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Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

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Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#21
post #15

When writing a small application in Go I had great success asking Chat GPT specific questions. It helped me figure out which packages I needed to use and how to interact with them. I understand that this might not fit your use-case, but it's worth a try. Just be aware that it tends to hallucinate APIs.

If it does hallucinate, you can just paste it the latest documentation and the hallucination rate goes to nearly zero.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#23
post #15

When writing a small application in Go I had great success asking Chat GPT specific questions. It helped me figure out which packages I needed to use and how to interact with them. I understand that this might not fit your use-case, but it's worth a try. Just be aware that it tends to hallucinate APIs.

>Just be aware that it tends to hallucinate APIs.

It gives you nice little hints and a different perspective on your api design itself. I'd have a chat with chatgpt and sometimes I'd miss to share specific code and it just assumes or hallucinate on that.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#25
post #15

When writing a small application in Go I had great success asking Chat GPT specific questions. It helped me figure out which packages I needed to use and how to interact with them. I understand that this might not fit your use-case, but it's worth a try. Just be aware that it tends to hallucinate APIs.

If it does hallucinate, you can just paste it the latest documentation and the hallucination rate goes to nearly zero.

Or it apologizes profusely, tells you you’re correct, and fails to fix its reasoning or the examples it gives you.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#26
https://www.manning.com/books/the-little-elixir-and-otp-guid...

I read this book years ago when i was first learning elixir. I was coding for about 8 years at the time, so not new to the game.

I liked it a lot. I don't think i wrote every project in the book, but it helped me wrap my head around OTP and how erland/elixir projects are structured.

Highly recommend it.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#27
post #15

When writing a small application in Go I had great success asking Chat GPT specific questions. It helped me figure out which packages I needed to use and how to interact with them. I understand that this might not fit your use-case, but it's worth a try. Just be aware that it tends to hallucinate APIs.

If it does hallucinate, you can just paste it the latest documentation and the hallucination rate goes to nearly zero.

Does it actually consume the documentation? You could (haven’t tried in a while) also have ChatGPT tell you anything you wanted aslong as you stated “It’s been posted on Wikipedia after your last consumed date”.

I feel like telling it that it’s wrong and linking documentation is the same as referring to Wikipedia?

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#28
post #15

When writing a small application in Go I had great success asking Chat GPT specific questions. It helped me figure out which packages I needed to use and how to interact with them. I understand that this might not fit your use-case, but it's worth a try. Just be aware that it tends to hallucinate APIs.

The person asking the question seems to be looking for a course or textbook with which to challenge themselves.

What you've described is the opposite of that.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it does hallucinate, you can just paste it the latest documentation and the hallucination rate goes to nearly zero.

Or it apologizes profusely, tells you you’re correct, and fails to fix its reasoning or the examples it gives you.

I told it to stop apologising all the time. It apologised for doing that :)

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#30
post #3

My take is that there’s such variance in people’s skill levels and so it’s really hard to cater educational programming content. Personally, I’ve found getting introductory books/courses and skimming through it until you hit something that you don’t understand and then diving deeper into that bit.

It is interesting, though, that you can easily get intermediate training and coaching in basically any sport. But the thing you do for money? Take this very ad-hoc approach.

Concepts and excercises in sport don't change that frequently comparing to programming. Programming is very ad-hoc indeed, it has way more variables for the intermediate level so that the coach won't have enough time to digest the details.
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