Python Programming & other inferior programming languages thread

Discussion in 'The Mainboard' started by Walt Disney, Jul 15, 2015.

  1. colonelrascals

    colonelrascals Mayonnaise-colored Benz, I push miracle whips
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    You got a prag studio code for me?
     
  2. Joe_Pesci

    Joe_Pesci lying dog-faced pony soldier
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    I'm dealing with some serious impostor syndrome at the moment.

    I'm still basically here:
    I'm re-taking my school's Operating Systems class because at this time last year I underestimated how much time it would take me to write, for example, not-terrible OS-level memory management and threading code from scratch. I passed the class but my final grade was a charitable 71.

    Basically what I'm wondering is, how important is this stuff and how important are my grades in getting my first legit programming job? Is it enough that I made it through all of my software engineering classes to get some kind of engineering job? I still have like 6 or 7 non-programming (in addition to like 4 software) classes left before I can allegedly claim to be an engineer.
     
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  3. Joe_Pesci

    Joe_Pesci lying dog-faced pony soldier
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    And I'm also talking just basic stuff as far as getting some kind of programming/engineering/whatever sort of job. My Design Patterns instructor, the hardcore C++ evangelist for the people paying attention to my little journey, talked about how apparently every new person, regardless of their skill level, used to start on the Build Team, i.e. literally making sure every version (release, dev, etc.?) of the code would built with no errors. Who knows if this is actually true, but I would totally do that to get a foot in the door :idk:
     
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  4. TDCD

    TDCD Handling the Fisher account
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    I’ve had 2 companies pay me money now and I don’t know a thing about operating systems, threading or low-level memory management, if that makes you feel any better.
     
  5. Joe_Pesci

    Joe_Pesci lying dog-faced pony soldier
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    How did your technical interviews go, if you don't mind talking about that?

    The only one I've "had" was a simulation of what people trying to get into Portland State had to do, which in my case was both reversing a doubly-linked list and removing a certain node from a binary search tree in under ~45 mins.

    Fwiw PSU is super cunty toward people coming from the metro area's community colleges
     
  6. TDCD

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    I started my bootcamp September 2016, finished & began looking for jobs in november, and then got hired March 2017.

    Almost everywhere I looked most companies made it clear they wanted people with CS degrees and not what I had, so I’m sure your in a much better position than I was.
     
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  7. TDCD

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    My interviews were all for JS positions, which tend to have much less low level stuff like that as nobody uses JS to balance binary trees or interact directly with the cpu.

    Sorting, recursion & some JavaScript-specific features are what I remember being asked for my first job. But more often than not it seemed like what the interviewer really cares about was if I could explain my thought process & problem solve even if I didn’t quite know the answer. That seemed more important than if I ‘solved’ the question or not.

    Didn’t get low level questions for my latest round of interviews s either. I did the google one which is supposed to be super technical but it was mainly real-world, higher level type problem solving. Again, all in JS so I’m sure the questions are much different if you’re trying to work in C or C++
     
  8. Joe_Pesci

    Joe_Pesci lying dog-faced pony soldier
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    I kind of wish my program had the level of focus like what you did WRT JS. It looks like you were right to go that route vs what I did because I'm still paying $800/class for relatively unrelated stuff like vector calculus, which I'm taking right now :donotwant:.

    Anyway, this is encouraging because I can talk about my thought process, however stupid it may be, all day long.
     
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  9. Joe_Pesci

    Joe_Pesci lying dog-faced pony soldier
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    I'm fairly certain it will only work between in Oregon between Astoria and Bend, but spoofing your location on Android isn't very hard. And yes the code is dreadful.

    My solo project for this year was supposed to be a predictive model for baseball but it turns out that building software models that are more accurate than, say, 538's predictions is actually way harder than I thought it would be.
     
    #1459 Joe_Pesci, May 8, 2019
    Last edited: May 8, 2019
  10. Pile Driving Miss Daisy

    Pile Driving Miss Daisy It angries up the blood
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    This! Unless you plan on really wanting to work at super low-level OS systems engineering or on an actual operating system, you're going to be fine. I bet over 3/4ths of all developers right now don't touch that kind of stuff unless they absolutely have to and even then they're going to be gooling Stackoverflow and consulting with people who have a better understanding. You are overestimating how important a true fundamental deep understanding of that is Joe_Pesci
     
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  11. Pile Driving Miss Daisy

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    Also the industry is slowing realizing that, unless you are assigned a job where you'll actually be working on compilers, microcontrollers, low level OS system stuff, requiring any sort of 4-year CS/EE degree is dumb and having a diversity of the kinds of people who attend boot camps (non-white, non-traditional students who don't want to argue on Hacker News for hours about the most technical of details) is a huge plus. I was talking with a friend of mine who is very smart, probably could work in most areas of software development, has a masters in linguistics where he wrote ML models for his thesis, and he agrees the developer community is largely being held back by having a stimga against anyone who doesn't have a Bachelors in CS/EE.
     
