Self-taught dev thread

Agreed, C++ looks pretty daunting for beginners. I'm going to look into it once I'm comfortable enough with webdev to freelance. Hopefully in a year or so.

I've got basic html and css down, about to start with raw js. Looks like I'm on the right track. Thanks for the advice, user

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it took me about 6 months of hard studying before I felt ready to start applying to junior web dev jobs (python/backend, no front end shit for me). Granted, I had taken an Intro to programming course in uni, but it felt like starting from scratch. I was NEET, so I really was studying full-time, 8+ hrs/day on average, weekends off sometimes.

I'd say the hardest thing was finding the motivation to do it, and not getting discouraged once I started applying and getting "NO!" as an answer. After those 6 months of studying, it took me maybe 4 more months of hardcore applying/interviewing (plus more studying on the side, of course) before I got my first job. Really happy with it though, 4k euros/month before taxes, not too bad.

I studied mostly from books, I hate videos.

I learned from reading various books and just making my own project. Good free books include 'How to Think Like a Computer Scientist', and all those common lisp books by Paul Graham or 'Practical Common Lisp'. SICP is still the standard too, you can't go wrong reading it and then trying to customize GNu Shepherd, GuixSD, or emacs or something.

It's been years since graduated uni, I've never held a real job in my life, am I permanently fucked? I'm learning C right now just because it's fun.

>Robots

You realize MIT opencourseware is probably what you want, since 2 of the first free courses you're programming simple robots. C++ you can learn yourself after any systems class, such as this one: cs.cmu.edu/~213/schedule.html (click on 'old video').

When you become half competent you now want to write safe robo software symbolaris.com/course/fcps16.html

I'm actually 30 right now, so I also graduated uni a while ago. I've had tons of jobs but all were minimum wage, shitty temp jobs. On my CV, I just put something like "Although I've had plenty of jobs, none of them were related to IT/programming, so I see no point in going into them right now. Etc etc" and everyone was ok with that, nobody cared. If asked, just say you've done tons of work as a waiter, you'll be fine.

Do you feel like you're behind relative to your peers? Was the self taught route common at your workplace?

I'm worried about being treated like a pleb and being paid accordingly. Ofc thats to be expected at first, but I'm hoping the skill levels balances out after a few years. Would you say that's accurate?

How's your career path user? Thanks for the suggestion, I'll add it to my book list

I have checked out the opencourseware stuff, but like I said I don't want to generalize too quickly. My goal is to become as good at one type of development as quickly as I can. Once I become competent enough to work in the industry I'll start to relax a bit an pursue non-career related projects

OP here, for some extra context I've graduated from a decent school with a BS in chemistry and biochem, currently second year chemical engineering.

As for why I went back and why chem eng, its a long story, but I've realized that I'll kill myself working as a chemical engineer.

My options are:
1) fuck engineering, practice coding full time aiming to get a job in a year
2) finish engineering while practicing code on the side, advantage being that Ill have a fallback and that an engineering degree looks impressive
3) fuck coding, finish degree, work as an engineer and blow my brains out

My biggest worry is being stuck at the bottom of the corporate ladder and being unable to immigrate out of my shitty country.

>figured out I was really good at this shit in 2011
>read everything about programming for two years straight while working a 37k/yr job at a hotel
>get a dev job in 2013 making 50k
>five years later I'm making 150k and I am an in demand bastard

Honestly, if you're good at this shit, and you love it, you will make money. If you're not good and you're not passionate about it and you're doing it to try to make money, you will just end up being a keyboard jockey for the rest of your life.

self-taught is not really common at my workplace, but nobody seems to care actually. I am behind, sure, because I'm the newest hire and everyone else has years of experience, but they're all cool about it. I'm pretty sure I'm getting paid like a pleb, but my goal is to just get some experience and then in a year or so go somewhere else where I can get lots more money. I'm pretty sure everything balances out with time, as long as you keep on pushing yourself once you do get hired.

Also, I would say that your non-technical skills (social skills, negotiating skills, managing skills) are way more important in the longer run, so if you've got those, don't sweat it. Otherwise, yeah, try to work on those.

General Thoughts
>Learn by doing. Apply anything you learn or you will lose it shortly.
>Make detailed notes and/or comments. Learn commenting and reference best practices.
>Cultivate and prune your reference and manual collection. Know how to use them. Use SO and the like as last resort.
>Revisit old work at least periodically. Make sure you understand what you did and why from your comments. If you don't, figure it out and include better comments. If you did, try to improve the old program with something you learned more recently.
>Commit regularly but don't commit trash. Once you are over the "hurr how do I even," hump (prob. a few months) you want to be consistent in your committing. Shown you have both the drive to keep on working through your problems and the discipline to do it neatly instead of slapping weird shit in and doing triage later.
>The herd is good to follow and bad to emulate. Start with languages and frameworks that have the most resources but be aware that most of them are trash.

but they are always assholes so even I think a thread for this is worth it

Thanks for sharing mate, this gives me hope. What kind of work do you do?

