hygiene.
TEETH
- If you have a toothpaste prescription, use it.
- Every single whitening toothpaste is a scam. Don’t use them.
- Every single over-the-counter toothpaste that decreases sensitivity does work. If your teeth are sensitive, use it.
- Otherwise, buy the cheapest name-brand toothpaste.
- Use dental floss. As long as it’s flat and waxed, the cheapest one will do.
- When flossing, never move the floss back and forth as if you try to saw through your gums. Just put the floss in, then out. Repeat if necessary.
- Don’t put your toothpaste on your toothbrush. Put a small amount of it directly in your mouth with a bit of water. Close your mouth and spread toothpaste all over your teeth using a rinsing motion, as if it was mouthwash. Now your teeth are completely covered.
- When brushing teeth, don’t use -90°/0°/90° angles. Use -35°/35°. This way you will spend less time while getting better cleansing. Bristle ends should touch where your teeth meet your gums.
- Get yourself a tongue scrubber. Scrub your tongue until what comes off of it is clean. Dirty tongue is why your breath smells bad, not dirty teeth.
- After you’re done, don’t rinse! Spit the toothpaste out, but let its residue stay there. The remineralization process is now started. If you follow the routine, you don’t need mouthwash at all.
- Drinking/eating sugary things, not washing your teeth and going straight to bed is the best way to get cavities ASAP. In your mouth, sugar quickly turns into the kind of acid that we use for soldering. It can strip the oxide layer off of copper. Do you know how after you drink Coke, your teeth become almost squeaky clean? That’s this. If you like sugary drinks, carefully drink them using a straw. Rinse immediately after you’re done drinking & eating.
SHAVING
- Get yourself an old-school safety T-razor, the one that takes suicide blades. It will last a lifetime. Mühle and Merkur are good manufacturers (not affiliated). Once you have it, for the rest of your life, you will only buy blades. This is the most environmentally friendly way to get a clean, close shave. Electric razors save water, but they often contain batteries.
- Because of how violently electric razor’s blades hit hair while cutting it, they chip your hair. This leads to your freshly grown hair being sharp, rough and unpleasant to the touch. The manual razor, on the other hand, produce clean edges. When your hair grows back, it will be softer than what you get with an electric razor.
- Feather brand blades (not affiliated) are the sharpest in the world. The sharper the blade, the less traumatic it is. Watch T-razor tutorials on YouTube. There are different shaving techniques that will get you a killer shave.
- T-razor blades last considerably longer than their modern soyboy single-use counterparts.
- Because of a single blade construction, T-razor almost never leaves irritation.
- Basically, modern single-use plastic blades are horrible for the environment, and they’re almost a scam for how much you get for your money. They’re only rivaled by printer ink. Use them only for intimate shaving, as they’re considerably handier down there.
- Always shave after hot shower.
- Before shaving, dry the skin surface. Apply shaving foam on dry skin only, as it contains chemicals that make your hair softer. When diluted, they’re not as effective, and shaving unsoftened hair is almost always unpleasant and dangerous.
- After applying the foam, wait about a minute for the foam to work. If the skin gets irritated, don’t wait for as long, or perhaps try a different foam brand.
- Before shaving, thoroughly clean your razor with hand sanitizer or ethanol. Ideally, it should be sterile. Using boiling hot water is also a good option, just be careful with it.
- After shaving, rinse off foam, immediately dry your skin with a clean towel, then apply aftershave. After applying it, don’t touch your skin until it completely dries. If you follow this routine, your skin won’t get any pimples, guaranteed.
- Scrubs won’t help you. Don’t use them.
