I'm in the middle of an MITx intro to programming with python course. My python is self taught and not too bad but I reccomend the intro course anyway. We just did a project with bisection search, we're into recursion now. I've always been able to write code but the real slick approaches to problems have never really come naturally to me.

For the guys asking about ios, get yourself a middle of the road mac mini. Then take the stanford ios development course. It is free on itunes. There is also a free book on the language on the ibooks store, called "the swift programming language." The stanford course is excellent.

At this point you could put together the equivalent of a real-deal 4 year university com sci degree just with free courses that the assorted universities put out there. I try to stick to those offered by the high prestige schools because they've been so good to me thus far. There's even a site out there that indexes everything out there and organizes a little catalog into a sort of degree track. Obviously there's no degree at the end of it but it can be helpful as a guide for what sort of things you are generally expected to know going into the field.

I made a pretty cool little script that does interest/balance calculations, I was thinking about making some python/django based site that takes visitor input into the script and spits out some info graphics that could give some advice for paying big debts. I'm having a hard time hooking up my code to a web page, not so much the actual programming but the git commits and virtual env and just the whole stack of tools you have to line up to bring the damn thing online.

Great thread guys.

I really think about applying for a junior PHP developer position but the thing is every vacancy I find looks odd. I know they write every buzzword into those advertisements but I always feel like I don't even fulfill 50% of what they want.

I know PHP and Laravel
I can cope with HTML/CSS/Bootstrap,
I can handle Composer and manage Packages etc.

Does anyone know if they would delegate an employee for about 1-2 month to coach me or how does the onboarding process look in general. I'm really afraid of getting through an interview and after that they would more or less leave me alone coping with task from their scrum-board or so. The thought alone lets my veins throb.

Here, I searched for "junior php" and picked randomly two advertisements. This is ridiculous isn't it?

[attachment=29502]

This one is even more insane: http://imgur.com/YyzTEB7

Apply today Yeah, of course...

^^
Don't let that put you back. A perfect candidate never exists so they're going to go with the best one they can find. Take your shot.

What that ad really means is "we're looking for someone who worked in at least one PHP project the proper way"

Jenkins, Git, SVN etc. will be helpful in your career regardless of what language you develop in, so those are good to learn.

Familiarity with industry standard tools always gives you an edge

Quote: (01-28-2016 05:14 PM)the Thing Wrote:  

^^
Don't let that put you back. A perfect candidate never exists so they're going to go with the best one they can find. Take your shot.

What that ad really means is "we're looking for someone who worked in at least one PHP project the proper way"

Jenkins, Git, SVN etc. will be helpful in your career regardless of what language you develop in, so those are good to learn.

Familiarity with industry standard tools always gives you an edge

So how competent do you have to be before actually getting an entry level job? I've been doing part time self study, mostly with PHP but also python, for about a year now. I can do basic CRUD applications with PHP like a bare-bones social network, online store, etc, some even utilizing PEAR template system. I think I wouldn't have too much trouble throwing together a Craigslist clone in a few days, although the code would probably look like garbage. I've also done some algorithmic work in Python (which I prefer over PHP for that purpose) such as the first 10 problems on Project Euler, with which I didn't have that much trouble.

So on the one hand, I'm reading stories about people interviewing for jobs being unable to do "FizzBuzz" and this makes me go like, fuck, if that's the level of the competition then I can probably hack it now. On the other hand, I realize how slow I still am and how I'm barely scratching the surface of programming. When I look at source code for some of the php libraries (like the templating class) I can't even begin to wrap my mind around how all components fit together. Yes, I can write simple CRUD procedural statements but creating complex, OOP based code for stuff like templating and pagination is something I cannot do and probably will not be able to do for years.

So I'm not sure where the balance lies. How do you know you've exited the "n00b learning for statements" stage and entered the "weak but somewhat useful entry level" stage?

You sound like you're ready for entry level jobs. How one rates his own programming skills usually oscillates between "oh my god I suck" and "I AM PROGRAMMER, KNEEL BEFORE ME". You don't need to be able to comprehend large third party frameworks written by dozens of experienced coders and financially supported by large corporations to have an entry level developer job.

A really large part of being a competent developer is how you sell yourself to others. I've seen so called "enterprise architects" from India with 15 years of experience and a stack of certificates as thick as my cock, that couldn't write a simple switch statement. If you have some sort of an idea of what you're doing, can make deadlines and work fast enough not to blow the project budget wide open, welcome aboard.

