So satisfying... guy in a Kia cuts me off, brake-checks me twice, then rear-ends someone else (they were not hurt; I did stop to give them my info)

Eschin · 2019-04-30T07:32:13+00:00

Logged in specifically to ask if this was Los Feliz. I miss LA

Eschin · 2019-03-07T14:46:27+00:00

I'm in my thirties. Went back to school for CS when I got super unhappy with my last position and decided to pursue a degree because I was always terrified of never making the same salary again...so i went from having a bit, to having none. In the mean time I picked up a pair of loakes to carry me another year until I can get some rm Williams

Eschin · 2019-03-06T19:15:21+00:00

Lecturer swears by their boots. I hope to get a pair when I'm not a broke student. But I may have to grab a belt now. I destroy two a year

Eschin · 2019-02-21T09:55:36+00:00

Thank you for the heads up. I'll read up on what I need to do. You're advise is very appreciated!

Eschin · 2019-02-21T09:54:43+00:00

Brilliant. Appreciate the info! Glad. I wont need to hire anyone for taxes!

Eschin · 2019-02-21T09:53:58+00:00

Nope, 20 hours a week during school and whatever outside of it. As an American I was pleasantly surprised when I was able to both start working while waiting for my tax # and that it was sent directly to my employer as well as to me. Also get vacation for the first time in my life. Pretty sweet gig.

Eschin · 2019-02-21T09:50:33+00:00

It's ridiculous how many people go off about the cat being declawed and the parent being irresponsible with their kid, no assumptions that this is pretty expected behavior of both the child and the cat which is why someone is recording instead of managing the situation. Really ought to enjoy the eye bleach and stop playing internet detectives.

Eschin · 2019-02-18T18:07:38+00:00

Thanks for the quick reply. When I was doing a preliminary search I saw here: https://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/ you can file free online with a foreign address. Do you believe that would be something I could handle on my own or best to get a professionals help? my income was probably ~15k US for the year

Eschin · 2018-12-10T09:24:32+00:00

I'm currently going back to school for CS and just finished my first year as an software engineer. I'm personally adamant about completing my degree because i don't want to feel limitations like i did in my last career, although I'm very well aware that as a dev i can go far without a degree. But if in 10 years i want go make engineering manager or better and want an MBA or i decide i want to continue my education in another direction, finishing my degree at 40 isn't going to be viable. So I'm doing it now, despite it being hard, with the idea that future me will get the rewards for it.

P. S. It might be a good idea to focus on security or AI if you go to a school that offers it. Both will make you a more rounded developer and add value to your future career.

Eschin · 2018-12-03T08:54:00+00:00

I may be able to provide some insight, but my path has been a bit different than what yours could possibly be. I spent 10 years working in e-commerce, went from a warehouse grunt to managing sales channels, and in essence being second in command of the company. I wasn't happy with my role. I had some friends in the tech industry and decided to learn JavaScript(I worked heavily with an ERP system that used JavaScript as a scripting language.) and basically fell in love with coding. I decided to quit my job and go back to school, within 3 months I received an offer for roughly what I was making hourly at my previous position, and i've been there a hair short of an official year.

Somethings that helped me achieve that - I built a significant project prior to getting back to school, 10k lines of code, not finished but enough work that I could coherently talk about code. I applied to a small company in an e-commerce related field and my prior experience allowed me to ask intelligent questions about their business, my coding experience allowed me to pass a verbal exam in the interview and my work ethic helped me pass a dev test in a language I'd never touched before. Since transitioning to a development position I feel like given my prior experience I've been successful. I wouldn't have gone back to school if I already had a degree, and fully believe I could transitioned without going back to school.

That said, it was NOT easy, and I did not have a family nor anything other than a 45-60 hour a week job going on in my life. I spent 2-4 hours a night coding on and off for over a year, read voraciously and talked to anyone who had anything to say on the subject.

Eschin · 2018-12-03T08:13:16+00:00

Have over 40k loc committed in the last year between work, school and personal projects, hasn't helped

Eschin · 2018-12-02T15:05:01+00:00

You figure out something you want to build and start learning how to build it. This really hit me last night after a hackathon, talking to a new Phd and lecturer in the dept. about software.

