61–70 of 83 posts
One day, when I was teaching 7yo kids, my vocal cords failed me. I suddenly could not make a faintest sound with my mouth, and the condition persisted for a few hours.
Turns out, not everyone has a strong voice. It can be helped with some training, but I was told I should look for other career paths. I worked as Computational Linguist for a few years, then went into software development.
Parents got me in the nice school where we're studying QBasic since the 5th grade and I still remember how QB core library contains functions for drawing a simple geometry. Coupled with a for loops you could do some dead simple animations, and it was fascinating.
First two years in uni were quite fruitful and I'd managed to land a internship at internationally known company. Last two years were a liability, and while doing the minimum to avoid dropout, I picked up Sapper/Svelte, then Elixir.
Writing a thesis subject in Elixir/Phoenix was perhaps the highest gain spontaneous decision in my life to date. Nobody ever learn Elixir in uni as a part of a course, so your adversary candidates pool is tiny, comparing to the vast masses of java/python/js/c++ graduates. Perhaps this was the main reason of me being hired fresh outta college with less than a 3 months of experience :)
But the job itself is meh:
- fully remote, no spying, can spread 8h how I want (4 in the morning and 4 in the evening, doing whatever during the day)
- pay is higher than I would ever get at junior position in mainstream languages
- team is nice
- but ridiculously low-quality legacy code
- previous devs had left with close to no documentation, so codebase ownership is low
- long time lags in processes, mostly due to the management
That eventually led to HTML multiplayer browser games (ogame and similar were popular in high school.) Once I figured out what F12 and greasemonkey could do, I had a lot of fun making shortcuts, auto-assignments, etc. I didn't love Flash games nearly as much because I didn't know how to interact with them. I had a couple geocities sites around this time, but had no idea what a backend or database was despite really wanting a visitor counter.
Bachelors in college taught me mostly backend stuff. That led to a lot of data scraping for various things, some of which went further than others. The most intense scraping was for a major collectible site that eventually CSS-sprited all of their text; cracking that was fun. This particular project was for a hobby of mine so my friends and network could get some price advantage on large moves by the major vendors; I was in/just out of college around this time, so the money part was important to me at the time. This data passion later shifted into personal financial tooling after college for my own unmet needs around investment.
I skipped the masters+ stuff and was happy to go right into industry. Work went from internship->job in backend (java) to ops (db admin of a mongo cluster on misc unix machines) to my current fullstack python/javascript set of roles. I mostly skipped FAANG stuff since I didn't want to stop hacking on my personal projects, but many of my college friends have had great success in those companies.
Now: Recently switched out of one of the large tier2 micromobility operators into a different vertical. Getting back into "hacker" mode after a multi-year hiatus for personal stuff.
Love: doing things, impact, perf problems, interviewing, stitching together data sources (Quandl/crypto, collectibles, games, economy data), etc. Advising an investor on whether they should care about this new "blockchain" thing for their financial services startup was pretty fun too. I love being able to spin up small MVPs quickly with tools like React and Mongo.
What he showed us was the most beautiful thing I have ever see in my life at the time. My jaw felt on the ground and never my life was the same after that.
The guy's managed to software-render some sort of parabolic shape made of colored polygons in 13h 320x200 graphical mode. And it was fluid as hell. Nothing like Doom but just knowing he did that was enough for me. Later, he also made a comanche style voxel engine and something I've never seen since: real-time perspective-correct texture mapping on curved surfaces (we're talking about a program that runs at 60Hz on a 133Mhz cpu). Without internet, without books. Just looked at games. The kid was a genius and would have made a terrific career was he in the US. As would I. I study all his C and asm code and a few years later was making a software rendered quake clone. Disclaimer: I had books and Internet.
I had no intentions of going to college, but my parents prompted it. That was a very smart idea. I did a two-year degree/diploma with a co-op option. I finished with high grades and after graduation got a job with one of the places where I did co-op.
The majority of my career was focused on what we'd now call "full stack" development. I started near the bottom (embedded & mobile) and moved into desktop, server, database, and cloud.
I thought that I would we a programmer forever, but kind of burned out in my mid-30's. I got sick of framework fatigue -- having to re-learn half the stack every few years. So I switch to the dark side and became a development manager. Been doing that for almost 15 years now, but I still keep very close to development by participating in architecture and prototyping.