If you have any code you're not sure about quality wise, post it here and we can help with code review.

I've been programming as a hobby/ancillary part of my job for about 20 years. I finally stepped into the world of professional software development and it's very different.

I'd highly recommend anyone looking to move that direction to learn some of the current software development paradigms. Particularly test driven development, refactoring best practices and source code management workflows (e.g. Git). There are lots of free resources. For a (currently) free Python/Django based approach check out: http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/12...index.html

I have an interview next week for junior c++ position. I haven't really touched much c++ since high school.

They are doing it over skype in a live coding session and I'm worried I'll choke because I'll forget the syntax or neglect some little quirk of the language. I'm practicing as hard as I can to be prepared but I only have a couple days.

What are say, the top5 things you'd expect a junior level c++ candidate to be able to produce in a little 30min coding interview.

Quote: (01-30-2016 11:54 AM)Silver_Tube Wrote:  

I have an interview next week for junior c++ position. I haven't really touched much c++ since high school.

They are doing it over skype in a live coding session and I'm worried I'll choke because I'll forget the syntax or neglect some little quirk of the language. I'm practicing as hard as I can to be prepared but I only have a couple days.

What are say, the top5 things you'd expect a junior level c++ candidate to be able to produce in a little 30min coding interview.

You can expect something like Fizz Buzz, or something marginally harder like the monty hall problem, the 8 queens problem or anything else that can be solved with basic knowledge of algorithms and data structures.

Don't expect any theoretical questions like what's the difference between shallow copy and deep copy, or what a volatile variable is. Solve previous qualifying rounds of google code jam and you'll be golden.

An important thing we expect new coders to be able to do is produce clean, readable and manageable code. Try to indent your lines properly, follow some sort of naming convention for class, method and variable names (ie. dont just throw random shit in there) and leave comments for parts you think that are hard to understand, so you get some extra points.

Quote: (01-30-2016 11:54 AM)Silver_Tube Wrote:  

They are doing it over skype in a live coding session and I'm worried I'll choke because I'll forget the syntax or neglect some little quirk of the language. I'm practicing as hard as I can to be prepared but I only have a couple days.

What are say, the top5 things you'd expect a junior level c++ candidate to be able to produce in a little 30min coding interview.

30 minutes is not a lot of time.

I wouldn't be surprised if they give you a program already written but not quite working and let you debug it. You would need to understand it, explain in your own words what it does, and get it to work properly.

In that case, it's important to be able to navigate the compiler and development environment easily.

Then I would expect a few questions about features of the language. What they do and how you would apply them. They may go into quite advanced features. Don't hesitate to be honest if you never used a particular feature in previous projects - just say that. "I haven't used that yet, but I can look it up in the documentation and understand it when I need it".

If you need a useful web page or help page for language syntax, know in advance how to search up that page so you don't waste time.

If they give you something to debug, I would pay attention to loops and boundary conditions - like a loop running one iteration too many or too few.

Quote: (01-27-2016 11:43 PM)Hoo Wrote:  

If you are doing it for $$$, it's not worth it. Get into something like business/sales instead, you will make the same or more.

I kinda disagree. Some people just aren't great at sales/being pushy. Programming is a pretty good career, from a financial standpoint. The only concern is that you gotta figure out how not to be 'in the frontlines' in your later years, because competing against kids just out of college who are current on the latest technologies might prove challenging, eventually. That and plain old age discrimination. It's a sad reality of the software industry.

Quote: (01-28-2016 07:59 AM)weambulance Wrote:  

I keep hearing these stories about how programmers going in for interviews can't solve such basic problems and I just don't get how that can be. Are they lying about being programmers? Are there really a bunch of programmers out there who simply can't do the job, and skate by somehow... copying code from the internet, or asking for help on stackoverflow... or some other way? Even if they can't write syntactically-perfect code on the spot, surely they can write it in pseudocode?

I've met a lot of geologists who were, frankly, pretty lacking in knowledge given that they had BS degrees or better. But a professional programmer being unable to solve a simple problem like FizzBuzz is on par with a professional geologist not being able to tell the difference between... oh, a pebbly conglomerate and a chunk of granite, and every Geology 101 student I ever had could at least manage that much. How the fuck do you get through a basic programming 101 type class without learning how to write a for loop and if/else statements?