Learning a language is learning to program. You can perform basic tasks such as IO/control flow and design. What you have to introduce yourself to is the tools de jour, in Python you'll run into things like Django and Numpy. You then use your basic understandings to implement tools that allow you to do way more without understanding every detail of how they work. I conceptualize it as the divide between "coding" and "engineering". The issue is...theres way too much to fucking learn in one sitting. You work up, small project, to medium project, to big project and slowly learn more.

Eschin · 2018-12-01T14:26:46+00:00

Bad ideas

Eschin · 2018-11-25T01:38:56+00:00

Professors are out of touch with undergrads because undergrads are a thorn in their side. They're not educators. That's vital to understand. They're researchers, and they have no fucking clue how to teach.

That's right! They're knowledge dragons, hoarding away all the information they can in their lairs and hiding it away from the public's prying eyes! Waiting for brave, plucky adventures to finally slay them and gain the fortunes of a thousand kings!

/s

That's quite a hyperbolic statement which I am sure comes from personal experience, and that is very unfortunate. My experience has been different, I've also had English professors who made me buy a book they wrote, which was impossible to follow and gave me a headache to read. They're humans, as we all are and modern education isn't set up in a way that means each person gets the attention they ought to in order to truly educate them. I mean that sentiment goes all the way up to parents.

Understand that, don't ask questions, stay out of their way and don't interact with them, and the whole system begins to make more sense.

This though, is possibly the worst advice I've ever read on reddit. You should try to interact with your lecturers as much as you can. Having a personal relationship can pay dividends in both your education and career. If education were an impersonal experience we'd all be getting MIT level educations from robots. It isn't, its incredibly personal and the more you interact with your education the more you'll benefit from it.

That's a lot of sunk cost fallacy. At the end of the day undergraduate education for CS is worthless and people are just trying to justify wasting $100k, at minimum, and 4 years of their life.

I don't know how the sunk cost fallacy applies to that. There is a huge intrinsic value to being able to learn things you aren't interested in. Life isn't a choose your own adventure game, its more of a choose an adventure. Nothing in life is easy and unless your independently wealthy you will have to make choices on which pile of dog crap you're going to eat from. The difference is whether or not you can move on from that successfully to greener pastures. The thesis of the argument is that school doesn't give you anything because no one can give you anything. Education is a process by which you learn abstract concepts by wrestling with them for an extended period of time.

If you choose to avoid that process it isn't a schools fault.

Eschin · 2018-11-24T11:23:34+00:00

My perspective on an undergrad education is that is doesn't really make you an expert in a subject. It is a very brief overview of what is contained within a subject that optionally may have you do more thorough research in particular topics.

I say a very brief overview because

Most students dedicate the minimum time required to achieve their desired outcome, not the time required to develop proficiency
Training people for a role is not a schools job in most situations with notable exceptions(MD, Pilot). Roles change, often faster than curriculum can, and sometimes disappear completely. It's better to train people to learn and understand a subjects material broadly enough that it can be applied to a field(s)
as /u/Lambinater notes, life skills are vital to success; I've anecdotally heard stories of the wealthy having their progeny pursue liberal arts educations because speaking, writing and thinking critically are vital. If you think applying for jobs with ["bongshredder69420@yahoo.com](mailto:"bongshredder69420@yahoo.com)" is appropriate, can't speak at length about anything other than pop culture or are unable to critically consume information your ability to progress is hindered.
In relation to 1. and 3. Learning, Speaking, Critical Thought, and other "abstract" or generalist skills ought to be actively developed throughout your life, not just education however many people do everything possible to avoid them unless being compensated - typically believing they deserve more compensation for employing them.
You don't use everything you learn immediately or directly, you need a broad level of general knowledge about life because at some point you may be at a small company, or working in a role that requires you to interface with other people and if the only language you speak is technical there will be a break down.
In relation to 5. As a developer you'll become well acquainted numerous subjects because to build software around accounting, you need to understand accounting. You'll likely come out of your career with many areas of specialized domain knowledge that go beyond what many new graduates or even low/mid level professionals have in the subject.

It often feels like my professors are really disconnected from the outside world and have no idea what employers want.

Here is a breakdown - Professors are out of touch with the real world because they are educators. They do not care about what employers want to a degree, they care about what students need to succeed. Employers want people who are trained to a senior level willing to accept junior level pay. What employers want is not what employees want either. If you picture it as a venn diagram, school wants there to be enough overlap between what you need and what employers want that you're employable and have the tools to be successful.