Solid plan bro, best of luck. Hopefully I'm where you are when you're where you want to be

Thanks dude, I saved this to text to reread every few weeks

if you can't handle the banter then you should leave because there are assholes everywhere. i'm just in a good mood, that's all.

thing is you get to show something at the end of free code camp which is always good. Also they got a community focused to learn how to be a codemonkey so it's a good place to start.

i'm learning C++ right now, I know little Java already. I don't feel comfortable with C++ rn.
should I continue learning C++ or drop it? I don't see many openings for C++ dev jobs and I don't have any project ideas and I think its gonna take me a long time to get this down and data structures along with it

Whats the typical day for a front end web dev like?

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Which books would you recommend senpai/senpai

anything O'Reilly is usually good. I would start with a generic 'programming language' book, to learn the syntax, and then try to switch to books that focus more on concrete projects. Like pic related, where you spend several chapters building up a scraper and improving on the previous chapter's work. This is how you learn, imo, not by doing random, short exercises. Then there's a Django with Rango book, also pretty good if you want to do web dev with python, and it also focuses on doing just one big project throughout the whole book.

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Java seems more relevant than C++ imo, but it depends what you want to do. If you're looking for a job, look up which skills are the most in demand and learn those

Another one for the list. Cheers bro

Godbless u senpai senpai

of course, you do know you can get all books for free from Library Genesis, right? Just google around and you'll find a working link

>be me
>learn html, css and js
>become full stack developer because node.js is a thing
>become app developer because Electron is a thing
>thanks for mercy life

Enterprise web applications.

thanks for replying. yeah that makes sense I'll stick with Java till I get a job. I was asked to solve shortest path algorithm based question and I couldn't solve it. I still find solving such interview questions hard. how to prepare for this?

question sounds like typical discrete math exam, did you go to uni?

its a little embarrassing but I did go to uni but I barely completed the degree. I took a IT job after that and quit it several months back. now I'm trying to make it as a programmer

I got my girlfriend who was an art major through the entirety of it and was prepping her for a internship but she gave up to make js yaoi date sims. Now she makes more money than me. :(

I started almost a year ago, but I just study on my free time after a full time job I hate, some days I don't do anything.

I feel this is going nowhere at this pace, and I'll probably just quit my job in september/october and get into this full force.

I have 20.000 bucks saved so I'll be fine for a couple of years. If my plan fails, sudoku is free.

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>I have 20.000 bucks

I was NEET but had enough savings to get me through roughly 2 years of NEETdom, which is why I even started doing what I did in the first place. I calculated one year to study, one year to interview and find a job, of course the earlier I got shit done the better.

If your full-time job gives you nothing, quit and study full time. What are you waiting for? You've got the money, right?

I secured an interview this week because of my FFC coursework which the recruiter found on my Github profile. It's also a challenging course.

freeCodeCamp served as a nice refresher, I haven't done web dev in 5 years.

>falling for the coding Jew camps

Senpai if you're really dedicated and want to breathe this shit into your soul and learn the abstract concepts behind OOP then what I started out with was reading the Java docs on OOP and reading the C++ book by bjercucksoup, you may not get at first pass but just keep going through it and once you do you could literally learn any language and ecosystem you like. Also you have to practice what you learn. Make a game or app, post it on GitHub and come back here so other programtist can give you feedback

Not gonna lie to you mate. I'm afraid.

I'm 29. I'm afraid of losing motivation on my way of learning and fucking up. That's my main concern, I'm not a genius but I consider myself intelligent enough to pull out this shit if I manage to stay focused.

10/10

whatever suits you, friend. I'm just giving you my opinion.

I learned to debrick dev hardware if you fuck up the names by flashing too low of a firmware to it
Take notes, because you may find yourself in a really shitty spot depending on how bad you fuck up. If the minversion is 0.85, don't be a retard and flash 0.82 without a nand backup or any encryption keys or you may be permanent fucked without developing new exploits to fuck with it.
Also don't reflash a bios with some fucky preporoduction one unless your bios is old enough to be a preproduction one.
Don't connect the sata cables to the wrong component of it's expecting a specific setup.

I did learn that compiling from source is only realistically sensible on linux

And I think you're right, I just need to pull the trigger and just do it.

Do it man. We have to leave our comfort zones to grow. Goodluck mate, you can do it

>Go to computer science honors degree
>Teach myself how to code
>Graduate

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Two years ago I was making $15/hr churning out shitty logos for a marketing shop.

Today I have a six figure dev job and smoke weed everyday. You can do it too, kids.

