51–60 of 123 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't get as many job offers by becoming an expert in one area though.... How many job offers do you see looking for a smart Perl programmer. How many do you see listing 10+ technologies, plus experience in scrum? (Does doing a stand up every day make you better at it? )
Those job postings are designed to weed out Americans and hire Indians. Real postings are more reasonable.
As some noted, the fact that you realized what drives your desire is very impressive. It takes a certain skill to understand those things! As someone who's been at it for years, I'll just give you one little piece of advice. If you've already been through the fundamentals, you've done enough. Now, instead of focusing on learning technology, focus on building things, this is what real engineers do. Let me explain. You…
You don't get as many job offers by becoming an expert in one area though.... How many job offers do you see looking for a smart Perl programmer. How many do you see listing 10+ technologies, plus experience in scrum? (Does doing a stand up every day make you better at it? )
In my 2nd year, I was selling website templates and earning good money. It required little knowledge of html, css, and js. It was good. But soon saturated my hunger. I read up on solving problems, from a development perspective. It's a lazy man's job but a brainstorming one.
Solving problems gave me direction. I proceeded to learn different languages for different tasks that were required. I read about implementing backend in django, ruby on rails, node.js and php.
In late 2nd year, I decided to work in a team, and solve problems as a team. I took the job on CTO, for various startups in college. Each startup would present a different problem.
Instead of learning it all. My direction became problem centric. Sure, most of my startups failed, I was working with resourceless people in college. And had to always be the one to start everything from ground-up.
Investing my time in too many startups, too many problems, too many languages ... hung me up on my degree. :P
Sure, you'll meet people who have a mindset that they'll get you to make the product and then ditch you. But I never cared about it. :P Don't feel bad.The world will always be like that. I got what i signed up for. :)
I am now a full stack developer by choice, I design my products, create apps and I have functional knowledge of most of the awesome frameworks. My journey made me work with deployment, asset management, managing servers, deploying hybrid apps, scrape data, building performant and consistent api’s.
It was a hard time. I will get my degree this autumn. Look at the bright side.
People always get happy when you can turn their idea into product in <15 days. :) Just solve problems… and you’ll emerge as a magician. :D All the best !
> I want to study data science, maths, devops and find that my desire is driven by fear of becoming outdated and irrelevant. [..] and conquering the anxiety of ever changing rules to the game. If that is your genuine concern, I'd suggest focussing on timeless topics. Two easy rule of thumbs: (1) if it's been around for a while and still relevant, it's probably going to stay that way (eg compilers/parsers, operating s…
Could you elaborate on your snark? Do you think OOP design patterns become outdated quickly? Do you think it's a waste of time for a programmer to study them?
1. Learn GoF design patterns. Be amazed by the cleverness.
2. While learning others languages, discover that other approaches remove the need for GoF design patterns at all.
Example: Visitor isn't needed in a language with double dispatch (like Lisp). Chain-of-Responsibility is just foldl. Factory for dependency injection is just a closure or a partial function. And so on.
I can relate, except that I still stuck. 1 - What has helped me is to categorize my insterests. Sure, they're connected in my brain and it's not like x is disconnected with y, we can always find a connection.. but I needed to separate them into categories to be able to manage them more easily because I don't need to tell you the state of the brain if you dump all of them in the one and only category most of us have w…
How about a paragraph per day ?
As some noted, the fact that you realized what drives your desire is very impressive. It takes a certain skill to understand those things! As someone who's been at it for years, I'll just give you one little piece of advice. If you've already been through the fundamentals, you've done enough. Now, instead of focusing on learning technology, focus on building things, this is what real engineers do. Let me explain. You…
You don't get as many job offers by becoming an expert in one area though.... How many job offers do you see looking for a smart Perl programmer. How many do you see listing 10+ technologies, plus experience in scrum? (Does doing a stand up every day make you better at it? )
Your fear of becoming outdated is well founded. We’ll all become outdated. That’s why every five years or so we learn a new language. That’s the fate of the IT industry, things change and sometimes they change too fast. We learn to adapt. But once you learn a language pretty well you’ll realize that there are commonalities between them all. Learning a new one is a matter of weeks. So stop worrying too much.
My last advice would be to choose a project and focus on it for the next two to three months. Stop reading and start implementing. That’s probably the hardest part. But it will help you get in grips with the language of your choice and feel more comfortable and self-confident. And it will also help you realize the path you wish to follow.
I feel good when I see posts like this. I have suffered and in past month have gone from an employee of very good company to broke unemployed. I am typically starting from scratch. Reason: I thought I wasn't a good developer. More I read HN, articles, stories, more I got anxious and left my job to pursue research degree. I figured out I lacked mathematical abilities to do research in the field I wanted to. I became d…
Now I'm combining the two - learning some new stuff during my commute, putting it into practice at work - and at the same time, making sure that my evenings and weekends are free to spend with my family. Right now I couldn't be happier - I feel that I'm finally beginning to develop as a software engineer, but I can maintain a nice work-life balance too.
Totally second the other posts here - learning is good but you really need to be working on building something, because that allows you to really consolidate when you've learnt. It's when you spot the perfect application for some theory you learnt in your project work, and you can execute that application, that you really start getting somewhere. IMHO. :)
Same for some of us. In my case, I'm busy building too many side-projects, and I do it just for the sake of learning new stuff, I have a lot of fun and it works!
With 5 years you're just starting. You need to pick an idea related with 3 or 4 fields you want to learn (Data Science, DevOps, etc) and build it. For example: An app that analyses tweets from a twitter stream in real-time and applies predictive analysis for certain (or funny) topics. You can use docker containers and setup a CI server yourself.
It must be an idea that excites you. Build it from a paper sketch, to a MVC app, to CI server. You'll learn along the way, bit by bit, don't rush things...
This is very effective for learning, and there's also something special seeing your small (or big) ideas come to life. You'll get an enormous satisfaction...