Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A 37-year-old wanting to learn computer science

initcoder.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 190 posts

Re: A 37-year-old wanting to learn computer science

#111

Post by andrew_lettuce »

pglevy wrote: post #95

What I took away from your post was not that you want to learn computer science but that you want to build things with software. If so, now is a really exciting time because it's never been easier for people without a CS background to go from idea to working software. As a UX designer, I've worked with developers for a long time, so I've picked up knowledge along the way. I've read some books and merged some PRs at w…

This helps with building, but how does it help with the learning? You don't understand how it was built, how it works out how to change our support it without an LLM. this is a very specific, narrow way of building.

Re: A 37-year-old wanting to learn computer science

#113

Post by e12e »

anthk wrote: post #98
chbkall wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for sharing these valuable resources. I am already on to the OCW Python course and SICP textbook. How did you start on these resources? Did you start reading them because you needed them in your current project Or did you read them because you thought they will be useful for your project?

Also, install chicken as the scheme interpreter, but do the classical SICP. After you got it installed, run: chicken-install srfi-203 chicken-install srfi-216 then, edit a text file called ~/.csirc with the contents: (import scheme) (import (srfi 203)) (import (srfi 216))

I thought racket had a #lang for sicp?

https://docs.racket-lang.org/sicp-manual/SICP_Language.html

Re: A 37-year-old wanting to learn computer science

#114

Post by andrew_lettuce »

trollbridge wrote: post #102
jspash wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ageism is as real as any other prejudice. And unfortunately it's just a difficult to prove. I've seen the faces of the room full of "kids" (yea, that's reverse ageism I suppose) when doing remote interviews and watched them drop as soon as I appear on the screen. Then it's just a matter of speeding me through the interview until they can find the candidate with the "right team dynamic" or "culture fit" etc. The excus…

I would simply ask upfront if they’re open to hiring over 40 and/or hiring with a disability (and then mention I’m not litigious and simply don’t want waste their time if they aren’t looking for that, no hard feelings). I actually had a few places admit they are not going to hire over 40 + a disability after I made it clear I have no intentions to sue.

That's pretty stupid on their part, considering you're not permitted to break the law because the aggrieved party is "ok with it". This is typically a civil rights issue handled by government enforcement

Re: A 37-year-old wanting to learn computer science

#116

Post by zahlman »

dnate wrote: post #101
zahlman wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have severe ADHD. I could not survive in the tech world without treatment and medication. YMMV, but you should get treatment if you haven't already. I won't speak for OP, but from what I've been able to figure out locally, it's quite difficult (will take years and is largely down to chance, and anything you might to do help the process along is inhibited by the condition itself) to even get a diagnosis unless you…

Or live in a first world country with decent healthcare.

I was talking about Canada.

Re: A 37-year-old wanting to learn computer science

#117

Post by manuel_w »

upghost wrote: post #58

If you want to speed run things and you have a little money to spend, I'd check out Dave Beazley's workshops, particularly his Advanced Python Mastery course[1]. One advantage you have over senior developers is that senior developers need to be generalists, you have the opportunity to go deep. It is entirely conceivable you could learn Postgres, JavaScript, or Python better than someone who has been programming in th…

It sounds like you attended this workshop and can recommend it. Is that true?

Re: A 37-year-old wanting to learn computer science

#118

Post by kbelder »

Disposal8433 wrote: post #79
chbkall wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you give me a small example of the kind of small irritations you are talking about here?

Not OP but when I was way younger I had some trouble learning programming languages. Following tutorials was boring and gave limited instructions. Someone on the internet gave the same piece of advice, i.e. to do something useful in your life. I was at the time downloading a lot of porn pictures but the internet connection was slow and unreliable. And that's how I learned the Ruby programming language with its regexe…

Way back when, before it was very feasible for the general public to get internet access (in the Mosaic days, maybe 94 or 95), I found that I could access my local college library with my dial-up modem. Their system let you connect to the lending services of other university libraries. I found one (maybe Oregon State?) that let you access Gopher. That was pretty interesting in it's own right, but there was no ability to display images, and the functionality to download files was removed, so pornography was frustratingly hard to obtain. You could look at ascii art...

But you could dump uuencoded binary files to the screen. Capture it, read it from the text buffer, reformat it, decode it, and then... a glorious 25kb jpg of a scanned Playboy image. (In HAM mode on my Amiga.)

I spent so much time doing that stuff. Wasted time, in a sense, but it motivated me to learn much I might not otherwise have bothered to. The desire of a young man to see a woman in her glory should not be underestimated; societies suffer if they point that energy in the wrong direction.

As a 37-year old married man, the OP has probably acquired some other motivations, though.

Re: A 37-year-old wanting to learn computer science

#119

Post by tkcranny »

andrew_lettuce wrote: post #110

I see people conflate computer science with computer programming regularly. If you are motivated to build things you probably want to pursue the latter, and dig in to understand how the things you use work. Maybe your want to go deeper academically in certain areas, but do you want to be motivated by real world application or theoretical underpinnings? True comp sci is a lot closer to mathematics than most people's t…

“Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes” — Edsger W. Dijkstra

Re: A 37-year-old wanting to learn computer science

#120

Post by ranger_danger »

globnomulous wrote: post #71

I don't mean to be a jerk, but I'm having trouble figuring out what the point of the post or of posting the post here is. Are you asking for advice? Feedback? Suggestions? Criticism? Support? The only question your post asks is "but who am I really?" To be honest, what I hear in the paragraphs that follow is less a description of yourself than the pronouncement that you are capable, curious, and driven to learn more,…

> I don't mean to be a jerk, but

Honestly, simply omitting that entire first sentence would have made the post seem a whole lot nicer.

Post reply on HN