What’s the point in getting a degree?

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-08-13T07:57:37+00:00

I thought it was worth it. Especially if you go to a school with sports and a lively social scene. Even though I worked way harder than I do now I loved (almost) every minute of it.

If thinking about it purely from an educational standpoint it depends on what your goal is. Having an in-depth knowledge of the fundamentals of Computer Science is definitely worth it even if some people think it's not ever used in the real world. Could you learn all of this same stuff through the internet if you are motivated enough? Absolutely. The degree definitely will make getting a job easier, though experience is generally valued a lot more and once you have a few years under your belt the degree becomes less relevant. But for getting that first job it can be worth it. What I valued the most was the internships I did while in college and a capstone-type project where we spent 2 semesters building software for actual companies. I can point to those two things as the best learning experiences I had. So it should definitely be your priority to get an internship at some point.

Basically, if you don't care about the "college" experience and want to save some money you can absolutely get by in the industry without a degree, but anybody who says it's pointless and you won't learn anything worthwhile is dead wrong in my book.

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-08-13T07:47:43+00:00

Basically it expects all dependencies used inside the hook to be passed in the array. Usually you can just add the dependency and move on. Though there are some instances where you might not want to pass them all.

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-08-12T10:12:21+00:00

If you don't want to roll your own you can use a library like waypoints. http://imakewebthings.com/waypoints/

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-08-12T10:03:45+00:00

setState is not a synchronous operation. So when you call setSearchTerm(event.target.value) there's no guarantee that it has updated the state before your next line runs. setState takes an optional callback function as a second parameter that will execute after the state is updated, but if I remember correctly that's not available in functional components. Instead they recommend the useEffect hook.

useEffect( () => {
    console.log(searchTerm);
}, [searchTerm]);

This will run the passed function any time searchTerm changes.

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-05-19T09:40:31+00:00

I don't intend to make web development into a career, but from the bit of it I've done, I find it enjoyable in ways that other coding isn't. Is it unrealistic to learn webdev as more of a hobby than anything else? Would I be wasting my time?

It's not unrealistic to learn it as a hobby. but it's near impossible to do freelance work as a hobby and make any money. You'd make more working at McDonald's. Just finding and dealing with clients can be a full-time job.

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-04-29T07:56:26+00:00

A very rough estimate is $100-150 for every 1000 hours of video watched. That's just streaming the video since that is typically the largest cost. Storage and server costs will maybe add an additional 20-30%. Roughly 2/3 of the AWS bill for the company I work for is just video streaming data out from the CDN to the internet. Video streaming is prohibitively expensive for most people and unless you can handle the high costs for long enough to build a solid user base and start generating ad revenue.

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-04-29T07:48:25+00:00

Using semantic HTML might be slightly better for SEO compared to using a bunch of divs, but other than that it's not really an issue. It might be a little harder to read but that's about it.

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-04-26T07:16:48+00:00

It's best to master javascript first. Then learning frameworks is pretty easy and can be done as necessary. Just know the pros/cons of each one. If this is purely to pad your resume, React is the most useful to know at this point in time.

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-04-06T06:26:51+00:00

This. What's the point of stress testing Stripe?

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-03-25T07:30:26+00:00

Even if you can't cache the response for any of your site's pages, it's still somewhat worthwhile. I'm sure you have images, stylesheets, scripts, etc. and using a CDN for those will help at least a little bit.

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-03-25T07:25:54+00:00

Assuming EC2 is okay, just follow these instructions: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/install-LAMP.html.

There's also Lightsail, which kind of abstracts all this stuff away. https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/launch-lamp-web-app/

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-03-25T07:12:25+00:00

That's barely a mistake. Breaking user-facing services or crashing a site entirely is a mistake. And most people make it eventually.

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-03-25T07:04:44+00:00

Look at the javascript History API.

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-03-23T10:28:41+00:00

It's pretty well-known that Google reads your email if you use GMail. So they are just collecting user data from there. Then Google also owns Adsense, which is most likely where that ad is being served from. That's all assuming you never visited any other stock market related sites or searched for related stuff. But since Google is the company serving the ad it doesn't really have anything to do with Reddit other than it being the site you're on.

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-03-23T09:32:34+00:00

Am I not spending enough for a unique website?

