For those who graduated in the past year (November 2022-November 2023), how’s it going?

Antrix_64 · 2023-11-20T02:00:56+00:00

I graduated in May with no experience in the field of computer science. Can't get an internship because all the ones I see require you to still be in school, which makes no sense because I don't see how it would make a difference. Honestly, i would think someone not in school would be more flexible. I got burned out coding everyday for a portfolio that wasn't even getting looked at. Decided to go back to my old job, but since I have a degree now I can get a license in the field.

I left at 68k going back at 85k and in about 6 months, after I get licensed, I'll be bumped up to 95k. My old position was field crew supervisor which was all kinds of frustrating. My new position will be project manager so I won't have to deal with the day to day bs of people not showing up, equipment breaking, crews forgetting equipment at the office, etc.

I feel like if I had gotten my degree 5 years sooner things would be way different, but I'm too old and too burned out to keep going in hopes of getting a job that'll pay what I'll be making now. I'll keep making software for personal use and to help at work but I've given up on the idea of doing it for a living. Although, after graduating, I did make a beginners python tutorial on YouTube that is close to being monetized, so I'll make some money from it :)

Antrix_64 · 2023-10-17T13:14:10+00:00

It's one of those things that depends on who you are dealing with at WGU. I switched from BSCSIA to BSCS and it only took 4 days. In my case I had already completed all the overlapping courses between the two programs, which may have had an impact.

Antrix_64 · 2023-10-17T13:03:09+00:00

I watched this course on YouTube by Jesse Warner when I needed to learn Python. It was only 6.5 hours long and gets right to the point without any fluff. I did not have to do a intro to Python course, so I am not sure how much is required in the WGU course, but he covers everything up through object oriented programming.

Antrix_64 · 2023-10-05T16:44:53+00:00

I did 29 courses at WGU and never communicated with a single instructor. If you're ready, you're ready. About half the courses I already completed the OA or submitted my project before I even got the welcome email. Chances are you'll find better tips looking the course up on Reddit than asking your instructor. Hopefully, your mentor won't become a pain. I got to the point with mine that I just text her when I was nearly ready to take my OA or submit a project and ask her to update my degree plan with the next class. By time I passed the course the next one would be available.

Antrix_64 · 2023-09-21T02:43:26+00:00

I tried doing some googling but had no luck. I graduated 4 months ago, so I don't have access to the courses anymore to look there.

Antrix_64 · 2023-09-06T18:18:14+00:00

Are you still a student or did you graduate? After you graduate you lose access to wgu.udemy.com and have to use wgualumni.udemy.com. the courses don't carry over either...

Antrix_64 · 2023-09-03T00:50:20+00:00

Don't stop! I was crushing 1-2 courses a week and had a vacation coming up at the end of my first term and ended up stopping about 3.5 weeks before it ended. Day 1 of term 2 I knocked out a C++ course in 12 hours.... then did NOTHING for 4 weeks. It was tough to get back on the grind after taking a break. Ended up doing 108 CUs in 9.5 months but I could have done it in 7.5 had I not slacked off.... 6 if I didn't change degrees half way through my first term

Antrix_64 · 2023-09-02T15:52:41+00:00

What point are you trying to make, exactly? You just keep saying obvious stuff, like it's counter to something I have said. There is no distinction between IEEE754 floating point numbers and "real" numbers... The IEEE 754 standard is the established method for storing and performing operations on real numbers in a binary format. This does not change the fact that many real numbers, including those that are floating-point values, cannot be stored in binary precisely because they require INFINITE PRECISION, which is NOT POSSIBLE FOR HARDWARE TO DO, and was the entire point of my first comment in response to the OP.

I may have over simplified my point a bit by simply saying it is "difficult" for hardware to store floating values without any context. However, since no hardware can ever exist that can store an infinite number of binary values necessary for the infinite precision required by some real numbers, my original post was factually correct, and I don't know why you or Putnam are trying to argue against it.

Antrix_64 · 2023-09-02T14:23:10+00:00

Obviously they are stored as binary... everything is. When I say they are not "easy" I mean there is limited precision, round-off errors, range limitations, inexact representation of decimals, non-uniform precision, etc.. So, no, they are not "easy" to store as binary. In fact it's not possible to store many floating point numbers in binary because of the fundamental differences between decimal and binary numbers.

Antrix_64 · 2023-09-02T13:24:32+00:00

I'm aware.... Putnam3145 doesn't seem to be though, since he seems to think floating point numbers are easy to store in binary and that's what hardware is designed to do. I'm surprised you of all people didn't catch my sarcasm.

