Hello everyone, I've been on the site since I first built my PC back in December (and a bit before), and I built it because I am really interested in programming and computers in general. My issue so far is I don't know what kind of career I'm seeking. At first I wanted to do game programming, assuming it would be productive, but I really didn't find it enjoyable. I managed to learn a fair bit of C and C++, as well as Python. I then tried sort of backend number-crunching type stuff, and found it way more enjoyable than trying to make simple games. I really hated not being able to see what it was doing though. So finally, and currently, I am trying to learn web development. So far, I think this is my favorite type of development, because for all the stuff behind the scenes, there is usually a cool result that you can actually see. Right now I'm learning Javascript and PHP, as well as using some of the tools like Bootstrap. I was wondering what got you guys into programming/development, as well as what industry you work in if employed.
Well it started with games like most and after a week-long trip to Berkeley and having one of those days to learn about the dumbest form of game development (using Kodu) I realized how not enjoyable it was. So we learned about MS Web Expressions 4 and I really enjoyed that, but didn't know html or css or js or php lol, so I stopped web design for quite a while. I moved onto the school computers and went into vbscript and a little bit of java. Never got into that. Finally moved to Linux and got hooked on Bash and all the commands you can run to do different tasks. Well there's my life story!
I honestly have no idea why I started programming, I just did. Started with VBScript in middle school for a very short time before I started learning C++. I stayed with C++ for a while then but never really got in depth with anything.
Then in my junior year in high school I got a local internship where I learned Objective-C and Java for iOS and Android. I went back my Senior year and started working with their other programmer to convert old asp webpages into ASP.NET for their internal stuff. That's about when I started getting into some of the deeper things in programming. I used lambdas and multi-threading, learning about data structures and database normalization (which I love to do), and loved every moment of it.
I really liked working on the web development. Well, except that I absolutely hate web development. CSS is evil. Of course this could totally be due to a lack of understanding. Also I want to cut whoever decided Javascript should work when your code isn't right. And good luck having 5 columns when using Bootstrap. But other than annoying ascetic stuff, I loved working with it.
I'm currently waiting for 2nd semester to start at college so I can get into CS-II. I get the feeling, however, that I will be bored out of my mind, even after skipping CS-I.
I agree with the CSS statement, at least in C (or anything else, really) you know when there is an issue, be it visible or not.
This brings back memories. I remember thinking the same thing you are after I took Computer Science I my first semester of undergrad. My Computer Science I class was a breeze and I thought Computer Science II was going to be more of the same. But in my University’s Computer Science Curriculum, CS II was a weed out class and was orders of magnitude harder than CS I. The course description of CS II seemed innocuous enough, but it was so vastly different in scope from CS I.
I certainly did not have the level of experience you did entering college, but back when I was a freshman, no 18 year old starting college had your amount of experience. And if your school’s CS II is like mine was and if you have already started learning data structures, you are probably in good shape to do well. But one more word of caution, the impossibly hard projects were the easy part of the class. The exams where ridiculous and covered almost nothing of what was taught in class.
right now they are paying really well for ios devs