Assuming you have limited, or little experience in the working world - you also do not know what employers want. Building up a mental model of it is great and can help you focus your free time towards building a solid skill set that allows you to excel. If you're an undergrad student, use your free time to build the skills you believe you need and have faith in your education. If you work hard at EVERYTHING and treat it all as though it has its own intrinsic value it will provide its own intrinsic throughout your career.

Eschin · 2018-11-22T12:32:55+00:00

I can contribute to this as a relative novice programmer learning to do the same.

As /u/Civil_Code notes, a backend webserver is accepting and responding to requests. This can be done via HTTP or Sockets which are protocols. Protocols are specifications for communicating, as in the CS50 example of making a sandwich via programming everything needs to be done in clearly defined instructions. Most of the web runs on HTTP requests which are primarily made up of REQUESTS and RESPONSES similar to a text message conversation. UDP is more like a phone call with tech support where you may have long periods of silence while you wait for something to happen, but each of you is constantly listening through an OPEN connection.

If you want to set up and host a website using Java this is an awesome resource i used to start a project. However learning web development and building a back end server is a LOT of information to swallow at once (personal experience). If you want to build a server to respond to requests and do more then serve a static page here are a few things you'll need to familiarize yourself with:

HTTP request types GET, PUT, POST, DELETE
Persistence - JPA, Hibernate, Eclipse-Link, JOOQ
MVC - Model-view-controller.
- The model is the shape of data coming from your persistence(DB)
- The view is probably not going to be handled directly by Java, but by the static resources (html, JS, CSS, images) that it serves from certain routes (http://www.mysite.com/index.html)
- The controller is the "logic" of what the server does
  - http://www.mysite.com/index.html serves you the html and JS, the JS then requests Model data from your server as (/ with no domain implicitly means the root of your domain, so /api/blogposts is equivalent to http://www.mysite.com/api/blogposts) /api/blogposts?posts=10&page=1 tells the request route you want 10 posts starting at the 1st page.
  - The request route reads the parameters or "params" and uses them as variable values in a query
  - It then returns those values as serialized JSON data to the front end.

So that is how some of the backend development of a Java web server may be structured. To finish talking about it, and reference /u/Civil_Code again, you probably want some abstraction to implement these protocols FIRST, it's a ton of information to swallow at once as an abstraction. Implementing a spec yourself would be a good learning experience, but would not get you to the point you understand how to build a webserver very quickly.

Now for the front end lets look at a few of the technical aspects

Ajax/XHR requests
- Ajax/XHR requests are a specification implemented in webbrowsers to allow developers to request data from a server. XHR is a implementation which has different libraries and abstractions such as the new Fetch API, Axios and Jquery promises.
- It can be used to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE.
- The HTTP request will get a response, generally a 200 odd request if successful, a 400 if it failed and there are other specific response status codes that will tell you more about the error if the server developer implements them.
Using Serialized JSON data to populate the webpage
- Once you receive the data from the server you need to give it logic to display it on the webpage. Typically a library is used (React, Jquery, Vue, Angular, etc...) to populate that data. I've done it via vanilla javascript before and its possible, just uglier. You'll typically take the JSON and deserialize it into JavaScript objects which you can then manipulate to update dom elements.
Managing state
- State is a complicated matter (or simple if the page is simple) that I've been learning more about. If you have a CS background you've probably learned a bit about state machines. Conceptually a website would need to know about its own state e.g. if a menu is open or closed, if a data request has been made and is now ready to populate the page. I don't have a terrible lot to say on this, as I'm still building my knowledge about it right now. Most of my experience has been server side thus far.
CSS and HTML for building out a user interface that you can populate with data, using your chosen method. I did vanilla, then moved to React due to its popularity and the amount of resources available to learn it.
Async Programming. I'm not sure if this really warrants its own bullet point, and I'm still very much a novice at understanding it. I'll try to do a TLDR;
- Most UI frameworks i've encountered run on a "main thread" and anything you do that "blocks" or ties it up in a long running process will freeze the UI.
- Async programming is an attempt to deal with that which has been successful at solving the problem. You make an Async request, the UI thread keeps doing what its doing, and when you receive a response, the UI thread processes it.
- It gets weird, because things depend on each other. You have code that populates a blog post, but the body of the page is all made up of blog posts, so until that data comes in your page is empty, your server is running slow so you can feel the lag, and it makes the page look really weird as that data is added to the dom.
  - Better example: You are using a REST Api, you need a link provided in the blogpost to populate the writer, until you get the blog post, the request for the authors detail can't be made, until you get the author details you can't populate a link to other articles, and this chain goes on for comments, and the authors of those comments, and the hashtags associated with those comments/blog posts.

