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Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

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Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's so freaking cool. Git rocks, and I remember how psyched I was when I learned about it. What's your next project?

I'm not sure. I'm always messing around with different projects. I used blocklike.js to jump from Scratch to JavaScript. Then I worked for months on this one game for the app store called Sticky Quest. You can find it here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sticky-quest/id1425679649?mt... This how I learned how to use npm packages such as Cordova and Eslint.

You could try expanding this project beyond elementary CAs.

One option is a 'totalistic' CA which looks at the average value of a given neighborhood, and can have more than two states.

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TotalisticCellularAutomaton.htm...

Or you could generate CAs with different starting conditions. Some beautiful elementary CAs don't 'show up' with just one initial point.

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#122
post #71

This is awesome! Keep up the good work. As a fellow developer who began writing software around your age, I have some advice that is definitely subjective and biased, but which you may indeed find helpful. 1. Keep practicing. Practice makes perfect. Explore different languages, frameworks, and problem spaces (interfaces, servers, distributed systems, statistics, etc.) to see what you find most interesting. You will m…

+1 for not recommending build systems

9. Use webpack!

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#123
You're off to an amazing start!

I'd say just find stuff that genuinely interests you and try to build it. I got my start focusing on games, but whatever gets you excited. You're already way ahead of the curve, so have fun with it, experiment, and you'll do great things :)

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#125
Good job! I mentor college CS majors whose code is not as clean as this. Seriously.

I would also recommend checking out The Coding Train. NYU ITP Daniel Shiffman's lectures on creative coding. It's time to get started with graphics ;)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvjgXvBlbQiydffZU7m1_aw

And to get a headstart in Artificial Intelligence, from the same author comes the ml5.js library: friendly machine learning for the web. Best of luck!

https://ml5js.org/

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#126

This is awesome! Keep up the good work. As a fellow developer who began writing software around your age, I have some advice that is definitely subjective and biased, but which you may indeed find helpful. 1. Keep practicing. Practice makes perfect. Explore different languages, frameworks, and problem spaces (interfaces, servers, distributed systems, statistics, etc.) to see what you find most interesting. You will m…

This is not just good advice for a successful programming career, but if you can pull it off, pretty much any field that one is passionate about.

As a scientist, if one is a scientist and has abided these ideas, they'd ramp up the food-chain pretty quickly.

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#127
Good for you young jedi. I started coding around that age as well. I made the mistake of not going through comp-sci but have still been able to work for Google, publish books, lead teams and companies and products. You'll do just fine.

You have the ability to write some code! If you want to get a jumpstart, you should take the princeton algorithms course (for free!): https://www.coursera.org/learn/algorithms-part1

Or read the textbook by sedgewick that accompanies the course. https://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/home/

There is very little math in there - it may take some elbow grease and mentorship to help to convey some of the ideas - but I believe that you could implement and solve most everything in there. That was my path - I had a teacher at the age of 14 who would explain to me how different algorithms worked and I would go and implement them. Drawing a circle (in memory - it was in C!) or sorting a list (we did bubblesort first IIRC!)

I think you could do it! I believe in you! The course material is approachable - much more so than basically every other algorithms/data-structures material I've found. it may take you some time but you'll be soooo far ahead with your thinking about code.

If you ever start working with Object oriented languages like Java, another book that may help you when you've gone down the road a bit is the Head First Design Patterns book. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596007126.do It's very easy to read, mostly pictures. It is made to be very easy to read (all of the books in that series are so look around at them.)

It's helpful to do both - code and also take in some material, but at 12 I imagine some of the material may be a bit daunting. You're doing really well - keep it up.

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Startup Idea: Start a slack/discord group for aspiring students between the ages of [pick your age range, say (8-18)] and start a mentoring/support group with these like-minds... You'll learn, build relationships and some of you will go off and found companies together.

Starting a Slack group for students is a good idea, but decidedly not a startup idea.

What about a saas to support the companies providing groups for slack.
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