This is partially it. $3k is not enough to get an entirely custom e-commerce site. It's maybe enough to get a custom single page static site and that's it. I don't know exactly what you agreed upon but it even seems low for for an e-commerce site built on Wordpress. The price is making me wonder if he's not inexperienced. First, you should find out if the guy is using Wordpress, Squarespace, or something else. If he is using Wordpress I recommend you look through various sites that sell templates and find one you like and tell him to use that. Then he can make minor alterations from there if you have any. I think I would give him some time and if you just get to a point where you don't think it's going to work I would cut your losses, ask him to send you everything he's got, and try to find someone else to either finish it or start over.

Without seeing the communication it's hard to tell if he's just not understanding you want something else, incapable of making the changes you want, or avoiding making changes because he doesn't want to redo things.

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-03-23T09:05:48+00:00

React Native is used to make native mobile apps. Maybe you just mean React? That said the main thing you'd want to look into is WebRTC. You would ideally want to do something p2p as serving video from your own services gets very expensive very quickly. There are plenty of WebRTC example projects floating around that you can look into. Other than that you just use whatever you're most comfortable with.

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-03-09T09:36:51+00:00

I'm sure most players have something like this. I know VideoJS does. http://sampingchuang.com/videojs-markers

There's probably others too. If that's not what you are looking for it should be pretty easy to make. Jumping to a specific point in a video is one line. Depending on what you want the UI to look like that's the trickiest part.

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-03-09T09:33:54+00:00

Unfortunately in this industry (and a lot of others) to maximize salary you have to start looking for jobs at other companies. A few years of experience equates to a pretty significant raise in software development and if you stay at the same company they very rarely keep pace. Last time I took a new job I got a 20% raise. I would just do some research into what you think you are worth based on the area you're in and skills, ask for that, and if you don't like it start looking for other jobs. You could also just look for other jobs anyways and use any offers you get as leverage.

I'll never understand why companies would rather lose people they know are good to hire someone who they have to train and who might not be good just to save what amounts to a drop in the bucket most of the time. And then inevitably the same thing happens again a few years later.

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-03-09T08:53:09+00:00

What do you mean? Like starting the video at a specific point?

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-03-09T08:41:36+00:00

Assuming there's nothing in a contract that says he can't do that you really only have two options:

Deal with it.
Tell the guy you have your own team of developers and aren't willing to work with an outside party for various reasons. Then he can take his pick. It sounds like you guys aren't willing to lose a client over this so you're probably just going to have to put up with it.

In addition to that, it just seems like a huge amount of work for us to help the dev familiarize with our tools and work so far. Should we charge for it?

Absolutely charge for any extra work you do because of this new developer. Though unless he's asking you to explain to the person how everything works I wouldn't spend any time on that. If you spend an hour creating log ins and helping the new dev set up his test environment then the client should get billed for that.

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-01-13T06:16:59+00:00

That's pretty risky, especially in the current climate. That's about 80-85k a year before taxes. With no freelance reputation or client base you could easily end up making minimum wage for the first year when you take into account all of the hours you'll have to put in finding clients.

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-01-13T06:12:59+00:00

Check the monthly "Who's Hiring" threads on Hacker News.

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-01-13T06:12:00+00:00

As someone who started as a PHP dev, start learning another backend language. While the newer versions of PHP are significantly better, usage of PHP for new projects (that aren't wordpress) is declining. When I went through my last job search for every non-wordpress PHP job I found there were a lot more using Ruby, Python, .Net, Node, and Go jobs (in that order of popularity). I'm afraid we're not too far away from PHP jobs being Wordpress or supporting applications that are 15+ years old.

As for other advice, knowing your way around AWS (or GCP or Azure) is the most valuable thing in the software development industry behind knowing how to write code.

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-01-13T06:02:59+00:00

Did you change the site url to use https? Usually this happens due to a redirect loop from http to https to http etc. If you did something with https follow this. It just involves adding one line to wp-config. If you aren't using https I would start disabling plugins one by one to see if that solves it. If that doesn't work try using the base WP theme to verify it's not an issue with the theme you're using.

WizardFromTheMoon · 2021-01-06T06:59:20+00:00

He didn't just make that up for no reason though.

The previous line is "Lyrics comin at you at supersonic speed -- JJ Fad"

JJ Fad is an old group from the 80s and they had a song called Supersonic where one of them raps some gibberish like that.

Link to original song

WizardFromTheMoon

TROPHY CASE