More in the comments!11 -
You know, in my limited experience, I find the whole CS degree debate to be quite unnerving. I mean, if you can teach yourself to be a computer genius, I greatly respect you. You're really going placed. Sadly though, learning everything on my own is a bit of a challenge for me. I just find this whole degree-holding VS non-degree-holding conversation to be very confusing. I'm currently enrolled in a 4-year CS program. I personally have learned more there iny first week than I have in months on my own. Now I know all too well that development is often more of a craft or a trade than it is a typical procedural job, but I'm honestly really anxious because I have half of the world telling me to pursue a degree (which I am) and I have the other half telling me to gain experience (which I did). The thing that is stressing me out is the continual pressure to do all of one option instead of a little of both. My life is changing faster than the tech industry, and boy is it a bumpy ride. So unless there is good advice to be said regarding the path you take to become an amazing developer, why fight over the need for a CS degree?9
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Dear the jackarse the wrote our highschool ComSci course.
Go fuck yourself. Pascal is deprecated long ago, no-one using it but you. You are dragging us down on the programming yet you want us to follow up "the great 4.0 revolution" while feeding us garbage from like what, the 90s? Please consider switching to some modern language, not necessarily the C family but please be something modern. And teach us to use the command line.
For the love of god
PTH6 -
This is more of an essay than a rant. TLDR at the end. I simply can't choose from all the shitty lecturers I've had, so I'm going to have to go through them one by one. But of background. I'm currently in 7th year of college, I did a multimedia degree in 2 years, a intro course to Software Dev and I'm currently in my final year of my Software Dev degree. So let's start.
Intro Software Course
- we had a database module, which was thought by, I shit you not, the head of the psychology course in the college, she attempted to teach us Databases using access. And not even using SQL, using access GUI components and it's query builder. Need I say more?
1st year software dev
- We had a networking module, the guy that taught the labs, he literally didn't say more than 12 words the entire 12 week semester, his answer to any question you asked him was a grunt and "research it"
- We had a psychology module, I have no fucking idea why, but instead of learning something useful we were told to read this and get in touch with your feelings...
- database module. Yes we actually did SQL here, 12 weeks of select statements and normal form, talked about by a guy in a monotone voice, who sounded like he was contemplating bringing in an assault riffle some day. Also instead of using MySQL he decided to use Ingres. Why I will never know.
2nd Year Software Dev
- We had a module called Algorithms and Data Structures. The lecturer gave us problems she couldn't solve. Simple problems. She was also crazy. Absolutely nuts.
- Object Orientated Programming. I had this lecturer for 3 semesters up until 3rd year. This guy did COBOLT in college, graduated in the 70s or something and went straight into teaching, he taught us Java for nearly 2 years. He literally copied and pasted texts from PDFs and read through them in class. He told myself and another guy at one stage he really didn't care, and was just counting down the days to his retirement.
- Databases again, different lecturer from 1st year, taught us for 2 semesters (24 weeks) and somehow managed to teach us nothing.
3rd Year Software Dev
- software engineering.. This is where the biggest cunt I've ever met was introduced. He arrives into class 15 minutes late every time without fail, talks shit about stuff that has no relevancy to the topic at all, tries to turn everything into a rugby metaphor and every time you ask a question he somehow dodges it and swiftly changes topic. This cunts past profession? A Project Manager. Fucking typical. This dickhead has also thought me 2 other modules.
4th yr Software Dev
- El cunto mentioned above for 2 more modules. Need I say more.
- real time systems, this module took the piss, the module was written by the lecturer which is what earns his space here. Assignments given to us, which required more time to do than we had in labs so we had to work at home, the problem we that is we were using an obscure RTOS called OS9 which would only work on the college computers. When brought to the lecturers attention he just said "figure it out"
Internet of Things - There was 2 lecturers, each lecturer seemingly working off a different plan, one week you'd have one lecturer, the next would be the other one going on about something completely different and unrelated to anything else we'd done.
Some lecturers didn't even make this list as I couldn't be bothered trying to think back about how shit other ones were. These were the ones that always stood out in my mind.
My main take away point from this is that you go to college for the paper which says you have a degree. Learning things that are going to benefit you in a career is up to yourself.