  12. Joe_Pesci

    Joe_Pesci lying dog-faced pony soldier
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    This is basically where I'm at, even though I'm pursuing a "traditional" software engineering degree. I view this thing as a trade. Nothing more, nothing less. I just want to work somewhere that pays decent and I don't dread walking into every day.

    It seems like a sort of taboo for me to say among my classmates that I don't really care about working on cutting edge stuff. I mean, it would be cool but it's pretty far down my priority list.
     
  13. Pile Driving Miss Daisy

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    There are hordes of people who do love this, really like learning everything new, and they burn out in a decade. I love learning new things, improving my code, rewriting it when necessary or from scratch if possible in a more efficient and easier to grok way, but I can't go 100% all the time without eventually just losing interest.
     
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  14. Joe_Pesci

    Joe_Pesci lying dog-faced pony soldier
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    Also it would be great for working students like me in the future if the industry realized that doing stuff like writing inline assembly that's ultimately compiled in C as the gateway to passing a class is a pointless exercise in memorization and self-hatred

    This happened because "local industry" decided that graduates from Portland State were weak on the "fundamentals"

    fuck them 10 times out of 10
     
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  15. Joe_Pesci

    Joe_Pesci lying dog-faced pony soldier
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    What have your technical interviews been like?
     
  16. HuskerGuy99

    HuskerGuy99 Above Average Member

    Very true but at the same time if you fully understand how to manipulate the memory, you can pretty much do any of these coding interview questions they ask. Even if you forget what a certain data structure exactly is, a few hints can probably lead you in the right direction.

    Also to Pesci, I wouldn't sweat the interviews at all. There are a LOT of developers out there that can't even do simple things like reverse a binary search tree. There was a pretty famous incident regarding this at Google a few years back where they interviewed a guy that had written software that Google itself was already using throughout the company. The guy couldn't reverse a tree, they didn't hire him, and then he took to Twitter to rant about it.

    I assume you know how to use pointers, Pesci? If you understand pointers completely, you pretty much understand memory. Mutex, sempahore, locks, spinlocks, WarrenSapp...all of these things are more important these days since everything seems to use a multicore processor. I would focus on crushing the data structures and algorithms using C to fully understand what you are retaking a course for.
     
  17. TDCD

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  18. Pile Driving Miss Daisy

    Pile Driving Miss Daisy It angries up the blood
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    I've been lucky in that I've really only had to interview with code/pseudocode once and even that wasn't too hard (although I didn't get hired but probably more for reasons like not wanting to slave away at a startup 60+ hours a week). I wrote some Java pseudocode to create a binary search tree and then a linked list iirc.Like HuskerGuy99 said, these super technical coding interviews are being show as not the best way to gauge how good a candidate will be for your company. There should be a base level of competence sure, but so much of this is asking questions and help when you need it, knowing how to just simply learn new things, and not being an annoying difficult person to work with (which the tech industry often has a hard time finding people who just aren't annoying social awkward nerds).
     
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  19. Joe_Pesci

    Joe_Pesci lying dog-faced pony soldier
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    :ahh: :ahh::ahh:

    He is in bfa purgatory currently
     
  20. Joe_Pesci

    Joe_Pesci lying dog-faced pony soldier
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    It's the name of my WoW dude :welpseeyalater:
     
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  21. glimmer

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    Same. Coding isn't really a hobby of mine - I do it full time for work and that's plenty for me. I've been working in C# and JS for 3 years now after graduating with an computer engineering degree that focused on C, C++, Assembly, and VHDL. If you're a competent developer and understand the fundamentals of programming, that will shine through and will be more than enough for someone to want to hire you at an entry level position. Every major metro area seems to need .NET developers and would be a great way to have a solid day job that you don't hate. Companies focused on embedded systems and other low-level design don't seem to have the same relaxed, lazies-fare work atmosphere that the more software-oriented companies do. It's a lot easier to recompile a front-end than it is to get a factory to change copper.

    I definitely think more people need to get into software development via bootcamps and the like as opposed to a traditional 4 year degree.
     
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  22. fsck~

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    The most in demand jobs and the most new jobs being created are in high level coding. Knowing what's happening under the covers can help, but it's far from something that most devs need. Almost all of your interviews for these entry level positions are as you said just in using hashmaps, trees, lists, etc.
     
