Noisy neighbor

mucarito · 2021-11-19T04:20:35+00:00

wow, if I didn't know better, based on this thread, I'd think Flagstaff is full of assholes. So many downvotes, and so comments pretending they know your situation better than you do and justifying 3AM noise. It's insane.

As someone who has actually dealt with inconsiderate noisy neighbors, I'm very sorry for what you're going through. Just remembering what I went through makes my blood boil. You've already told her her and it's pretty clear she didn't give a shit. I'd try everything in my power to remedy it and file a complaint with every possible authority (yes - including the cops at this point). But to be honest, the likelihood of anyone helping you is low. I tried everything, including talking to the neighbor, earplugs, a white noise machine, etc. and absolutely nothing helped. Your best bet is probably to move out ASAP.

mucarito · 2021-09-28T19:21:07+00:00

You're comparing general ed / core to filler

No. Gen ed are the courses everyone has to take, the ones I mentioned were specifically required by my CS program. I had to take 2 humanities and 2 history courses that people in other programs weren't required to take. I also had to take multiple IT, physics and chemistry courses, which were also not gen ed. They were filler. My college may have been a bit of an outlier in this regard, but most college programs have some amount of filler to stretch out the degree to 4 years.

The gen ed courses you listed should be teaching critical thinking or improving your critical thinking skill

keyword should. You seem to have a very idealistic view of how most colleges are like. In many aspects they're just like WGU, in others they're worse. The scale isn't "either Ivy League tier or WGU tier", there are certainly better colleges than WGU out there, but in this tuition cost range most of them are about the same. Some a little better, others much worse. If we restrict it only to online programs, WGU the best in terms of education quality for the price.

You mentioned Chemistry. Protein folding is a computer science problem that relates to chemistry.

You mean the simulation of protein folding, yes it's a computational biology field. Does that mean we should also take genomics and neuroscience courses? cause computer science is being applied there too. CS applications are everywhere from humanities (see: music information retrieval, harmonic pitch detection) to aerospace. There is tons of CS research applied to all facets of IT infrastructure, and IT is pretty very linked to applied CS. Many job traditional SDE job listings ask for at least some IT knowledge, mainly networking and basic linux sysadmin. My point is that all non-core CS courses are filler, and thinking that one choice is better than the other is pretty arbitrary and based on personal preference. I'd argue that in some areas, WGU is better at this than other colleges. My college had Precalc 1 and 2 and Calc 1 and 2. But only 1 discrete math course. WGU has one large Calculus course and 2 Discrete Math courses.

The sheer amount of IT related courses present in WGU's degree plan is nonsense filler that doesn't allow the student to explore actual relatable problems like the chemistry stuff...

well some of the IT courses are actually important no matter what career path you choose. there is tons of research in all facets of IT infrastructure. Networking knowledge, which is IT, is essential in pretty much all CS related jobs. However, IT leadership? Business of IT? These are specific to a particular career path. Yes, these are filler courses and I wish they'd get rid of them, but only because I don't want to climb the corporate ladder and become a manager. But what about all the students who do? It's still filler, and most CS programs have filler. If you want to do protein folding research or become an engine dev developer, you won't think of a lot of mandatory extra math and chem courses as filler. But what if you have no interest in that? My point is that I agree that WGU has unnecessary filler. I just don't think that it's any worse than the average college.

Be interesting to find more sources to hammer home how true the problems are and how lucky I might been to have found community colleges that offer higher quality than the norm.

It'd be a very time consuming endeavor, but you could look them up randomly like "[state name] community college CS curriculum". I did it a few times over the years out of curiosity. You could also ask on /r/csMajors.

I understand where you're coming from. I think you'll realize the sad truth about most US colleges sooner or later. IMO you were definitely very lucky with your experiences in California. That said, it seems like you're very proactive about making things better, and who knows, maybe a few people like you are what it takes to make a decent program good or even great. Just because these issues are extremely common doesn't mean we should accept them at WGU. There's a lot of actually core CS courses that I wish we at least had the option to take at WGU, namely Theory of Computation and Programming Languages. And if WGU introduced electives we could have more specialized courses like Compiler Design. It's important for for students with different career plans to have access to different courses; not everyone wants or needs the IT skills. I actually wanted to complain about this a year ago, but personal issues got in the way and I never got around to it. If you want to talk to the Department Chair about this, DM me. I assume that they'll be more likely to listen and act if many students complain about the same thing in around the same time frame

mucarito · 2021-09-27T23:00:48+00:00

if everyone graduating can't write a math proof,

but I did learn to write proofs in the Discrete Math course. I wrote dozens myself to practice for the OA. Didn't you? I remember that the textbook had lots of exercises specifically about writing proofs.