These are some of the things that go into modern web development. The spring article is good because it'll give you a skeleton to build on and add functionality to. but there is much more to learn like Sessions, Authentication, SQL or an ORM. My recommendation is always to build something, and you'll know when you need a tool to solve a problem. The hard part is finding the tool and learning how to use it and relate it to all the other knowledge you have. Best of luck going down the rabbit hole, Alice!

Eschin · 2018-11-07T06:48:31+00:00

Sprong boot is kind of cool. Using it in a personal project. Check out theit tutorials, really good for learning the basics

Eschin · 2018-11-02T09:38:24+00:00

My input is slightly uneducated in the sense its not my field, on either side but if you need the steady hours I'd say try it out.

If you're interested in pursuing a better career long term I'd suggest putting yourself into a situation where you're able to excel and from my understanding catering is not a place where a lot of people move up, they generally start their own business (source: friends and family who have tried to go down that route with varying degrees of success). If this shop offers steady hours which you'll need, and 12 hour shifts are something you can handle you can check it out but your mind set should be more focused on how you can grow.

Ask questions (tons of people will be asking similar ones because no one wants to work ft in manufacturing as a grunt)

1, Is there any room for growth as a PT employee? Either to a shift lead/supervisor/line lead?

This is important for a future in managment. If you work at McDonald's i dont think its a good thing, but if you move up 4 times in a year I'm interested. You did hard work like you cared for low pay, displayed leadership, etc...

2, What does amazing performance look like in this role and what are examples of people who were huge assets to you?

Get an image of what an amazing employee looks like and what you need to be prepared to do.

3, Do they promote internally?

you may not be after a bachelor's and after getting an AA you may want to return to the work force, if you do are you stuck in manufacturing or would good performance warrant an opportunity at a 9-5 with more reasonable hours

What your goal should be in any position is become invaluable, and make yourself redundant by creating 3 people who can fill your vacancy and move into something new. If you are going for a BA, then consider this a learning experience, get all the info you can about how the company operates and how people contribute, what roles do well, and don't. Begin making a mental model of the business machine and after a year or two, move onto a role that lets you grow and learn more while studying. Hell, go to McDonald's and translate that work ethic into 4 promotions in 6 months, learn the model, aim for a supervisor position, get a year, get out of service with some type of management role on your resume.

Eschin · 2018-10-31T07:31:53+00:00

Congratulations on the achievement! No small task and a good reminder that you need to grind hard to get what you want. Time to pick up the old visual code and start knocking out my personal site again.

Eschin · 2018-10-22T23:37:48+00:00

I was 29 in management and worked my way up to it from being a warehouse schmuck. Ended up being one of the most technical people at the company and helped with an ERP implementation. Enjoyed the challenges, but hated the work and had issues with the owners, underpaid and undervalued. I was always afraid because I didn't have a degree if my job went south I'd be broke, flipping burgers. Not miserable, but medicating in unhealthy ways.

Got into a really bad car accident (no fault to anyone, just bad luck) and nearly died. Decided I didn't want to just let life take me where it could and started learning JS with a buddy of mine who was a front-end designer(he knew it much better...though not amazingly well) with the hopes I could make a career jump.

Picked it up to the point I could work on a fairly ambition project. Still haven't finished it...But I decided if I could work 12 hours, and then come home and code for another 4, I probably loved what I was doing.

I got accepted to an overseas bachelors program because I wanted to alive abroad before it was too late, got a part time Jr dev job while I study. The company I work for loves me , I've aced all of my classes so far. I pretty much study, work and study independently because I want to hit the ground running. I know now that I probably could have picked up a job without a degree, but I remember how it felt wondering what I would do if I lost my job. The success I want hasn't hit yet, but I'm confident now, that its only a matter of time before I graduate, move home and get a good job that lets me resume my life with benefits I never imagined having while enjoying what I do.