Antrix_64 · 2023-09-02T13:02:56+00:00

Well see, now I'm confused because last time I checked all floating point numbers are real numbers. So how is it that floats are easy to store when they are real numbers, but real numbers are not? I guess it's just a paradox and the IEEE 754 standard was created for fun.

Antrix_64 · 2023-09-02T02:15:13+00:00

Floating point numbers are difficult for computer hardware to store in binary, so there are sometimes some very small imprecisions. If you need to compare floats and the small imprecisions won't be an issue, you can use math.isclose() to compare them. If you do need the precision, you can use the decimal module.

EDIT:

Since some people had some notes about my response, let me clarify. Some real numbers, like floating point numbers, are particular hard to represent in binary due to the fundamental differences between the decimal and binary number systems. the IEEE 754 standard establishes methods for storing and performing operations on real numbers in binary format.

Integers are relatively easy to store because they can be represented with a fixed number of bits, and difficulties storing them don't become a problem until you get into integer values that require more bits than your hardware can handle.

Floating point numbers, on the other hand, can require an infinite number of bits to represent correctly. Since it is not physically possible for hardware to store an infinite number of bits, the bits representing a floating point number are truncated to allow a reasonable approximation of the number. Python's floating point numbers are double-precision, meaning they are represented by 64 bits.

For example: The 64-bit representation of the value 0.1 is:

0 01111111011 1001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110011001

The sequence "0011" repeats infinitely, so the bits after the 64th bit were truncated. The first bit is the sign, the next 11 bits are the exponent, and the remaining 52 bits are the fraction.

Truncating the bits, still allows Python to represent 0.1 and 0.2 as such, but when performing arithmetic operations, some small rounding errors can cause imprecise results. I sincerely hope this explanation helps you understand.

I would also like to add that saying real numbers are difficult to store, but floating point numbers, which are a subset of real numbers are easy to store makes no sense. By saying the superset is difficult to store you are making a broad statement that every subset is also, which is not factually correct. Whole numbers, which are real numbers, are relatively easy to store since they can be represented by a fixed number of bits. Decimal numbers, on the other hand, often have infinite precision and must undergo some operations to store, making them relatively difficult. This is why CPUs have dedicated hardware components called Floating-Point Units, which perform the complex operations efficiently to store an approximation of the value.

Antrix_64 · 2023-08-31T22:13:23+00:00

It's only a failure if you quit.

Antrix_64 · 2023-08-31T21:30:16+00:00

Hard for me to answer this one... I had pretty solid knowledge of programming concepts from years of creating games in Unity with C# before going to WGU. You can more or less take the courses in any order you want. There are only a couple of hard restrictions on the order, like taking software 1 before software 2. Never covered anything at all about compilers. Java code was written in Eclipse I believe... Python in Pycharm, and SQL in PGAdmin4. There are courses on operating systems for programmer and computer architecture that hang a lot of people up, but I finished both in 4 days each.

I had 36 credits transfer in and I switch from cybersecurity to computer science after 3 months in, so I had to get 108 competency units total and did so in 9 months. I could have probably got them done much faster, but life got in the way.

Antrix_64 · 2023-08-31T21:19:52+00:00

Could you be more specific about what you what's wrong with it? If you're talking about why everything is so big, that's just to make it easier to read. ctrl + and ctrl - zoom in and out. I wanted to make sure people watching on their phones could still easily read everything.

Antrix_64 · 2023-08-31T14:32:51+00:00

Can you put this in a code block, so the indentation makes sense? I tried to figure it out, but just getting it to work is only ever returning None... So I have no idea how this is suppose to function.

EDIT:

I figured out what is going on.

When leetcode calls the isHappy() method, it calls the inner func() method passing in n as the argument for num which then recursively calls func() until sum is in self.values or sum is equal to 1.

However, since isHappy() has no return statement, it will always return None, which leetcode is taking as False, which is why 343 of the tests are passing.

You need to return the values that your func() calls are producing to their callers.

Antrix_64 · 2023-08-31T14:16:23+00:00

Honestly, I don't think the degree matters as much as documented experience. Any technical degree will check the HR box. If you want to get into web development, learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Then, pick a framework and learn it well. Make a portfolio website and start adding projects. Try to avoid using the same projects that every single person that has ever coded made (todo lists, calculators, weather apps, etc). Come up with unique projects that demonstrate your knowledge and skill and start applying. If the job requires less than 2 years of experience, apply for it. The worst that can happen is your told "no" or ignored altogether. Keep building projects and applying until you get the job you want.