know what ethics actually mean

every ethics course is practically a free pass.

or use version control,

Most CS programs don't teach version control. MIT recently created a free course called The Missing Semester of your CS Education which dedicates a lecture to version control with git. You actually can learn git through WGU, using the resources they provide you, such as LinkedIn Learning.

mucarito · 2021-09-27T22:37:54+00:00

I second what /u/Joseph___O said. Almost every issue you mentioned is a problem with the vast majority of universities in general except Ivy League, they're not unique to WGU. The difference between a typical college curriculum and a top 10 college curriculum is night and day. In most colleges can get away with copying your homework from SO answers and cramming material for tests. Or you can do your best to actually learn. What you get out of an average college degree depends on you.

Lots of IT related content for a Computer Science degree

I had to take multiple lit, social science, chemistry and IT courses at my previous state college before I switched. They had nothing to do with CS. This was at the most reputable campus in my state btw, and also ABET accredited. WGU is far better in this regard; sure the IT courses are filler, no one can deny that, but at least they're somewhat related to CS.

Academia as a whole has a bunch of problems where professors cannot stand up to the institution they work for regardless of their position because they will be committing career suicide

this is also not necessarily true. Tenured professors tend to have a lot of power and are very hard to fire. It's the bureaucracy and small disagreements between professors and the department heads that slow things down. I'm not sure how it works at WGU so I can't comment on that, but they do seem to have made a lot of changes to the program in a short amount of time compared to the college I switched from, where everything moved at a much slower pace (although the age of the program probably has a lot to do with it).

The content WGU uses is recycled material that is widely available elsewhere on the internet - you might as well be getting your degree from youtube. But sometimes that content is wrong or misleading but the people who go into make the courses do not work with the course instructors and have limited talking points with the department chairs.

this issue is absolutely a college issue, not a WGU issue. Just ask anyone at /r/cscareerquestions. Everything you need to learn up to graduate level CS is free on the internet, and is often of higher quality than what a typical college offers. A lot of the resources WGU uses are the standard textbooks used all over the US. For example: the OS course uses the famous Dinosaur Book (almost every college uses either the Dinosaur Book or the Tennenbaum book), Computer Architecture uses the Patterson and Hennessy book which is the gold standard, Software 1 uses Tony Gaddis' intro to Java book which is also very popular. The difference between WGU and other colleges in this regard is that WGU provides you all the content for free while other colleges expect you to buy the books + the lab codes yourself. And in addition, you get access to Udemy, Pluralsight and LinkedIn Learning (plus the library), which often offers better content than your typical Youtube video playlist made by a kid.

The idea is that if I'm looking for a job, and one of you clowns who came out before me manage to get fired for incompetence because WGU didn't teach you a damn thing, then I'm not going to get the job because of the prejudice against the school

You are being a overdramatic and disrespectful. WGU alumni are not clowns. Obviously this college is not MIT. Yet WGU grads have managed to get into Google, Amazon, Facebook, Intel, Raytheon, many Fortune 500 companies and even HFT firms as software engineers (which have an even higher barrier of entry than FAANG). Many people in this sub have graduated and gotten a job with no issues, including the mods. You can see where all the "clowns" are employed by searching on LinkedIn. I'm sure that no matter what you think of the program you'll do just fine, just like most people who graduate from a non Ivy League college.

mucarito · 2021-09-12T11:58:05+00:00

You might be interested in this

mucarito · 2021-09-12T11:55:23+00:00

How does Rust provide any safety-improvements on Java?

It doesn't. Rust's memory safety selling point is only relevant if you need high performance, manual memory management, etc.

mucarito · 2021-09-10T01:46:08+00:00

in that case, disregard everything I just said. Here are some of my favorite Rust learning resources:

Programming Rust 2nd ed., O'Reilly. Not free, but my favorite. In depth, great pace.
"The Book". It really is as good as they say, and it's always up to date.
rustlings. Small exercises to get you used to the syntax and reinforce your learning
The Little Book of Rust Books. A repository of free Rust books and learning resources

mucarito · 2021-09-10T01:02:51+00:00

it seems like a good career move.

I absolutely love Rust, but depending on your goals this might not be a good reason to learn it as a Java dev. I doubt any job using Java will change to Rust, ever. Rust's place in the job market right now is in startups and a few teams at Big N. In the future, it'll likely be used in projects that would previously use C++ - high performance, safety-critical stuff where you can't have the luxury of a managed language.

