11–20 of 48 posts
It's like asking people on the internet what you should eat for dinner or who you should marry. Unless you don't learn programming just for the sake of it (assuming that's true based on the question you are asking), you either haven't learned enough yet to broaden your horizons to get ideas, or don't have enough geeky hobbies to put your new skills in motion. Have fun finding out what it is.
The best way to learn is to build something for someone else. When someone else sets the requirements you have to engage in real problem solving and research the best tech to solve the problem. This keeps you from following just the easiest path as well as exposes you too new ideas. You can do this at work, for a local non profit, for your friend's weird startup idea, ...
I had the most prolific time of my life, when out of work for 6 months, and I did completely random projects, a 2048 solver (it was trendy at that time), a connect-four adversary and many others ideas https://caub.github.io/misc/, just imagination, learning the algorithms, also some leetcode for future interviews, still then this moment helped a lot building myself
If I had to single out a single project that I think advanced my understanding the most, it would have to be building a computer from scratch and writing the OS and a C compiler for it.
They even pay me for it too!
I don't know what you're after, but if your aim is to go into software development as a profession then read on. Otherwise skip the rest.
Honestly, if you have the fundamentals down you can probably find an entry level job and learn the rest on the job. No tutorials will prepare you for real experience in software development.
Programming is only about 20% of software development in my experience. It's a critical 20% that you can't do without, but the rest is hard to prepare for and best just to get real experience of.
There's no point spending forever learning to be the best in the world at that 20% without discovering if you even enjoy the other 80%. There are even far too many who hate that 80% and often will not be scared to share this disdain freely.
The trick is to ignore them, fully engage with the whole job and you'll quickly out pace them in career development, and you'll likely enjoy your job a whole lot more too.
Could build a vue js SPA frontend that dynamically renders a table of things (fake pet food sales?) based on a call to AWS dynamodb. Could use AWS Lambda to implement a server side auth layer. Would get some decent AWS exposure (deploying vuejs with S3 and cloudfront, possible serverless lambda experience plus API Gateway), some nosql experience, would learn the request response lifecycle and how frontends actually w…
More important, in my experience, is to find someone tough but super knowledgeable to review your code. Try to anticipate what kind of notes you'll get if open you a PR with your code as it is, and then fix that stuff before you open the PR. Write a checklist of stuff that keeps getting picked on by better coders than yourself, print out the list, and tape it to your office wall.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a nice response, what were those bits of code that made you smile?
Two come to mind quickly: Spending a night or two trying to tune 2D chemical matching code to gain 10-20% and ending up with a factor of 3x. Bought the group lunch for that one. The other was creating an application that hung together well and was easy to use. Took several iterations of the GUI to have something that did more than cause confusion... They say the best GUI's aren't memorable because they're not in the…