Mostly bash and a lot of templating
I got it back but i was honestly about to be like “i quit” if i couldn’t. Scariest 20 mins of my life.
Lotta bashing. I’ve only written a few small bash scripts, so I dunno, but any hundreds of lines thing seems like a lotta bashing to me. It’s so dense.
It’s a lot of bash that could be python, but my boss prefers bash, from a script that basically scrapes kubectl logs from our clusters in snapshots and stores the logs in a file system that the static site generator uses to generate these nice display pages for me. I’m using hugo (not my choice either) to generate the site, it’s pretty cool. But learning how to template while doing front end design ui stuff has been a nightmare.
lol Docker can’t run on new MacBooks new CPU chip 
I was as thinking about this from Chads thread and also had been thinking about it recently anyways but how possible is it to get job coding without bootcamp/college degree in CS? I already have a 4 year degree and a good paying job but my industry tends to have ups and downs although I have faded any job loss over 10 years so far. So it would be more like a backup gig or something i could move to in the future if i got tired of this. I feel like someone in this thread made it without the degree but I didn’t see it in the first few posts so I’m asking here again.
It’s very possible, but you need to have something to show prospective employers if you don’t have a degree or recognized certification. Easiest way is to start building some web pages or an app or whatever. Do the things that prove you can do the things you want to get paid for.
I was a boat captain and then i got a cs degree
I’m a former college dropout/100nl macro tabler who’s now a lead dev at a fortune 50 but I’m awesome so ymmv.
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What is a good place to start if I want to develop an economically valuable skill outside of playing cards? I have lots of time that I could put to more productive use than fucking around online. I don’t have any formal training or know any real languages but I have a bit of experience using autoit scripting.
Last year, I spent quite a bit of time writing a pixel bot for WoW Classic from scratch without any outside help other than copying one bit of lua used to translate rotation and health/mana values into RGB that made version 2.0 much better. I enjoyed the process, learned a bunch and produced something functional enough to farm a couple thousand bucks worth of gold, get a reasonably high rank in pvp and not get banned.
I was always a terrible student and have serious motivational issues, but I like to solve puzzles with tangible results and if something really catches my interest, I have no problem grinding 12 hours a day. I’ve played poker for a living for a couple decades, I’ve never had a real job and I’m not looking for one, but developing a marketable skill seems like a good idea, especially considering the uncertain economy and possibility of AI destroying the online games.
That’s pretty much me and programming has been a very very good career.
Side projects are great for a number of reasons. But as far as acquiring a marketable programming skill w/o ever getting a real job - that might be kind of tough. A lot of contract devs seem to cut their teeth for a year or two at a real job, then go freelance.
Pure freelance from the start seems to lend itself better to stuff like graphic design where it’s a one-person show, and you don’t have to worry so much about building things that are stable and maintainable over the long haul. The vast majority of complex programming tasks need a senior dev around to ensure the latter imo.
Maybe stuff like being a wordpress or drupal dev could work as pure freelance. But ugh - not sexy at all. In the old days you could definitely be a mobile app dev as pure freelance. But learning everything you need to know now through google-fu seems daunting.
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I feel like “skills” is an overrated way of thinking about a career. Skills by themselves aren’t valuable and you won’t get paid for them. What is necessary to get paid is a situation where you can use your skills to create economic value and capture some of that value for yourself. Learning to write software is pretty trivial for a smart person who’s willing to devote a year and maybe $1000 to it. The harder problem is figuring out how to use the ability to write software to make money for yourself, which boils down to either building the credentials to get hired in a regular job or a freelance position or else starting your own software business. (As background, I self-taught myself programming over the last 16 months and quit my job a few months ago to start my own software business…)
If you don’t want a regular job, then you should be asking yourself who your clients (as a freelancer) or customers (as a business) are going to be. If you don’t have experience and a network in the “normal” economy, it’s probably going to be extremely difficult to put together something viable. Writing software is still extremely interesting and can be very fun, but that’s not sufficient to make it economically valuable. You should decide first how you want to use the skill (job, freelance, hobby, whatever) before planning how to acquire it.
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what route did you go for the self teaching?
I spent maybe a month of nights and weekends (as a partner at a biglaw firm with two kids under 4 at the time, if that helps translate to a number of hours…) working through problems on Project Euler (would not actually recommend this, HackerRank or LeetCode are better) just to get some basic syntax figured out. Then I started working on projects. I had a software product I wanted to create to start my business and then I just worked on some random hobby projects.
The actual resources to learn how to write code are staggeringly, ridiculously abundant, so you can pick what works best for you. I read a fair number of books. Tim Roughgarden’s series on algorithms is great (although you can also get most of the same content through a free Coursera class, which is fantastic too). Eloquent Javascript is really good for Javascript.
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How worthwhile are certs like certified kubernetes administrator (or the CKAD)? Is it just a resume padder or?
I generally agree, but WAR said that he wasn’t looking for a regular job. If you don’t want to think about value creation, then a regular job is definitely the way to go!
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Thinking about value i’m bringing to the company just stresses me out. I just do what I’m told and let my boss sort that out.
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I’m mostly looking for something to do with my ample free time that is more productive/educational than dicking around on the internet and playing video games. Turning it into actual money isn’t an immediate concern, but developing a skill with at least some amount of value to society is probably a good idea.
All the coding I’ve ever done has been automation of menial tasks like closing stupid Bovada popups and basic, functional video game bots. I enjoy that process and if some new game came out with a solid black market for currency, being able to write a more advanced bot would interest me. I’m sure I could write a solidly winning script for hyper-turbo sngs, but that is outside of my ethical boundaries and I need my poker accounts for real income.
A stat I saw recently was the average google engineer produces 1.5M in value each year. Clearly they should hire lots more engineers.
I’m curious how they got this number other than dividing revenue by number of engineers? (Which is kind of lazy and bad)
I don’t doubt it, but that seems really high. I had pegged them for like 2x avg salary. That’s like 6x+. If that were true and I were a google engineer I’d want way more salary.
My friend works at google and that may be my next attempt at a job if I can get my ass in gear over the next few years. I have two referrals.
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I am wondering if career wise aiming at a FAANG or other large tech player (like twitter) is a good idea or not. I’m probably overestimating my potential - but I am in a unique position to gain a lot of skills and knowledge at this job and my career path would roughly look like:
Small startup → mid size successful company → large tech company
Which makes sense to me. But maybe working at these companies is not so great?
I figure then I put in a few years at the large company and can work anywhere I want after that. That’s roughly my plan. If i am mainly a devops/sre/sysadmin/backend engineer type of guy, what skills should I be looking to pick up?
That’s why I asked about the kubernetes cert earlier. My company is paying for courses + certs for a ton of stuff right now and it seems silly not to do it, but if the value gained is just the cert and there’s not much meat in those courses I may not bother.
I wouldnt dare ask this on the old forum because that one douchebag would just love to chime in and tell me I have no drive or talent.
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