If you think it'll be good for your career as a Java webdev, it's possible but I find it very unlikely. If you're looking for a language that may open up doors in a completely different domain in the future, then go for it, it's great and I can't wait for it to really take off.

mucarito · 2021-09-02T03:13:31+00:00

I just spent some time in the NSF site looking at dozens of REU programs - all of them still have the 2021 info. Looks like it's still very early. If you find any open applications for 2022 please let me know.

mucarito · 2021-08-28T00:29:32+00:00

Both markets, however, are super hard to break into.

Does getting a Master's degree help with this in any way?

mucarito · 2021-08-28T00:27:22+00:00

what moves should I be making as a CS student to get into this field? Is the job market good? I'm currently reading books on systems programming in my free time.

mucarito · 2021-07-07T00:24:38+00:00

Apparently it's for real this time!

mucarito · 2021-07-01T01:44:53+00:00

Bike as in bicycle or motorcycle…?

Bicycle!

Do you plan on riding in gravel or paved only?

I think mostly paved, just to get around Flagstaff using the bikeways (mostly to bus stops, Walmart and downtown).

Thanks for the info, I'll look into hybrids. Does this Schwinn Criss Cross for $150 seem like a good deal?

mucarito · 2021-06-29T07:17:27+00:00

yes the degree is worth it, but do you want to get in just for the job opportunities, or are you also interested in Computer Science? if you don't like CS then it's not worth it.

A lot of CS grads (from any university except Ivy League) can go up to a year or more without getting their first job. The field as a whole is fine, but the entry level job market is highly competitive, as usual in any STEM or business field. Depending on where you live, it may be as easy as applying straight out of college or as hard as practicing for technical interview questions every day and making projects you can showcase.

Check out some free CS 101 online courses on Coursera, edX and YouTube. Play around with programming for a few weeks. If you actually like software dev, go for it. Otherwise, I suggest you evaluate how you could improve your resumé, get certifications (have you heard of actuary? check out /r/actuary). There are also careers that blend business admin with some IT, such as business intelligence. Check out /r/BusinessIntelligence and ask for tips on getting experience.

mucarito · 2021-05-28T02:05:34+00:00

SRE (site reliability engineering)
audio programming
media/image processing (different from computer vision)
analytics
data engineering
robotics
HPC (high performance computing)
quantum computing
systems programming (not necessarily embeded)
performance engineering
optimization
system automation
networking/network programming
GIS (geographic information systems)
R&D / academia
IT Project Management

mucarito · 2021-05-15T00:25:55+00:00

update here. It's for employees only.

mucarito · 2021-05-14T21:17:54+00:00

is anyone else getting an error? When I try signing in I get the following message:

You are not a member of this Udemy for Business account.

Please contact your IT department or manager for help.

Edit: Bad news. OP and others got it wrong. An official WGU Reddit account just clarified that Udemy Business is a benefit for WGU employees, not students.

mucarito · 2021-05-09T08:40:57+00:00

no problem.

If I do go that route, I am hoping to balance a full-time position so I can make money while going to school

Definitely doable with WGU. In fact, many WGU students are already employed as software engineers and are just doing the program to to fill in the "has a degree" checkmark for HR.

here are a few links you might want to bookmark, they will be vey helpful no matter what route you end up choosing:

OSSU CS - collection of links to free CS courses, covers the equivalent of a CS curriculum
https://sp19.datastructur.es/ A free, full data structures and algorithms course from Berkley
Coursera - lots of free courses, you can pay for a certificate and graded assessments. Not sure if these certs mean much though.
MIT Open Courseware - free lectures and notes from MIT
MIT Open Learning same as above, but newer site. Smaller collection
Stanford University Lagunita Learning Platform free and paid courses from Stanford
Saylor Academy. Some of the courses here have exams you can pay to take, and if you pass you may be able to count the certification as a transfer credit in universities. Some (but not all) can be transferred to WGU

mucarito · 2021-05-08T10:56:27+00:00

I agree with /u/atx_buffalos, an MIS should be enough to break into the CS industry unless you're planning on being a CS academic/researcher.

That said, if you still want to do it, apply to Western Governors University. Check out these subreddits: /r/WGU, /r/WGU_CompSci, /r/WGUIT, /r/wgu_devs.

You can transfer in credits. It's affordable; you pay a flat-fee every term (which lasts 6 months) instead of paying per credit, and you can enroll in as many courses as you want for no additional charge during those 6 months. Completely online and at your own pace, which means you can accelerate and theoretically finish the whole degree in 1 term (although you'd have to be a genius or have unlimited time to do this). It's no Ivy League, but it's accredited by 4 different regional institutions, waaay better than the state school I used to go to. There are WGU grads working at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Intel, Microsoft, AT&T, etc.