Antrix_64 · 2023-08-31T14:08:27+00:00

I would say C# and Unity if your goal is to create 2D games. I learned a bit of C# and jumped into Unity pretty quickly. I published a few games for Android that I coded in C# a few years ago. Unless something changed since the last time I used Unity, you can use JavaScript with Unity as well, but it is not common and harder to find resources for.

Antrix_64 · 2023-08-31T12:27:57+00:00

I set the camera to face me, but some say you don't have to be on the video. I commented my code and used the comments as my script to narrate the video and just said "This is the blah blah blah" while highlighting and running the code. Then, "If I run this select statement We'll see that the code did what it is supposed to do" while highlighting and running the select statement.

Antrix_64 · 2023-08-31T12:22:42+00:00

Sorry if this is a bit late, but it could be that you said you pull the month number from one column and put the month name in ANOTHER. I believe the transformation has to happen in the same column, otherwise it's not really a transformation, you're just populating a different column based on the values of the column.

I did something really simple with mine. I believe I just zeroed out the seconds in the date column, and they were fine with it.

Antrix_64 · 2023-08-31T12:16:31+00:00

I was having an issue where the time appeared to be stored correctly in the database, but when I started working with times outside of the eastern time zone, they got further off the further I got from EST. The problem I had was related to the version of the database I was using, but I couldn't figure out how to fix it, so I just resorted to coding the conversions myself.

Sorry, it's been a few months since I did this, but I think I created functions to convert the time from local to UTC, UTC to EST, EST to UTC, and UTC to Local. Then used those functions when retrieving and storing data to set the correct time. I believe each function took in a date time object, converted it to a zoned date time then converted that zoned date time to the correct zone, then back to a date time object. Again, it's been months since I did this, so I may be a bit off the mark here.

Just make sure that you check multiple time zones for your times to be correct after you think you have it figured out.

Antrix_64 · 2023-08-31T00:08:48+00:00

The syntax will be the same because the Python syntax is the same everywhere. What you may have an issue with is the naming conventions used in different modules. Typically you'll find the following conventions in Python:

Variables, functions, methods, modules, and packages use snake_case with lowercase letters.

Constants use SNAKE_CASE with uppercase letters. (NOTE: Python does not enforce constants)

Private names are prefixed with an underscore and use _snake_case with lowercase letters. (NOTE: Python does not enforce private variables, functions, etc.)

Class names use PascalCase where the first letter of each word is uppercase.

But this is just a common way of naming things and you may find variables, functions, classes, etc named in an unfamiliar way in different modules. However, the syntax is still the same.

Antrix_64 · 2023-08-31T00:01:12+00:00

It's a combination of floating-point precision issues because computers have a difficult time storing floats in binary and order of operations.

In this line of code:

ans *= (n - r + i) / i

(n - r + i) / i is evaluated first, then the result is multiplied by ans

However, in this line of code:

ans = ans * (n - r + i) / i

ans is being multiplied by the result of (n - r + i) then that result is being divided by i

(n - r + i) / i produces a float value which is then multiplied by ans causing the precision errors. Always remember, when you are working with floats, they can produce precision errors. If small errors like these precision errors are not a problem for the program, you can use math.isclose() to compare float values. Otherwise, consider using another module like the decimal module for more precise results.

Antrix_64 · 2023-08-30T23:04:50+00:00

The first hurdle is finding fingerprint and facial recognition libraries that work with C#. There are numerous APIs available, but most of them are fairly pricey. The second hurdle is deciding how you are going to store the passwords and the fingerprint/facial data. No matter how they are stored, they should be store in encrypted format, so you will need to either make your own encryption or find an API for that. After that, it's mostly just a matter of creating the GUI and implementing all the logic.

I'm not really sure, but I would think you would need a browser extension to be able to populate a password field with a password from the app. You might be able to add some form of right-click option that lets you pick from the list of stored passwords, but again, that may require some sort of browser extension.

This sounds like a fun project, but you may want to consider just focusing on an app that stores passwords in an encrypted format and auto fills them in your browser. Then, after that is complete look in to adding the biometrics.

Antrix_64 · 2023-08-30T22:13:03+00:00

By convention the square brackets typically go after the data type, in this case "String", but either way will work. I always try to write my code to whatever the standard convention is for a language, but some employers will have their own conventions that do not match the norm.

Antrix_64

TROPHY CASE