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  23. Pile Driving Miss Daisy

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    Joe_Pesci these are the kinds of questions you may get in person if you look at Javascript, my friend in Austin has been a dev for a few years and is looking for new work.

    Find the numbers of numbers of an n-dimensional array of n-dimensional arrays
    Code:
    numberOfInts([[[5], 2], 0, 4, ["foo"], [3, 5], [], 1])
    > 7
    Given a string of text and a line length, write a function that word wraps and justifies the text
    Code:
    justifyText("This is a sample string", 8) 
    should yield
    Code:
    this  is
    a sample
    string
    
     
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  24. Where Eagles Dare

    Where Eagles Dare The Specialist Show On Earth
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    So, half way through Ga Tech's entry level python course.

    At the same time I'm using python to write a basic af ML classification algorithm w/ scikit-learn.

    Attacking from both ends. Copy/Pasting a fuck load of code & editing it
     
  25. leroi

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    Sometimes it feels like software development is about 90% ppl with aspergers.
     
  26. Name P. Redacted

    Name P. Redacted I have no money and I'm also gay
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    I'm not a software engineer but any new graduate engineer who doesn't require hand-holding is a huge plus. I (and basically everyone) expect new grads to be largely clueless and just have a decent fundamental knowledge of the "core" of their schooling.
     
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  27. TDCD

    TDCD Handling the Fisher account
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    thats why I’m good at it :mulletsmug:
     
    #1477 TDCD, May 8, 2019
    Last edited: May 8, 2019
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  28. TDCD

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    Joe_Pesci

    In regards to preparing for interviews, what worked best for me was working on personal projects instead of just memorizing the popular algorithms. I had a few friends that just studied 'cracking the coding interview' and many seemed to burn out because that stuff gets boring/tedious pretty quickly. But working on my own projects kept me much more interested and willing to put in work. I felt like the real-world problems I ended up solving for my stuff had great carryover to my skills & problem solving, and also forced me to learn a ton of new stuff I was never exposed to before.

    I worked on projects with stuff that interested me like baseball stats, fantasy sports, skyscrapers (nerd alert). Another added benefit of this is putting the work on github for all to see. Also this work greatly helped with my own imposter syndrome because I made a few things I was really proud of.

    Again, since you have much more low-level OS knowledge the algos may be more important so I wouldn't just ignore them but I'd definitely recommend not making them your only interview prep.
     
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  29. fsck~

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    Huh, I would lean towards the opposite. Interviewing questions often are targeted to just data structures and algorithms. Though you might have some crossover I don't think you really learn the specifics and get comfortable with interviews without practicing them.

    Also speaking of stuff you're interested in, anyone interested in running a fantasy football AI league this year? I tried starting this a couple years back, got some interest, but nobody finished. Basically I have python framework setup which gives you player stats and everything, including previous years to run against, and you create an algorithm to draft players. We would get people in this thread to write their own, then run drafts and have a log of thousands of leagues and see who wins the most.
     
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  30. TDCD

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    absolutely down for that

    As for the first part, it's not that I think working on stuff for fun is more useful than studying algos, moreso that it's more engaging and therefore I'm willing to put in a lot more time & effort. I can work on my own stuff for 10 hours/day but no chance I'm working on straight graph problems for 10 hours.
     
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  31. fsck~

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    This was the AI fantasy draft project I started, just realized it was 4 years ago.
    https://github.com/colin725/rff

    Was just learning python back then, would be fun to revamp this project. I bet there are a lot better NFL data APIs available now too.
     
  32. kennypowers

    kennypowers Big shit like a dinosaur did it
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    Same. My job involves modeling and simulating high strain rate physics events, literally no one from undergrad is qualified and a very few amount of grad students have experience that we’re looking for. So I’ve started going after kids that are eager to learn, pick up things quickly, and are generally self starters. If you do t know how to do something, dive in and learn how to do it. Hired ~7 fresh out of grad school kids last year with this philosophy and they are killing it.
     
  33. Pile Driving Miss Daisy

    Pile Driving Miss Daisy It angries up the blood
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    I mean it seems like this should be a no-brainer for most tech/engineering industries, but so many hiring old-school managers just have to find candidates with X amount of experience regardless of their demeanor. Thankfully, I think, the extreme low unemployment is forcing companies to finally consider inexperienced but probably harder workers and what do you know, it can work out.
     