First, first started with a web-page summer class in middle-school. We learned HTML and a tiny bit of CSS/JS, all handwritten in Notepad and copied and pasted into Geocities (c. 2002)
I was strong in math and science at a young age and wanted to be an astronaut, but wearing glasses, I decided being an engineer (of some sort) would be better.
In High School, I went to an engineering Magnet school, so I got to play with Lego Mindstorm and other robotics. We built a solid-state rocket that broke the sound barrier and I helped program the beacon used to help find it when it came down.
Between high school and college, I picked up "C++ for Dummies" and while I didn't learn much, it at least introduced some concepts (like pointers and classes) and syntax.
In college, the books I consider the most influential were: "The Pragmatic Programmer" (that's a career-defining book) and my favorite languages were C ("The C Programming Language" by K&R) and Ruby ("The Ruby Programming Language" from O'Reilly).
For today's programers, I'd suggest Python (it's ubiquitous, and perfect for learning and building fundamentals) and/or JavaScript (also ubiquitous for working with the web).
> What is your experience with university? Did you get a degree, was it worth it, do you think it helped you find work, what did you love/hate about uni?
I went to a state college (Texas Tech University) because it's what my family could afford. I got into more prestigious colleges (MIT, NYU) but would've had to take on massive college debt as I didn't qualify for much financial aid nor many scholarships. (Not rich enough or genius enough nor poor nor dumb). I still decided to make the best of my situation and replicate the MIT EE/CS program by dual-majoring in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science.
I'm really glad I did EE/CS dual-major b/c it gave me a full spectrum of understanding: from electrons->fields->gates->circuits->low-level architecture->operating systems-> C -> C++ -> Java -> Python -> Lisp
Also at the time, CS wasn't as solid of a career path after the dot-com bubble. It was honestly nice to have an EE degree as a "backup" and I also did most of my programming for my EE lab work.
Given that I made the frugal decision to stay in-state, take on minimal loans by living at home, and got two degrees out of 5-years, and the college really helped me find my first job through career fairs (even in the tail-end of a recession), I would definitely say that a degree was worth it. I was also the first in my family to ever graduate from college, which was/is a major source of pride for me and my family. I also met my fiancé-now-wife in college and other life-long friends. I worked through college at the college IT dept as well, in addition to my 15-18hr course load. This got me tangentially-relevant work experience. College and work taught me how to study and work efficiently and effectively.
There's definitely a larger no-degree movement and I would never say you need a degree; there's also a lot a degree entails that is nonsense.
My EE & CS classes were worthwhile and taught me the most fundamental concepts of programming: language (as in language design, compilers, interpreters), functions, recursion, pointers. You really understand "the stack" when you build C-function calls in assembly. You understand compiler errors better when you've written one. Again, not saying you need to go to university to learn these things; just sharing that these parts were what's valuable.
> How did you get your first paid work (family & friends, internship, freelance, full-time)?
Career fair and interviewing pretty much my whole last year at uni. I already had an internship, which also greatly helped.
> What do you do now and what do you love/hate about your job?
I'm a senior software engineer. I love the coding and the scale and scope at which my work applies. I can launch features to literally millions of people and help generate hundreds of millions of dollars in donations. I get to learn new concepts and apply them.
I love that I pretty much set my hours, I work comfortably indoors. I work remotely, so my gym, my dog, and my wife are just a room or two away. I don't like office nonsense (arguing over fridge space or who filled the coffee or what did you do this weekend), so remote is fantastic. And I love* the pay.
I hate the inefficiencies and bad politics, but that's just part of white-collar work. When people would rather feel right or appear smart than be right or smart. When metrics are given priority over substance; when how something is measured is prioritized over what the measurement was meant to represent (an analogy would be chasing a higher credit score while you're in deep debt to your family or losing weight by cutting off a limb). Long-term results are sacrificed for short-term gains.
I'm happy to share more.
* My opinions are my own and not my employers. I don't speak for them nor they for me.
I got into computers when my dad brought a Commodore Vic-20 home in 1982. Learned BASIC by typing in programs from Compute magazine. Then in high school they taught us Turbo Pascal on the PC. I had no intentions of going to college, but my parents prompted it. That was a very smart idea. I did a two-year degree/diploma with a co-op option. I finished with high grades and after graduation got a job with one of the pla…
Are you me?!?! I bought a copy of QuickC after pascal got boring, msft's documentation that shipped in the box was excellent and I learned a ton from those books. QuickC's stdlib was really buggy though, felt like a hobby project compared to MSBasic.