IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Deathwing

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Lol.... then count yourself as very lucky in the jobs you have had so far.

Just sharing my opinion for others who are thinking of becoming developers.

Vast majority of programming jobs have absolutely NOTHING to do with automating the computer in an intelligent OR creative manner. If you ever do any consulting.... especially business and or finance (where a lot of the money is) .... good luck finding the handfulls of jobs that require intelligence or creativity. The rest just require minions. But you can make boatloads of money fleecing suckers doing dumb shit automation stuff all day.

To stay a developer for along time and fit your definition would IMO require working on products that are interesting, challenging and require skill, intelligence and creativity AND working on a NICE team..... Your average programming gig is not that at all. Some areas like High Performance Computing or big tech companies such as IBM, AMD, Google or Intel you might have an easier time:), but the bar of entry and experience to get there is pretty high.

Never said my jobs came close to that ;) My current one involves reviewing test results 25% - 50% of the day so devs can fix their stupid shit they'd rather not bother testing properly first. If there's time after that, I get to work on that intelligence and creativeness part. All the easy parts of automating our test system has been done long ago, so it's just difficult things like browser tests for example. Kinda interesting, but holy shit, fuck selenium.

What do you consider dumb automation?
 

alavaz

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I learned HTML in like 95 before CSS and got stuck in the table mindset. If I'm being real though, I still like tables better since they scale very predictably.

JavaScript is funky as fuck. I read an article once about people going to great lengths to obscure it and someone wrote a script that created more javascript that was the script that was actually executed (using eval) by scraping characters from messages returned from errors. So in a nutshell, it would run a bunch of code that caused exceptions, build a character set from those error messages, and then write more javascript that actually worked.

check out JSFuck - Write any JavaScript with 6 Characters: []()!+ as I think it was based on the idea above.
 

Noodleface

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I learned html back when html 4.0 came out, right around when dhtml and html 5 were around the corner.

I feel like if I designed a website it would be all tables too. And frames.
 

Ao-

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So I want to pick up coding (and mainly I want to write up my own smallish website), any suggestions for someone with zero skill?
 

Asshat wormie

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What is he going to do with C when he wants to write a website? I say learn Ruby and then the Rails framework Or better yet Python and then the flask or Django framework . Or if you want to be cool, Elixir and Phoenix framework.
 

chaos

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So I want to pick up coding (and mainly I want to write up my own smallish website), any suggestions for someone with zero skill?
I used the No Starch books to learn Python. Pretty easy.
 
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Noodleface

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What is he going to do with C when he wants to write a website? I say learn Ruby and then the Rails framework Or better yet Python and then the flask or Django framework . Or if you want to be cool, Elixir and Phoenix framework.
Twas a joke
 

Tenks

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Assembly for sure


INBvStO.png
 
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Asshat wormie

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I know it was a joke but I am amused that Assembly got suggested before PHP :D
 

Big_w_powah

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...and making headway into scoring our first full blown MSP-style contract. If I get this, I can mic drop and bounce happy. :)
 
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chaos

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I know it was a joke but I am amused that Assembly got suggested before PHP :D
C probably isn't a bad idea really, I wish I had learned that, would make some of the things I'm doing now a lot easier. Instead they taught me Java and PHP in school.
 

Cad

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Java is fine it just abstracts away pointer concepts, which are important to understand how it works if you want to understand data structures.

I have no idea why any school would teach anybody PHP.
 

chaos

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Luckily they made the class so unbearable that I'd rather seppuku than write another line of PHP ever again.
 

Asshat wormie

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Java is fine it just abstracts away pointer concepts, which are important to understand how it works if you want to understand data structures.

I have no idea why any school would teach anybody PHP.

Not that it means dick but up until this year, Harvard's intro to CS was in C, PHP, JS with CSS/HTML sprinkled over some portion of the projects. This year PHP has been dumped in favor of Python.

Anyway, C or Scheme/Racket (personally i would pick Racket, or even Haskell, for the minds unpolluted with procedural/OOP programming) are probably the best way to start a formal CS education but if someone wants to cobble together a website, python with flask is the way to go i would think (django has too much shit in it, flask is slimmer).
 
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Ao-

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I used the No Starch books to learn Python. Pretty easy.
Have a link (or an ebook)?

I'll go with python and then migrate to flask/django. I'm surrounding by python experts, so I can bother them for help.
 

alavaz

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Java is fine it just abstracts away pointer concepts, which are important to understand how it works if you want to understand data structures.

I have no idea why any school would teach anybody PHP.

You can accomplish the same shit in PHP as you can in any other interpreted language. I don't know why it would be a bad choice as it was probably the most popular web dev language until recently. Even then, I'm sure there's tons of PHP in the wild still.