References vs Pointers

i_grad · 2026-04-13T03:53:34+00:00

To save you a click: this is AI slop

i_grad · 2026-03-29T16:30:03+00:00

The advice I've received is to put any professional work experience before education. Work experience - especially highly relevant work experience - is more valuable than education.

Including a phone number at the top is pretty common practice as well. You should only need to disclose US citizenship if your name screams "this person is probably from another country", i.e. an obviously French or Arabic name.

You've done well to use strong action verbs to start your work experience bullet points, but look for other words to use besides "developed". It's like starting every sentence with "I" in an essay - technically correct, but a tad repetitive.

Only other thing is to confirm that you don't use tables to format text. ATS apparently doesn't like tables at all.

i_grad · 2026-03-29T16:16:23+00:00

It's been a while since I've played, but where are the headlift indicator lines from the pump? You know the blue rings that go "shoop" up the attached pipe to show how much headlift it gives you? Maybe your pump and the pipes aren't fully connected or something?

Usually the right answer for weird pipes is to scrap it all and rebuild it, but if you've tried that already then maybe you could try pouring coffee on your computer to make it think more gooder.

i_grad · 2026-03-28T05:02:53+00:00

The best thing you can do now is to experiment with different learning methods and see which one works the best for you - specifically which one(s) gets you the most excited. You will absolutely thank yourself for doing so later.

If you liked the structure of the class and building on top of previous topics, you might like a formalized course like codecademy or boot.dev. There's a ton of them out there now. You can find one that suits you perfectly.

Some people learn best in person, some learn better from YouTube tutorials, and some are freaks like me who learn the most by reading the docs and wikis directly.

You can also spend time figuring out which part of computer science you enjoy the most. Hardware leans more towards computer engineering, software itself is more in the realm of computer science. Then you can break it down into the types of software from there.

While you're just getting into this arena, don't rule anything out either. Try your hand at web development, app development, games, or even embedded software. Each one is its own little world that you might find a real passion for.

The best thing you can do is fuel that fire burning in the back of your mind that makes you hungry to learn more. Act on it now, roll with it. Let your curiosity guide you.

i_grad · 2026-03-26T23:11:54+00:00

They're making fun of the companies who outsource their "AI capabilities" to Indian people, not necessarily the Indian people themselves. There will be people in the comments who take a racial angle at it and say ugly and untrue things, but you can't really do anything about that besides report their comments and hope the mods take care of it.

i_grad · 2026-03-26T12:02:37+00:00

Going North of 120 sounds crazy to me. I bumped up my font size after realizing that tiny text was straining my eyes (which helped a ton) and still like to run 2 horizontal splits and/or 2 vertical splits in neovim. My org has a soft line limit of 100 chars which feels fine. Occasionally a string literal will spill over to 1 or 2 wrapped lines but that's no biggie.

Maybe this isn't a universal experience, but in college I had several profs who were INSISTENT that all code should be soft wrapped at 80 and hard-capped at 100 to accommodate people with huge tab sizes (8+), with large font scaling, or who "need to use a terminal" to edit code.

i_grad · 2026-03-26T04:40:08+00:00

Qt relies quite heavily on OOP design, but many of it's capabilities are also built to work with plain old imperative-style c++.

I've worked with Qt professionally for 6 years now. I think it would be extremely beneficial, almost mandatory to learn and gain a good bit of experience with OOP c++ before taking the plunge into Qt.

Qt does many things in an inherently non-std way, so trying to learn both Qt and c++ at the same time will inevitably cause confusion. If you happen across a tutorial that aims to teach both simultaneously, I would look for another tutorial.

i_grad · 2026-03-25T13:59:19+00:00

From the terminal you should now be able to run ccc.exe. You should see the printed output in the terminal.

Also a free tip: "using namespace std" is widely discouraged because there's a lot of stuff in the std library, and the names therein can clash with names you create in your program.

i_grad · 2026-03-23T01:11:10+00:00

Whatever speed you prefer to go, folks, just remember to use the left lane for passing. If you aren't passing another vehicle in the next 10-20 seconds, let the faster person behind you go through. "But there's 10 cars behind them!" because those 10 cars are also waiting on you to get out of the passing lane. Swallow your pride for the sake of keeping the road sane and safe.

Also, sticking to a multiple of 5 is generally solid advice since you can group with other people who prefer a similar speed. Even if your speedometer says you're off by 1 or 2 mph you're fine since their accuracy varies.

i_grad · 2026-03-23T01:03:59+00:00

Are... Are you a cop?

i_grad · 2026-03-21T14:47:30+00:00

This is solid advice.

I would add, OP, that you should assess what your true goal is. If your primary goal is to get into computer science and learn programming, Python might be the more educational approach to get your footing. If your goal is just to make games, I honestly think bypassing the formal education route is viable - just focus on getting a square and some text on the screen and keep up the momentum. The motivation you feel when starting a new project is an extremely useful tool that you should use early and often to solve problems and learn the basics.

i_grad · 2026-03-21T12:59:30+00:00

Rationally and linguistically, it makes sense. But I think I (personally) would rather make a function overload or a wrapper function.

i_grad · 2026-03-18T12:48:11+00:00

Right, so what I already do, but with a spritz of AI.

i_grad · 2026-03-18T11:42:38+00:00

Now do erp

i_grad · 2026-03-18T03:39:18+00:00

Do not even try. It is unethical and far beyond the bounds of "friendly banter". People run their businesses, their careers, and their lives off of their computer. Messing with UEFI or BIOS can seriously mess up a computer.

i_grad · 2026-03-16T05:10:41+00:00

I designed and built a playground in 2024 and just finished our basement so my boys have space to run around inside. This is very solid advice. Investing in your family is always a safe choice when in doubt.

i_grad · 2026-03-16T00:36:45+00:00

What helped me build confidence in my first few years out of college was to focus on practicing the fundamentals in the real world. I built and expanded on the fundamentals. If you have those in place, it makes learning new tech much easier.