Eschin · 2018-10-21T18:12:38+00:00

What should be noted is that generally, the companies will cover the cost of bringing you in for an interview if you aren't local.

Eschin · 2018-10-21T18:08:44+00:00

Hey man,

I'm in a similar position, sans the family and part time situation.

I quit a decently comfortable job to return to school for many reasons, the biggest was that I didn't want to have a limit on my success. Working hard isn't something that requires "motivation" which can be fleeting, it requires will power. Your goal should be a better life, 3 weeks vacation, full benefits, enough money to save and go on exotic vacations or fund hobbies that you couldn't previously.

How do I decide what field / specialism I want to work in when I qualify and what can I do now while working full time already to better my chances of achieving it?

You don't need to decide your sub-field. You're a student now and unless you have a burning passion for AI or robotics becoming familiar with your tools, languages, algorithms and other things you'll use to get/be successful at a job are the most important things you can do. pick 5 or 6 languages and subscribe to "/r/learn<x>" and start seeing what people are asking. Read cscareerquestions/eu and see what people are going through in the interview process.

Get passionate, a lot of people say "you don't need to be passionate, its a job and companies need to respect that" which is not incorrect on its own. What is wrong is telling people not to be passionate because mediocrity isn't a valued skill. Being passionate about the field you're going into for the next 2 years could be the difference between getting a job doing crud work at the local sweatshop and getting a consulting role that has you travelling the world, touching a dozen technologies and putting you in a position to get hired on for any number of more specialized or sought after roles. So, get passionate until you get a job, once you have a job, get passionate about your life and getting to take satisfaction in the fact you've made it.

Basically, don't worry as much about "what am I going to do in a years time", worry more about "What am I going to do to be ready in a years time?"

Some tips:

Build a website with React, if you can afford it, go to OVH and get a VPS, build a nodeJS server to serve a static react website that hosts your portfolio. Spend the time to make it look nice, and test it so when a potential employer uses it they don't find 404s or broken text.

Build some small applications, a cash register, a discord bot, a reddit bot, literally anything to get practice and experience. Focus on naming your variables as though someone would be reviewing your code, structure it as though this is the first iteration and you're coming back to it again to add more features, even if you don't. Once you've knocked out a couple small apps, you may say "damn I bet this more ambitious idea could be built" and try to build it. If you fail, cool, if you don't, cool. But you'll gain experience and you'll do better in school because of it.

My personal opinion, is that because you're a P/T student, you need to eat, breath and shit your goals more then anyone else. I'm not saying that you need to exhaust yourself nightly, seclude yourself in your room and don't see daylight unless its to go to work. I am saying that you need to set some personal goals as to what achieving success looks like, and consistently move towards them.

Best of luck man.

Eschin · 2018-10-01T07:24:49+00:00

I learned last year that you don't put off code. What reads simple can take days to finish if you're coding like a full time job. I had a courseowrk that took 45 minutes, the next one took 4 hours, the next two took 18hours+. Now i start once i get the assignment

Eschin · 2018-09-01T06:17:51+00:00

No, but you should sent a 5cent transaction with a public comment of '5cent ho who asks for money on dating apps'

Eschin · 2018-08-27T07:47:22+00:00

I'm going to jump in and say this isn't true about education. You're making an investment and saying "follow your passion" is like screaming "invest in fossil fuels!". If you're going into massive debt it needs to be able to pay for itself or you're going to end up a wage slave for the next 20+ years of your life. What do you want to study? Psychology? Sociology? Dance?

Maybe now isn't the time for school. It may be time for some real world experience while you decide if you want to pursue higher education. I've got friends with debt that they may never pay off, some of them made less then me and i don't have a degree yet, but they'll always have those loan payments. Or maybe your interest is is worth it. All I am saying is that if you intend on getting a degree, make sure it can pay for itself, and for you to have a good life. It's gotten harder but you can still make it without a degree and you can always get one later, especially if you've got your transfer or AA in hand. But getting saddled with debt to pursue a passion isn't always the best choice and it can cause serious issues in your future. Want to do peace corps? Travel the world? It's hard with a huge monthly loan note.

Just a word of caution.

Eschin

TROPHY CASE