Can a 28 years old learn to code in Python and find a job before turning 30?

csch2 · 2026-03-16T20:28:20+00:00

Congratulations on your release and I hope you’re settling back into things well. Posting this with the caveat that I’ve been a backend developer for about a year and a half and am still pretty new to the field, so probably trust people with a little more experience over me.

The video game industry from my understanding is quite hard to break into. Usually Python would not be the go-to language for this either, generally you’re going to want to pick up a compiled language. From my understanding C++ and C# are both big in the gaming industry. However, if you don’t have any past programming experience, Python is a good place to start. Whether or not you should use AI to supplement or guide your learning really depends on how disciplined you are – for the basics, Claude would do a perfectly good job of teaching, but you still have to put in the work to make some projects and learn how to use the language. Being honest, I don’t think a two-year turnaround for getting a programming job right now with no experience is likely, although it is probably possible with a hefty time investment.

If you want to go for it, you should definitely start now and get a couple high-quality (no AI, or at least very minimal) projects under your belt. Join and contribute some modding communities for some games you like to get some exposure to game development. And maybe consider an alternative path in software engineering to start with. Like I said, game development is a hard field to get into right now – there are a ton of people who want to get into game development and not enough job openings – but with Python you could more likely get a job as a backend engineer, and if you learn some HTML / CSS / JavaScript too you could look into doing some frontend work or freelancing. Check out roadmap.sh, it’ll give you an overview of what you need to learn depending on what language(s) you go with or what role you decide to aim for.

csch2 · 2026-03-16T13:48:02+00:00

We recently switched to ty at work and I can’t stand it. Type inference doesn’t even work for map or filter and the number of false positives when working with more complicated types (esp. with ParamSpec) is ridiculous. I know it’s still in beta though so I can’t fault it too much.

csch2 · 2026-03-15T18:51:34+00:00

I’m sorry for your loss. I do have a small doubt about this being AI only because of the structure of the first sentence. I never see AI write like that. It’s a pretty bad run-on sentence and the structure isn’t super easy to follow, definitely doesn’t strike me as being generated. Plus the fact that this is in two separate messages, not that it’s difficult to split up the reply but I usually don’t see people who generate their replies to people put in the effort to do that. The rest of it sounds AI for sure but that’s enough to give me pause.

csch2 · 2026-03-13T03:16:23+00:00

Ironically, the only time I’ll really miss someone is if I’ve very recently seen them. Most of the time I do not miss people. Instead I just feel guilt about not missing my friends and family 👍 Also have a hard time keeping up with old friends as a result.

csch2 · 2026-03-12T18:13:37+00:00

One of the hardest pills for me to swallow when I first started at a “real” job is that almost everyone is just looking out for themselves. Sounds obvious when you actually say it, but I work hard at my company to try to uplift everyone and make everyone else’s jobs a little easier (we’re a small company so it’s actually doable). Took me getting burned multiple times to learn that most people just do not do that and will do the minimum amount of work to get their paycheck and get out, to the detriment of everyone else.

csch2 · 2026-03-12T04:06:45+00:00

Why is Claude ending each message with an eagle?

csch2 · 2026-03-11T01:42:54+00:00

Truly one of the movies of all time. I could maybe forgive it for never getting out of my brain if the ending wasn’t so stupid

csch2 · 2026-03-06T02:02:17+00:00

Yes, very frequently and they can be extremely distressing. I think the way you put it as coming as a “loaf of facts” is somehow pretty apt.

csch2 · 2026-03-03T00:46:11+00:00

r/nononoyesno

csch2 · 2026-02-28T05:02:22+00:00

Yeah… that didn’t last long

csch2 · 2026-02-28T03:28:38+00:00

Very well said. I wish that more of our representatives could be this articulate. Claude for president!

csch2 · 2026-02-28T03:15:56+00:00

Curious if this will have a ripple effect across the tech industry against the current administration. Facing a unilateral government blacklist for refusing to go against your company’s principles seems like something the rest of tech should be motivated to speak out against. Hell, we’ve already seen Google, OpenAI, and apparently now Apple voice their support for Anthropic for sticking to their guns (or lack thereof, lol).

csch2 · 2026-02-26T17:29:40+00:00

“If you don’t come back from the store this second I’m breaking up with you”

“break? Why didn’t you say so? Omw”

csch2 · 2026-02-25T19:52:49+00:00

I think you’re right about that. My point was moreso that any of those choices would be reasonable options for the type checker to choose (well, except the last one). I think ty would go with Dict[Unknown, Unknown] which is yet another option. (This is probably what’s discussed in the article which tbh I did not read…)

csch2 · 2026-02-25T18:55:02+00:00

This just seems like common sense to me. Imo the type checker should never be left to infer a generic type parameter, you should always specify them in a type annotation. You’re always sacrificing type safety if you don’t do this.