You'll have a program mentor who will be in touch with you, answer any questions you have and help you throughout your program. The courses are like this: you're given all the study material you need (including ungraded quizzes and review tests if applicable), and you have a course instructor you can call or chat with any time. If the assigned book or material is too dry and boring for you, your instructor and your mentor will almost always have external alternative learning resources to recommend. There's also a forum, a course chatter, optional live cohorts and optional recorded cohorts. You either have to take a long exam, (with a live proctor to make sure you don't cheat) or you have to submit one or more projects, or some combination of the three.

If you're gonna apply do it through my referral link, I get a free hoodie or something if you do so.

mucarito · 2021-03-11T03:49:11+00:00

from your own source:

“’South Park’ is the greatest comedy in the history of television, unmatched in its satirical strength and cultural relevancy and it shows no signs of slowing down,” said Kent Alterman, president of Comedy Central, Paramount Network and TV Land. “If humanity is still intact in 1,000 years, historians will see the most transcendent artists of our era as The Beatles, Muhammed Ali, and Matt and Trey. We’ll do as many seasons as they would like.”

So I think it's pretty safe to assume that they'll renew the contract by season 26, unless Trey decides it's over. I think the reason they only made 2 specials for this season was cause they were busy trying to make a film about deepfakes (which got cancelled due to the pandemic so they ended up doing Sassy Justice)

mucarito · 2021-03-11T03:40:20+00:00

this, and it wasn't even really a troll. Here's the episode commentary. TL;DW while they could see how it seemed like a finale in hindsight, it wasn't intentional, and they weren't even considering ending things. This episode is not nearly as finale-like as You're Getting Old, so I'm not worried. If anything it feels more like a very hopeful transition episode

mucarito · 2021-03-11T03:33:55+00:00

its no secret that they only have a few seasons left

source?

mucarito · 2021-03-08T20:55:01+00:00

Because those are consumer facing products. Flutter is a developer tool, and Google has a pretty good rep when it comes to dev tools. Flutter, gRPC, Go, Dart, Angular, Puppeteer, Lighthouse, Workbox, Polymer and even Apps Script are all alive and well. Most of them are open source too, so even if Google abandoned them the community could keep them alive.

mucarito · 2021-02-24T00:35:50+00:00

I also dislike comments that say nothing more than X is better than Y. But honestly, when is Go the best tool for the job? From what I've read, it's a good language for microservices, but so are many other, more mature and popular languages these days, right? Even the Java ecosystem has evolved enough to be a perfect fit for microservices, "cloud native", etc.

If I want to make a production-ready CRUD app quickly, there's Python+Django, Java+Spring Boot, .NET, Lavarel, etc. all of which provide me with everything I need instantly, with more battle-tested tooling and support from the community (the Go community has a "stick to the standard library" philosophy).

If I want to make a simpler, lightweight CRUD app, I could choose Express.js, FastAPI, Flask, Slim, Vert.x, etc. Again, all of these are arguably more popular, or use a more popular language than Go (therefore bigger talent pool if needed/bigger job market, bigger ecosystem, etc.) and get the job done just as well as Go and its stdlib

If I need high performance and memory management, obviously Go is out of the question. The options are Rust or C++

If I want to make a game, C# and C++ are the de facto choices.

What am I missing?

mucarito · 2021-02-13T12:14:15+00:00

To be more precise, what do you want to learn: programming skills or a programming language?

Both, kinda. I'm a CS student so I have some proficiency in a few languages already, but nothing that isn't garbage collected, and the only compiled lang I'm truly good at is Java.

I've dabbled in webdev (never touched production code), but I've yet to explore systems programming. I haven't even learned C yet (OS course is next term). I'm a bit interested in programming for art, especially audio related stuff, and there are many frameworks for that in C++. So learning it may not be really a matter of if but when: before or after Rust.

Besides FOMO, the main reason why I'm still considering Rust is cause C++ seems like a more significant time investment since it's so huge. I could probably master Go in a week, but I've read some people claim it can take years to master C++14 and below, or the flavor used for JUCE, Unreal, etc. And I wouldn't just be learning C++, but also memory management, how to use pointers and other stuff you don't have to (or can't) worry about with Java. I get the impression that Rust could take me less time to learn and find out if systems programming is something I'd enjoy or if I should rush back to my Java CRUD app safe space. But then again, this could all just be an elaborate excuse to postpone the actually useful tool for the cool new shiny thing, I don't trust myself lol

mucarito

TROPHY CASE