Started doing VB6 when I was 10 (12 years ago).
Went on with VB.NET 2 years later, did some HTML and CSS in tose two years.
Did HTML, CSS and some JS along with VB.NET for a year, then went with C#.
Tried Java and Python during the next 6 years.
Spent 3 years with this new web dev meme bullshit you can't even spend time with because you have to update or migrate to something else in a 3 month span.

Never went with those websites that'd teach you stuff (I believe Lynda and Tuts+ were strong players back in the years), went with YouTube video tutorials with that Dreamscape music or whatever it's called in the background where someone writes in Notepad and pastes code from somewhere.
Also spent a lot of time reading books.

IMO if you think that development is still a good career path, I'd go with anything related to web dev, maybe start as a web designer or UI/UX and learn front-end, then learn back-end while picking up some Python for some fun stuff.

Learned basic html and css and was learning bootstrap when I got my first job at a digital marketing agency that edited wordpress sites with a WYSIWYG editor called Wpbakery (formally named visual composure). Did very litttle coding just some CSS to hack shit together.
Company shut down but I learned a bit of SEO, wordpress and overall got real experience dealing with clients and other things which helped my resume.

Got back into learning CSS beyond the basic shit for a few weeks and now I have a possible internship lined up at another company if I pass their coding challenge which is to re-create their frontpage using html,css and js.

I don't know JS but I'm gonna learn jquery in a few hours and try my best. I really need another opportunity.

All self taught and I love it.

resources have been reddit webdev, some udemy courses here and there, cssreference.io, youtube and lots of google.

Ok I'll give you my story
>quit engineering job (ME)
>memorize some syntax and algos
>interview well
>get hired as python dev
I hate python but it's still a lot better than doing statics all day.

this but unironically

I'm in the exact same boat and this helped a bit.
Currently working 9-5 at a call center and my job makes me want to off myself. Started studying a few weeks ago, but i can't seem to find the time for it.
I come home from work at around 7pm, shower, eat, clean my place a bit and i'm left with maybe an hour of study time. Getting up at 4:30 and studying then gets me nowhere either.
I got maybe a couple of grand in crypto to sell so i can pay my rent for the next couple of months, and i'm sure ill regret selling at this price, but i think those couple of months are worth it if it is going to get me a job

Starting with C++ but some code I saw uses std:: a lot while the book I'm using uses namespace std. I took a programming class at college before I dropped out that used namespace std instead of std:: but never explained why.
I looked it up by myself and know the difference, but should I keep using namespace or get used to typing std::? Which one would I be more likely to see at a job?

always use std::

Im copy pasting code, is this alright?

I bought books about programming not cuz i wanted to support the writers but because i find it easier to read. Big screen or LCD screen in general will destroy your eyes staring for so many hours reading shit. Also kindle isnt that useful as its not good for switching pages. I still believe the paperbook is better than pdf and such

Currently on the Udacity Data Science scholarship. I know it's a mooc but it's a normally expensive one that I'm not paying for.

I'm self taught and do full stack embedded development plus code generation code blocks AP for retards, embedded communication on diverse hardware, and control systems / robotics AND GET MINIMUM WAGE MY FRIEND DID A HTML5 BOOT CAMP AMD MAKES.80K STARTING

Not to mention full application development open source in my own time lol
Without a piece of paper you are fucked
Maybe it's better if you take the webdev meme
Do I need js cryptocurrency neural networks to get an internship???
Fuck

In Uni, plan to build up portfolio of HTML/CSS/JS websites, c++ and python applications. Will this work? I am going for engineering degree but will a portfolio to show experience and knowledge alone get me a job or is it a meme?

It will really help if you show that you know stuff and like to do it in your free time

I'd hold off on selling your crypto right now, pretty bad time for it. Wait until December.

Why does it take you 2 hours to get home after work?

Start learning html and javascript from books in the late 90s whilst at middle school. Now make pretty respectable money as a full stack developer. I dropped out of college.

You don't need some shitty course to follow like in OP. Just create something you want to exist in the world and go do it. Build projects even if you know nothing, when you get stuck just look it up and learn.

From what you're saying I gather you aren't at uni yet, so why do engineering if you want to be a dev?

Yeah but don't bother with C++. No one gives a shit and it's a headache. Do something in Java or Node Js instead.

The best way to learn to code:
Get a good book with plenty of examples.
Know where the documentation is.
Get full IDE and compiler, none of that in-browser railroaded "coding" nonsense.
Lots and lots of trial and error.

PajeetCodeCamp

Friendly reminder that we have /wdg/, web development general, which is very noob-friendly. If you go and ask which language to study you'll start a flamewar, but if you just paste your bit of code and ask for help, many will jump up and contribute.

8:45 to 18:00 here. Intern.