Software Development and Programming Careers (Official Discussion Thread)

[KritNC]

New site I came across today from the creator of Flat Iron School, Learn: A platform for education.

So far it seems really interesting. Focuses on learning TDD and working with Git from the start to better prepare you for real world programming.

 

[kevm3]

Getting to grips with Angular. Starting to actually enjoy using it. React.js will come next.

 

[kevm3]

Back. My philosophy is to not be cheap on resources. Guys will spend 200 dollars on a pair of shoes, but when it comes to programming, they will try to cheap out and ask for free resources only. #1 rule, be willing to invest in your craft. Now for Rails, I like the Rails Tutorial my Michael Hartl. That one will give you a solid grounding of the basics, which I'm sure you already know after having deployed a couple of sites. I find the rails guides very nice, which is rare for documentation

Then, once you have a solid grounding on the basics, you can look at things like rails screencasts.

GoRails - Ruby on Rails screencasts for Web Developers - GoRails

If I were you, I'd focus on continually deploying sites. Do a bit of data structures and algorithms here and there , but your main focus should be JS and Ruby and their frameworks. Why do I say that? Because you need to produce a displayable body of work. People need to be able to hit your profile/github and be able to see sites you've produced. I don't think you'd be able to get deep enough into data structures and algorithms in 3 months to catch the eye of employers. Once you get in the door, then start picking up data structures and algorithms. I just personally believe it's important to have visual evidence of what you can make. If I have 10 sites showing a variety of technologies like rails, angular, etc all effectively deployed, that will catch the eyes of a lot of recruiters over being a theoretical guy with all this knowledge of data structures, but nothing I can show. I know a lot of the bigger tech companies will grill you on data structures and algorithms and all of that, but you don't need to enter the industry in one of those companies, and you'll need a lot longer than 3 months to be impressive enough at data structures and algorithms to waltz in on merit of that.

Over the long term, to really make progress, yes you will need to know data structures and algorithms, but if your goal is get a job in the next 3 months, you should be going hard on practical skills.

My github is at:
kevm254 · GitHub

 

[kevm3]

The more I start using Angular, the more I like it. Easier to understand than ember and much easier to find tutorials. After I get my bearings with Angular, I'll pick up react next, which is said to be even simpler.

 

[Data-Hawk]

I want to work at Oculus ( VR ) so bad.

Brehs I suggest looking into the VR field. It's not going to be used just for gaming and I can see the field is going to explode already.

 

[kevm3]

I want to work at Oculus ( VR ) so bad.

Brehs I suggest looking into the VR field. It's not going to be used just for gaming and I can see the field is going to explode already.

Yeah, I have a feeling VR will be huge. I wasn't impressed with 3d tv at all, but VR is going to be big. They've been pushing for VR for a long time now anyways if you look at all of these older movies, so it's pretty much a technology that they want implemented in society. The big downside? If you think you have phone zombies, you'll soon have VR zombies who escape into their digital worlds.

 

[Data-Hawk]

my MSDN enterprise subscription was renewed today . Gawd I love having access to all of Microsoft software at the expense of my company. Time to download Visual Studio Ultimate

 

[Data-Hawk]

Yeah, I have a feeling VR will be huge. I wasn't impressed with 3d tv at all, but VR is going to be big. They've been pushing for VR for a long time now anyways if you look at all of these older movies, so it's pretty much a technology that they want implemented in society. The big downside? If you think you have phone zombies, you'll soon have VR zombies who escape into their digital worlds.

Yeah initially I was like "This is going to be cool for Gaming". But Facebook didn't buy them for gaming at all. They are thinking Education, Government uses.etc

I was watching CNN the other day and the Army or Swat ( Can't remember which one ) was using an Oculus rift for training. But I want to work there. Imagination being surrounded by so many smart people. That forces you to step up your game.

 

[KritNC]

It is so depressing looking at job requirements and see
Position: ENTRY LEVEL JUNIOR Developer
Experience required: 6 years



Makes me want to give up sometimes.


Anyone done any cool projects with APIs? I am just getting into making a call to different APIs and trying to figure out some project to work on involving APIs.

 

[kevm3]

It is so depressing looking at job requirements and see
Position: ENTRY LEVEL JUNIOR Developer
Experience required: 6 years



Makes me want to give up sometimes.


Anyone done any cool projects with APIs? I am just getting into making a call to different APIs and trying to figure out some project to work on involving APIs.

I'd just ignore those requirements and submit anyways.

 

[kevm3]

I think I'll end up working with the youtube api sometime soon since that's the site I'm on most of the time.

 

[Marci-Senpai]

Subs...will read this whole thread tomorrow

 

[kevm3]

Been really getting into angular. One feature I really find helpful is partials. Things are SO much cleaner when you don't have to scroll through tons of blocks of html because you can simply move your navigation and the such into another file.

I'll have to find a way to integrate this into rails

 

[kevm3]

Experiences with angular after using it for a short time?
It's decent. The two way data-binding is quite nice. The downside is that things can start to get messy very quickly, especially when you have all kinds of logic stuffed into the views and the fact that there is no standard directory structure. It gives you freedom to organize things the way you want, but the problem would be when you work on someone else's project, if they aren't extremely disciplined, it can create hard to maintain code. Still, it makes it fairly easy to get helpful things like partials and data-binding quite simple.

The convention over configuration is where I prefer ember over rails. Ember is similar to rails in that things are expected to be in a specific folder. The downside to Ember is that it doesn't have anywhere near the popularity of Angular, so it's harder to find up to date tutorials and it can be more difficult to get up and started compared to angular. As of now, I'll stick with Angular, move on to Angular 2 and pick up some react.js in the meanwhile.

For people new to programming who aren't planning to get a job in the immediate future, which do I recommend? Learn Javascript in and out, pick up some jQuery, pick up some react, and wait to see where the framework wars settle in. Angular 1.0 is being deprecated, so it is now essentially a legacy framework. A lot of immediate jobs will require Angular, so if you need a job right now, it will be great to learn, but with the future seems more unclear. React.js is really taking off. React is only the 'view' layer, as compared to Angular, which is a complete framework that offers routing and all of that.

 

[kevm3]

You might wonder what is the purpose of frameworks like Angular, Ember or even libraries like React? The are all used to aid in the creation of single page applications (SPAs) in which your refreshes are minimized. In the old days before AJAX, every time you clicked on a link, you'd send a request to a server with some information and the WHOLE page would have to reload. With AJAX and javascript, you are able to get dynamic updates. Think about when you go visit a shopping cart page and you see a cart section on the page update dynamically without you having to refresh. SPAs allow for only a certain portion of the page to be rerendered as opposed to the whole page.

What is AJAX? It stands for asynchronous javascript and XML. The purpose of AJAX is to be able to send requests to the server and get pieces of information back after the initial page load, and then javascript is used to dynamically update the page with that new information. The XML portion stands for extensible markup language, and was originally the data format that was returned from the server. Now, JSON, which is Javascript Object Notation, is the format that is typically used to return data form the server. It is much easier to parse and deal with than XML.

So in essence, a page loads. You interact with a page in some form or fashion, and behind the scenes, some of your actions cause a type of request to be sent to the server. The server analyzes your request, and then it returns data typically in JSON format. The data is then inserted into the page dynamically without you having to refresh. This is what a lot of those huge frameworks such as Angular or Ember make easier.