TLDR; 90% of my college lectures were shit. You need to learn useful stuff yourself.1 -
sams teach yourself c in 21 days
i printed all 600 or so pages from the pdf and practiced a whole summer during high school1 -
(Note: I got a bit carried away while writing this, so the end result is a lot longer than I expected. Apologies for the long post!)
The beginning of my programming journey started with a book.
This was back in 7th grade. I had some basic exposure to BASIC (pun maybe intended?) from our school curriculum, but it was nothing too interesting as our teachers never really treated it as anything important. They would stress a lot on those Microsoft Office chapters (yes, we actually studied Microsoft Office as part of our computer science course at school) and mostly ignore the programming chapters because I dare say many of them struggled with it themselves. So although I had been exposed to *some* programming, it was mostly memorizing the syntax without actually understanding what was going on.
Then one day there was this book fair thing going on at this local Carrefour (for those of you who've no idea, it's a pretty famous hypermarket chain) in this mall, and for some reason my mother and I were in that mall on that day. Now the interesting thing is that this usually never happens -- I usually visit malls with my dad or my friends, this is the only instance I remember where I had actually visited one with just my mom. This turned out to be fortuitous. My father is the kind of person who's generally not amenable to any kind of extraneous shopping requests. My mother, on the other hand, was and remains pliable.
So I basically saw this book -- Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours -- being sold at half price. I vaguely remembered having read somewhere that JavaScript is a good introductory programming language (and it helped that this was the time when I was getting into a Google-craze -- I basically saw some photos of Google Zurich and went all HOLY SHIT THAT'S WHERE I NEED TO WORK WHEN I GROW UP (for those of you who haven't seen it, I recommend googling it. That office is the bomb) -- and I'd also read that you need programming skills to join Google). So I begged and begged my mum to buy that book, and thankfully she did.
Back home I returned with my new prize under my arm. Dad took one look at it and scoffed that I'll never actually use it. Pretty much entirely out of spite (to prove him wrong), I attacked the book with a zeal. I still remember how I felt when I wrote my very first JavaScript program (printing the current system date in an h1 tag) and marveling at the output. I guess that was when something struck -- the realization that this was probably what I wanted to do in life.
Fast forward to today, and I've never looked back and wondered what it would be like to have done something else.
PS: for all you beginners out there, JavaScript is a horrible language. Please start with something like Python. Also there are better resources than Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours available, that I just didn't know of back then. I'd recommend Eloquent JavaScript any day. -
I think discussing / talking about whether your educations are useful or not is always gonna be a never ending debate.
Each person has their own unique way to nurture their true potentials. In my case, I always "thought" that taking college in Computer Science is such a waste of time and money, even I still try to survive with it these 3 years. In my first year, I fight a lot with my parents because I always said I wanna drop out and just get to work. But in the end...I still continue my journey for 3 years and yeah...I currently struggling to graduate. Maybe, after graduate, it will be a waste of time and money like how I thought about it. But I also learn that taking college journey have teach me a lot of things, like meeting so mane different kind of friends / people, time-management, etc. Maybe those Study Materials in Class will be forgotten in just a few years after I graduate, but those other life-lessons I believe will remain in myself for a long time...
Some people said if you are someone who wanna work hard, study hard, and have the grit to learn by yourself and committed to become a developer by yourself, you don't need college. But if you are someone who still find out your way, still figuring out whether it's the best choice to take computer science or not as a carreer, and you don't wanna waste time doing nothing, just get yourself to college.
The point is...it's just how we try to find out what's actually worked for us even if it's not the best choice.rant studying computer science computer science study life college life life motivation life of programmer wk145 collegelife college wisdom2 -
fallacy of a "good child". m:mom/dad s:son/daughter , o: outcome.
counter : 1
m : Son, can you do this thing x for me?
s : yes sure
o : son is good
counter : 2
m : Son, can you do this thing x for me?
s : yes sure, give me 5 mins
after 5 mins...
