My journey to becoming a better Software Engineer

[PikaDaDon]

Alright been following this youtube playlist:



Made a bubble sort visualizer using pygame: pikadadon/BubbleSortVisualization

The application interface was completely unnecessary but I was familiarizing myself with python and utilizing constructs that I'm already familiar with (encapsulation, inheritance, etc.)

Anyway, I was thinking of some sort of project I can do. I'll avoid making a simple game but instead make a game that utilizes a backend server somehow. Since I'm trying to become a backend developer. Maybe some kind of simple game folks on thecoli can play together.

This looks interesting:


Never played agario before but looks like the perfect project. Might have to use javascript instead though. If it's a web game anybody can play it. Whereas a desktop app made in python would require people to download the app and run it on their computer. Might be some trust issues there.

 

[Cereal_Bowl_Assassin]

October 31st 2019

• As I assumed when I first started this thread that solving coding problems would slow me down the most and they did just that today. I'm not even sweating it because there is going to be good days and bad days but i do feel my confidence rising slowly.

 

[PikaDaDon]

October 31st 2019

• As I assumed when I first started this thread that solving coding problems would slow me down the most and they did just that today. I'm not even sweating it because there is going to be good days and bad days but i do feel my confidence rising slowly.

Solving code katas/leet code and making actual software are two different skillsets. Those brain teasers are only good for job interviews and are a poor way to judge the quality of a programmer. I personally think it's better to try to make little apps.

 

[Cereal_Bowl_Assassin]

Solving code katas/leet code and making actual software are two different skillsets. Those brain teasers are only good for job interviews and are a poor way to judge the quality of a programmer. I personally think it's better to try to make little apps.

Props bro I did what you suggested today and it helped with my confidence. But I agree and that is one of the things I dislike about the whole interview process. I always said the hardest part of my job was when I was interviewing and attempting to solve coding challnlenges

 

[Cereal_Bowl_Assassin]

November 1st, 2019

• Had a small breakthrough with solving some coding challenges so I'm happy about that.
• Started building some basic apps that @PikaDaDon suggested and that was helpful. Hopefully I will start to post them on this site

 

[Archimedes]

1) I think you got hired because you have college degrees. For someone such as myself who is a dropout I'll have to work 10x as hard to get to where you're at. That piece of paper holds a great deal of value for some hiring companies. I personally knew a guy in Illinois who got hired for a frontend role yet.....he doesn't know any javascript (he was learning it). Only had an unrelated degree in security.

2) If I were making 'well above 6 figures' I wouldn't even be posting in thecoli. I'd be getting a rub down by two busty Asian chicks in a hotel room in Atlantic City.

3) I see the term 'DevOps' gets used frequently but personally I have no idea what that is. I've never heard a simple explanation for it.

It's everything that surrounds and aids traditional dev work. Programming that facilitates programming if you will. If you want something more concrete, think in terms of deployment: writing a piece of code that runs on your local machine is one thing, but a lot goes into overall infrastructure needed to reliably deliver and automate stuff. Think of the modern pipeline. You'll have some devs pushing to git which will trigger some job on a build machine which will run tests, artifacts will be pushed on some cloud repo, then there's the automation tools needed to deploy.

You could write all of this in bash, but that would be dumb, there's plenty of nice DSL's to help. Look into technologies like Jenkins/Travis for build machines/continuous integration and chef/ansible for deployment and vm management. Cloud solutions are everywhere now, stuff like aws would fit into devops.

 

[Cereal_Bowl_Assassin]

November 2nd, 2019

• Limited time today, so I studied for 3 hours, building apps and relearning how the internet works
  • Will break this down when I have more time

 

[desjardins]

Check out anki for studying
I use it to remember small programming tidbits that are easy to forget.
For example today I made an anki card on the fact that java arrays are initialized at run time not compile time
This is useful to know because it means you can initialize the arrays with methods that resolve at runtime (almost like functional programming in a way)
That’s something I almost never do in real life but is good to know in case someone asks you about it in a interview
6 hours a day after full time job might burn you out too man, remember to let your brain rest

 

[Hood Critic]

Microsoft has a decent series of videos on their Developer Network Youtube channel for anyone who wants to learn enough Python to hit the ground running:

Python for Beginners - YouTube

 

[PikaDaDon]

Microsoft has a decent series of videos on their Developer Network Youtube channel for anyone who wants to learn enough Python to hit the ground running:

Python for Beginners - YouTube

44 videos. Sounds like tutorial hell.

 

[Hood Critic]

44 videos. Sounds like tutorial hell.

They're broken up well. The instructors are as corny as you'd expect but it was a good refresher and I feel like the content is relevant and to the point for someone getting started.

 

[Cereal_Bowl_Assassin]

November 6th, 2019

• We have been having multiple server outages at my job over the past few days. infrastructure was almost brought to its knees as well
• Things look l;ike theyve been fixed but I wasn't able to do much side work because my real work got in the way

I'm starting to get comfortable with Python again and I'm about to ramp it up once i complete this postmortem for the infra/server outages..

• I'm trying to decide on what my first major project should be. a website, an a.i. chatbot or some kind of social media app

 

[Cereal_Bowl_Assassin]

Check out anki for studying
I use it to remember small programming tidbits that are easy to forget.
For example today I made an anki card on the fact that java arrays are initialized at run time not compile time
This is useful to know because it means you can initialize the arrays with methods that resolve at runtime (almost like functional programming in a way)
That’s something I almost never do in real life but is good to know in case someone asks you about it in a interview
6 hours a day after full time job might burn you out too man, remember to let your brain rest

Youre definitely right about that. If I dont get one day of doing nothing then i feel off and that is whats happening right now. each sunday I'm not going to do anything work/code related lol

 

[Cereal_Bowl_Assassin]

November 9th, 2019

• Started working on my chat bot but ran into some memory issue that I couldnt get around with just using python. So I'm going to use c or java. C was my first programming language but I never learned java. Going to research both and then continue from there

 

[PikaDaDon]

November 9th, 2019

• Started working on my chat bot but ran into some memory issue that I couldnt get around with just using python. So I'm going to use c or java. C was my first programming language but I never learned java. Going to research both and then continue from there

You abandoned an entire language because of a single issue? C is too low leveled and Java is too verbose.

I strongly recommend go