Maybe they cheated in their CS 101 class of maybe they got their degree from Devry/ITT? Or maybe they don't have a degree and they're copy&paste warriors? For example, you could easily build numerous websites without being good at algorithms, thanks to Wordpress, Bootstrap, etc.

Quote: (10-14-2013 02:31 PM)Edmund Dantes Wrote:  

I finished the HTML & CSS section of codeacademy but I have no idea how to play with code. I wrote some of my own but I don't know how to view it. I looked up code viewing generators online but it was mediocre at best.

Do I need some kind of software?

And where do I go next?

You just save html and css files in a text document...

Here's a fun little program you can do that is actually a pretty fun conversation starter.

Write a program to simulate the Monty Hall problem. Quick google search will give you an idea of what it is so I won't bother explaining it.

Iterate over the problem 20,000 times. In the first 10,000, determine the percentage of times you win by changing your guess. In the second 10,000, determine the percentage of times you win by not changing your guess.

Print the results to the screen. It should be about 2/3 chance of success by changing your guess, and only 1/3 for keeping it.


Fun fact: this problem caused a bit of a stir in the early 90s, PhD level mathematicians were fooled by it, and many continued to deny the answer until they tested it over many iterations like your program will do.

Quote: (01-31-2016 04:00 PM)AntiTrace Wrote:  

Fun fact: this problem caused a bit of a stir in the early 90s, PhD level mathematicians were fooled by it, and many continued to deny the answer until they tested it over many iterations like your program will do.

Increasing the number of doors makes the problem intuitively obvious. E.g. 100 doors with a prize behind one, pick a random door, of the 99 other doors the host opens up 98 losing doors, then if you switch to the other closed door you have a 99/100 chance of winning.

Never going to be able to hear about the Monty Hall problem without thinking of Kevin Spacey.

Quote: (01-31-2016 04:28 PM)Soma Wrote:  

Quote: (01-31-2016 04:00 PM)AntiTrace Wrote:  

Fun fact: this problem caused a bit of a stir in the early 90s, PhD level mathematicians were fooled by it, and many continued to deny the answer until they tested it over many iterations like your program will do.

Increasing the number of doors makes the problem intuitively obvious. E.g. 100 doors with a prize behind one, pick a random door, of the 99 other doors the host opens up 98 losing doors, then if you switch to the other closed door you have a 99/100 chance of winning.

Thinking about the problem I wasn't really convinced until I saw:



Oh. Yeah, alright, seems obvious then.

I just wrote most of a Monty Hall simulation in python. Fun little challenge. I might post the code tomorrow, but my eyes feel like they're about to bleed from staring at computer screens all day so I'm for bed.

Quote: (01-31-2016 04:28 PM)Soma Wrote:  

Quote: (01-31-2016 04:00 PM)AntiTrace Wrote:  

Fun fact: this problem caused a bit of a stir in the early 90s, PhD level mathematicians were fooled by it, and many continued to deny the answer until they tested it over many iterations like your program will do.

Increasing the number of doors makes the problem intuitively obvious. E.g. 100 doors with a prize behind one, pick a random door, of the 99 other doors the host opens up 98 losing doors, then if you switch to the other closed door you have a 99/100 chance of winning.

When I'm technical interviewing someone and they say this I come.

Another bonus point is, I ask a problem related to input parsing, that most people would solve with fuck tons of nested loops and if/switch statements, and the candidate solves it with a one-liner regex. Even if the job is not RegEx related, knowing RegEx indicates the guy's passionate with what he does.

Quote: (01-31-2016 06:15 PM)the Thing Wrote:  

Another bonus point is, I ask a problem related to input parsing, that most people would solve with fuck tons of nested loops and if/switch statements, and the candidate solves it with a one-liner regex. Even if the job is not RegEx related, knowing RegEx indicates the guy's passionate with what he does.

I never even heard about regex until I was doing the django tutorial and it came up in relation to passing URLs. I was like wtf is this shit and why is it showing up on the first page of a n00b tutorial and had to bang my head against the wall for a good couple of hours before it sank in. It is damn powerful though.

Quote: (01-29-2016 03:54 PM)Fast Eddie Wrote:  

So I'm not sure where the balance lies. How do you know you've exited the "n00b learning for statements" stage and entered the "weak but somewhat useful entry level" stage?