--case 1 : m is still waiting, s comes and does the work
---o : son is bad since son let m wait
--case 2 : m did half of x and says "just teach me how this part is done, and i will do it on my own". s teaches
---o : son is bad since son didnot do the task
--case 3 : m does the whole x work
---o : son is bad since son did not do the task
counter 3
m : Son, can you do this thing x for me?
case 1)s : why can't you do it yourself? i taught you last time?
--- o : son is bad
case 2) yes give me 5 mins
---o : same as cases of counter 2, i.e all are bad
counter : misc
m : why didn't you do x for me beforehand? why do i need to tell you everytime?
case 1 s : woah! when did you say to do it each day?
--- o1 : son is bad since he cross questioned
case 2 s : oh am sorry, i forgot
--- o2 : son is bad as he intentionally forgets
----
am i not seeing enough politics in the office each day to handle another black tag on me? i sometimes delay a task assigned to me, sometimes want other to just understand and do it on their own. but why does it always end up making me a bad offspring?1 -
I want to teach you two peacekeeping methods that can help you diffuse difficult situations.
Method 1: before engaging in a heated internet argument, ask yourself: “What is my absolutely best case scenario endgame here?” To me, it’s often something like “Yes, you’re right, my entire life up to this point was a lie, I will read everything you wrote as a prayer every night to strive to be like you in every way.” Yes, this will definitely make my day, but in the grand scheme of things I won’t care. So why settle for less? The grand prize of this special olympics isn’t worth the effort.
Method 2: reading the intent. When you feel uncomfortable talking to someone, ask yourself: “What is their intent? Why are they saying me this?”
If the intent is to tear you down, see method 1. Anyone can be fooled, no exceptions. You losing an argument doesn’t diminish who you are, at all. If you fear it will, then work with your fear directly. It probably has nothing to do with this one argument.
If the intent is to help you, but they don’t know how to explain it without sounding hostile, then discard their tone. Read the message, accept it and tell them “Yes, you’re right, I get what you’re saying.”
Saying “I was wrong” immediately makes people perceive you as brave. It’s the virtue of strong people to be able to admit defeat.2 -
The access to knowledge online is really good. You can pretty much teach yourself everything you need to get a job that would need a degree.1
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Well not like friends as such but kinda of get people respect when you are good at it.
It was during 12th Grade while working on our project for the year , everyone had some kind of doubt and you know the Teacher is not always free to help every one so after looking at what me and my friends were creating she said approach them for your doubts.
Well I can be a prick sometime if I want to be mostly because you are writing bad code or your facts are wrong hence not a lot of them used to like , like me.
But after that they had no option hence felt pretty badass after that.
And like not that I was criticizing them but it you don't want to learn then please solve your own doubts yourself.
Maybe I was wrong to you know to teach everyone. but well that's me do it right else don't do it. -
I am starting to teach competitive programming in my college. And now I am tired of people asking me if they should bring their laptop or not. I mean seriously. I wrote pdfs on tutorial and notes for them and they are like laptops are heavy.
And I am getting irritating at questions like first class if we will be doing something important in first class or not.
How can I say if it will be important or not. It depends on how good you already are in competitive programming and CS concepts.
I upload every pdf for class on githubs and shared it. Why don't you just check it for yourself.
Damn irritated. -
Effective 1:1s are perhaps the most important soft skill that no one teaches you.
The HR onboarding section for 1:1s is only chapter one. But your manager won't teach you, your skip level won't teach you, and your mentor won't teach you. At best one of them even has an effective 1:1 skill set.
90% of 1:1s become operations: What went wrong this week and what needs to happen next week. Basically a private standup.
You attend 1:1s all year and yet somehow your manager doesn't know the difficulties you overcame, what you'd like to change, or how you're pushing yourself to grow. Then you get re-orged to a new manager.
If like to meet someone with effective 1:1s *and* low job satisfaction.3 -
For the first year or so, for me at least, I found that loads of my classes didn’t teach much other than rote learning. Loads of this does that, here’s an example code to look at. I bet most of us would’ve learned quicker if we got to play with the code and figure stuff out yourself.