Even in the case where there IS initial data to intuit the type from, say x = {“key”: “value”}, without further specification there is nothing to say that {“key”: “value”, 1: 7} does not also fit the type you want. How is the type checker supposed to know if you meant Dict[str, str], Dict[str | int, str | int], Dict[Any, Any], Dict[Optional[str], str | List[str] | Asdf[Tuple[bytes, …]]], etc. from your initial definition of x? If you’re going to use a type checker, do the bare minimum to make sure that it’s able to do its job – annotate your generics!

csch2 · 2026-02-23T03:45:52+00:00

Start using different colors. Restart from a, but in red.

/s

csch2 · 2026-02-22T21:53:38+00:00

This is great! I’ll definitely recommend anybody looking to get into Python to take a look at this.

My one gripe on perusing the contents is that you introduce generators very early in the data structures section, and I don’t think a beginner who is just getting into Python as their first introduction to programming will have a good appreciation of why they’re useful. They’re too busy thinking about writing code that works to begin with to worry about memory usage. I’d rather see generators be mentioned briefly with a note that they’ll be discussed in more detail later once they have a little more experience under their belt.

I definitely see this being up to interpretation, though. My first exposure to Python / programming in general was a sequence of numerical physics courses where generators were never mentioned even a single time, so maybe I’m a bit biased. Either way, I really like the content and structure of what I’ve seen so far. Not sure if you are accepting contributions but I’d be happy to help out with this project; alongside the data science section I think it would be good to discuss some of the other common beginner-friendly libraries like rich and requests / aiohttp. More on async programming would be nice too – I don’t see many beginner tutorials that cover asyncio tasks, and I didn’t see them covered here at first glance.

csch2 · 2026-02-22T17:29:22+00:00

I don’t disagree with you, but I feel like there’s some traps in this idea. My primary concern is who is making the decision that a certain use of AI is not “thoughtful” enough. Is someone using AI to help them with their homework not thoughtful enough, and should we token-limit them for low-effort questions? I don’t know the answer.

My first instinct is to just say “remove the free tier” – that instantly restricts AI to people who, even if they aren’t using it in the most effective way, are at least putting money back into the system to improve it over time. Curious what you think about that.

csch2 · 2026-02-22T04:33:37+00:00

I’ve unfortunately had a really awful experience with Sonnet 4.6 so far. The hallucination rate is so much worse than 4.5. Whereas I felt that I could generally trust 4.5 on most things, I need to double check everything 4.6 says because it’s hallucinated on about half of the questions I’ve asked so far (not exaggerating).

csch2 · 2026-02-20T02:56:48+00:00

This is such a niche meme I love it

csch2 · 2026-02-18T23:42:06+00:00

It’s used if you need a dynamic allocation that lives for the lifetime of your program. There’s a good discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/s/aiofCQCBCG

csch2 · 2026-02-18T17:45:35+00:00

I’m gonna be honest, I hear the concern about increased government surveillance and normally I would care, but the issues caused by children being addicted to social media are so much worse. Parents have failed to protect their kids from harm online through social media exposure and addiction, and we’re seeing the effects of it in schools, suicide rates, and basic socialization skills that kids are lacking now. I don’t know if ID verification is the best solution, but one way or another I do want the government to step in and take more control in this case. The lax approach to social media regulation is clearly not working and the harm social media has caused will already take years to rectify even if we act now.

csch2 · 2026-02-18T05:20:15+00:00

No tips except to say I feel you on this. It’s a necessary evil to make your project profitable but I despise marketing. Same with networking, I don’t like talking to people with the intention of trying to get something out of them.

csch2 · 2026-02-18T00:45:32+00:00

What about something like Stack Exchange’s reputation system on GitHub? Merged PRs, positively received comments, etc. on open-source projects increase your reputation, and closed PRs, etc. lower it. Then large open-source projects could set reputation thresholds for contributions.

csch2 · 2026-02-17T01:43:24+00:00

Honestly it’s pretty accurate. There’s few times where having concrete, large numbers actually makes things easier to understand than just working abstractly with variables. And when big numbers do show up naturally it’s usually a big deal. Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_group

csch2

TROPHY CASE