When you can comfortably solve at least some of the programming challenges on this page: https://codility.com/programmers/challen...lcium2015/
You would then be able to consider yourself a "competent" programmer, at least at the technical level.

Quote: (02-01-2016 11:38 AM)Fast Eddie Wrote:  

I never even heard about regex until I was doing the django tutorial and it came up in relation to passing URLs. I was like wtf is this shit and why is it showing up on the first page of a n00b tutorial and had to bang my head against the wall for a good couple of hours before it sank in. It is damn powerful though.

It's hard to grasp, but yes it's powerful.

I'm working on reducing my big-O (time complexity) in my code. Most of my previous programs are O(n^2) rather than O(n) or O(n log n), and that's what I'm working on in my spare time. Regex is a good way to decrease the time your programs take to run.

Quote: (01-30-2016 11:54 AM)Silver_Tube Wrote:  

I have an interview next week for junior c++ position. I haven't really touched much c++ since high school.

They are doing it over skype in a live coding session and I'm worried I'll choke because I'll forget the syntax or neglect some little quirk of the language. I'm practicing as hard as I can to be prepared but I only have a couple days.

What are say, the top5 things you'd expect a junior level c++ candidate to be able to produce in a little 30min coding interview.

Binary search tree manipulation, i.e. know how to do stuff the STL containers already do for you.

Do something to a linked list, usually write an algorithm to reverse it.

Know exactly what static, virtual, and const mean.

Do things with pointers. (You get some godawful wad of ++s and *s and have to say what the expression does. So know the order of operations in C)

Stack vs heap, how to use new and delete. (Class constructors/destructors too)

If you get an idiot you might have to regurgitate the Object Oriented Programming rules (Inheritance, Encapsulation, Polymorph, Magic Missile)

I would like to get into software development. I've been practicing some coding on my own but I was wondering what folks think about bootcamps like Hack Reactor in SF?

Essentially is a three month bootcamp where you learn both front/back end programming, multiple languages from javascript to ruby rails and work on projects to create a portfolio which will help with job hunting.

And from reviews of graduates of this bootcamp and others, a common refrain is they learned much, much more attending than in going the self-taught route previously.

I passed my interview. I have more interviews but they told me it is more of an HR interview and if I'm fine with it I have a job.

I researched the company and found some scary shit. If I get an offer I might not take it. It looks like a scam wherein a more qualified consultant impersonates you, then dispatches you across the country to work on a project, while that guy gets a cut and you are thrown into something you are likely not prepared for. I admire a good hustle but I'm not in this to be viciously taken advantage of. The fake it till you make it is quite tempting, but these days companies have way too much data on all of us, there is no way that people doing this don't get discovered.

Thanks for the tips Bortimus, one of your suggestions was the subject of the coding exercise.

Here is another coding challenge that surprisingly many people fail. Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100, but instead of even numbers it prints fizz, instead of numbers that are divisible by 3 it prints buzz, and fizzbuss if it is a number that is divisible by 2 and 3. I probably butchered the requirements, but it is a famous problem (google fizzbuzz). It should probably take you like 10 lines of code total and maybe moving the condition up from where you initially thought it belongs.

One time I was asked to write a program on the board that takes a string and produces an array of all substrings. Hint: you can assume a string is an array of characters and use recursion. <-- I asked for hints and the interviewers gave them to me.

A lot of times they will email you the problem and give you x hours to solve it. Extra points if you are very meticulous, write some unit tests, and leave good comments. I think I got my current job only because I found a mistake in the code they gave me. There is a book with whole bunch of these interview problems, my old professor used to collect them, http://www.amazon.com/Coding-Interviews-...1430247614

P.S. the actual code you will write for money will be nowhere near as interesting as the hoops they make you jump through to prove you know what you're doing.

Quote: (01-28-2016 08:18 AM)AntiTrace Wrote:  

Many are used to the peer programming environment, where they are told what to write by another programmer.

I've noticed that more and more folks coming into the field are in favor of open office plans for exactly this reason. They don't say so explicitly, but if you read the subtext of how they argue for open seating, it's there. They're incapable of doing their jobs on their own, so they want to feel empowered to spend all day constantly interrupting those of us who can.

This is one of the consequences of a focus on diversity in the tech industry, and not hiring solely on the basis of aptitude.