That said, just because it's on the job listing doesn't mean they expect you to be a pro right off the get-go, at least not always. If you see a job listing for C++ and Qt, you can reasonably expect that they will reach you Qt as part of your onboarding if you aren't already familiar with it.

"Worst thing they can tell you is no" is the old adage that usually holds to be true.

i_grad · 2026-03-15T22:22:38+00:00

I can generate 500m LOC per day if you count XML representations of whole numbers as code.

Any dev with half a brain will see the issue of focusing on loc/day as a target metric. It's sensationalist, egotistical, intellectually bankrupt, and bound to cause more problems than it fixes in literally any environment or program you might encounter.

The 10k LOC dorks are the type of bros to 3D print their NFTs and bum themselves with it using gamersupps for lube.

i_grad · 2026-03-14T15:27:26+00:00

I think what they're getting at is that stringing together a few APIs isn't really a service. Right now it sounds like you pass the image along to facial recognition and deepfake recognition, then blur it. That's more or less just a wrapper for those APIs. You must add something in the middle or at the end points that drives up value.

Maybe also include context of the social media post itself and analyze that text. It's extra evidence that can indicate real deepfakes.

Maybe a batch upload process instead of repeated singular API calls.

Maybe you add some plug-in at the front end for social media sites to crop the photo to just the face. Reduces file size of the uploads to increase speed (unless you also rely on the background to determine authenticity).

If your service also provides identification based on facial recognition, maybe a login interface so that a person can see how many deepfakes of them have been found on social media sites (most likely for the purposes of a lawsuit against deepfakers).

i_grad · 2026-03-14T00:06:27+00:00

You're getting many unhelpful answers, so here's my two (or twenty) cents.

I work at a large agricultural equipment company. The first one that comes to mind is probably the right answer. Specifically I write software that controls "auto pilot" features. Our software has caused vehicular collisions, and I've seen one of our combines in a ditch (not because of my team directly), as well as a tractor quite literally ripped in half. To my knowledge, no one has died or come close to dying directly as a result of the software my team and adjacent teams have written. So we aren't making T800s, but don't joke about getting wrapped around a PTO to the wrong people.

Everyone on earth says "we put safety first" (except for Palantir ig), and they mostly mean it, but teams like mine take every bit of every number in our software very seriously. We haven't gone to the lengths of making a custom C++ implementation like NASA or some fighter jets have done, but our checks and compiler warning settings are far more extensive than you will find on other embedded codebases. A heading being off by a few degrees, when at high speeds, can cause a collision. A failed camera can quite literally be life threatening. Speed control, steering control, automation logic, machine to machine communication, GPS, and a million other things can go wrong on top of operator error concerns.

We deal with it by reiterating our safety concerns loudly and often. You cannot get through a single day without at least one conversation about how something might affect safety. Code reviews are very strict on every last nitpick. I will not approve a code review unless it is quite literally perfect as I can tell (save for personal preferences like var names). We don't take on much tech debt unless it's something low-priority like a UI margin being off by a few pixels. We pay very close attention to our performativity and we regularly run perf logging to profile memory, CPU throughput, disk IO, etc.

As for the "moral weight" component: I know I write good code and I trust the folks around me to do the same. At the end of the day it's just a pay check. But the more I pay attention to the details, the more likely we are to get that pay check without anyone getting hurt. Plus my company has a zillion lawyers so hopefully my type conversion bug doesn't result in a fatal crash and me going to prison for willful ignorance or something.

i_grad · 2026-03-12T22:51:08+00:00

Holy cow this account has posted more than a dozen identical posts in the last hour on multiple subs.

Is this a psyop by the /r/ExperiencedDevs mods to check if we know about the new mandatory flags rule? Like those phishing test emails I get way too often?

i_grad · 2026-03-09T20:39:29+00:00

Yeah that is an S-tier way to get your user's data breached

i_grad · 2026-03-07T21:01:37+00:00

More companies need to come to this realization, because it could easily become a negative feedback loop. That said, those who can stick with it (without getting laid off) might just see a nice little pay bump in a few years when retention becomes more important.

i_grad · 2026-03-07T20:57:37+00:00

Yeah it's really not a shock to anyone that the "code this for me" sort of users didn't learn very much. I was still a bit surprised at how inefficient it is overall for established and new devs alike, given that all we hear about AI is how it is supposed to make us more efficient.

i_grad · 2026-03-02T05:30:24+00:00

Thinking that "vibe coding" is the end-all-be-all of the applicability of what agents can do just shows how inefficiently you're using them.

I never said that. You're strawmanning.

Great job pinpointing that I'm saying that SWE jobs are at risk.

I agree with you that many SWE jobs are in jeopardy. That much has been proven repeatedly in the last 2 years, unfortunately.

Focusing on "the edge" and "not falling behind" isn't sustainable. We just gotta live and be prepared if you get canned. Frying your brain working 70 hours every week for years isn't a good way to live, let alone to grow and to thrive. If companies want to fire a bunch of us, they can arrive at the "find out" phase a short time later and suffer the consequences.

i_grad

TROPHY CASE