  34. Can I Spliff it

    Can I Spliff it Is Butterbean okay?
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  35. Joe_Pesci

    Joe_Pesci lying dog-faced pony soldier
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    FWIW the bootcamp was the correct decision, both in terms of time and cost
     
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  36. TDCD

    TDCD Handling the Fisher account
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    Are you on the job hunt?
     
  37. Lucky24Seven

    Lucky24Seven Ain't nothing slick to a can of oil
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    Hey. Thinking about going back to school for something in the tech field. Programming, coding, networking, etc. Anything that gets me more than 4 days off a month if I’m lucky. What is the best route to go? A certificate, 2 year, 4 year? Just looking at options now. Probably won’t enroll for another year. Want to cash flow going back to school.
     
  38. Where Eagles Dare

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    Are you doing anything technical/coding at the moment?
     
  39. Where Eagles Dare

    Where Eagles Dare The Specialist Show On Earth
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    Saw my first job post asking for edX or Coursera certificates as proof of education... Mainly for python/data science related job. That surprised me, and it was at a F500 company.
     
  40. Sega

    Sega Well-Known Member
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    In March I started teaching myself and this has been my path:
    Harvard CS50 lectures on YouTube taught by David Malan
    HTML & CSS - a few days
    vanilla JavaScript - a few weeks
    React (front end JS framework) - a few weeks
    Bash terminal (Mac command line) - couple days
    NodeJS & Express (JavaScript for the backend & its associated framework) - This is where I am
    MongoDB (database) - not there yet

    I've also played around with Python some, but I'm trying to prioritize learning the MERN stack for now, which is what's listed above. So far I've probably spent less than $75 on a handful of Udemy courses, a $5/mo server on digital ocean. YouTube has enough free stuff to learn it all, but the flow and having it all aggregated in one course is easily worth the $10 that it cost for a Udemy course for me. Especially on the bigger topics like React, and you'll build complete apps that teach you to join the client and server, use the command line, etc.

    The reason I'm going this route is it's self-paced, cheap, and I'm good at developing obsessions and holding myself accountable when I've decided to learn something. There's no certification or certificate, but you can create a portfolio and add it to a simple resume website and I think you could change careers without much of a disruption in your financial situation. Maybe once you're comfortable add an AWS or other cloud cert, or a security cert or something to add a little extra validity to your resume.



    I'd also appreciate any tips you guys have on the route I'm taking
     
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  41. TDCD

    TDCD Handling the Fisher account
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    LMK if you have any node questions
     
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  42. TDCD

    TDCD Handling the Fisher account
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    That path you’re taking sounds great btw. I watched the CS50 lectures on one of those edX type sites, very useful.

    You also reminded me that I’ve been paying for a digital ocean droplet that I havent touched in well over a year :facepalm:
     
  43. Where Eagles Dare

    Where Eagles Dare The Specialist Show On Earth
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    Self taught is good, but it's somewhat hard to translate into a job unless you do a bunch of creative shit on your own or can start implementing it into projects at your current job.

    I'm doing that right now with python/machine learning/data science. I run BI/Analytics for my company and trying go incorporate new predictive shit.

    Also might transition out of management and into an engineering role at another much bigger company (interview this week) in a Sr development role just to get more hands on experience.

    Planning on starting a micro-masters this fall with either GA Tech or UC San Diego and transfer the credits into the full time role
     
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  44. Sega

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  45. Pile Driving Miss Daisy

    Pile Driving Miss Daisy It angries up the blood
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    Walt Disney whatever happened with your Elixir boner? Are you still on that goodness? I'm going through my second tutorial book with Phoenix right now, it's amazing how easily it scales if you have a proper use case for websockets.
     
    #1495 Pile Driving Miss Daisy, Jun 11, 2019
    Last edited: Jun 11, 2019
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  46. Walt Disney

    Walt Disney #Dawgzy
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    It’s still up
    :ahh:

    I use it everyday

    Have 3 pretty big production apps in it,
    Goat language

    Glad you’re liking it
     
  47. Walt Disney

    Walt Disney #Dawgzy
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    I’m pretty curious how Phoenix liveview does

    Seems awesome
     
  48. Pile Driving Miss Daisy

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    Went to the Lonestar Elixir conference and Chris McCord gave a talk on it. Finally released it, but they're cautioning to not use it in production since there's no release candidate yet. I've used it on a couple of super simple Nerves projects.
     
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  49. Lucky24Seven

    Lucky24Seven Ain't nothing slick to a can of oil
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    Nope. The only thing I really have a good grasp on would be PC hardware repair. I’ve built PCs from the MoBo up, but greener than baby shit.
     
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  50. Walt Disney

    Walt Disney #Dawgzy
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    Go To elixir conference in Denver imo