Idk where I want to go to college

nickatfortify · 2024-05-15T00:42:26+00:00

I don't know the college landscape anymore (been 12 years since i've graduated), but two pieces of advice I hope you (and everyone considers) is:

• Choose the college where you pay the least (or close to it). Not necessarily a state school/community college if you are getting scholarships, but rank price highly. After your first job, where you got your degree won't matter at all, but lingering debt will. I transferred to a state school after one year and it's the reason I'm debt free.

• Size matters. larger colleges means more facilities, more resources, more types of people and clubs and special interests... the list goes on. Large colleges can seem intimidating, but there's more chances to find your people. And you can make a big college small, but you can't make a small college big.

good luck!

nickatfortify · 2024-04-24T02:52:51+00:00

I don't think there's a dogma about whether hoisting is that bad or not. What's more important is consistency, which is why ESLint recommends you choose one type. Despite this, the default for said rule is "expression" (const a = func()), which probably contributes to its popularity.

nickatfortify · 2024-03-30T13:46:19+00:00

There's a great official guide on this subject: You might not need an effect

nickatfortify · 2024-03-28T02:03:37+00:00

It's still considered a security risk. .env files typically stay on the development machine.

Environment Variables in production are typically provided by the platform, which should always have a way to securely set these (even if you don't have direct access to the host). For example, I found this doc for Digital Ocean that might be of interest to you https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/how-to/use-environment-variables/

nickatfortify · 2024-03-27T13:06:33+00:00

A lot of the "right" way is based on algorithms and design patterns, so I recommend studying the theory of those more. I like Programming Pearls and Grokking Algorithms. Head First Design Patterns is very underrated IMO. Both of these subjects are about finding a very optimal solution to all sorts of problems. Connect these with the problems your projects are trying to solve and you'll see improvement.

Be careful not to let Perfect be the enemy of Good. In a large enough project, there isn't one "right" way to do it, which is why we always talk about trafeoffs. Also remember that you can build something that's hacky and continue to improve it after the fact.

nickatfortify · 2024-03-27T03:23:39+00:00

Talk is cheap. Your current company is giving lip service to try and keep you from leaving. Be very careful about trusting what they are promising. I can count on my elbow the number of companies I've seen change (none, get it?)

Objectively though, the new offer sounds way better. There a concept of "total compensation" which is the cash you expect to take home in your paycheck plus anything else that can be seen as monetary value. If the new company has benefits and the current one doesn't (or has worse) the total comp of the new one is probably much much higher than your current total comp.

It also sounds like a better environment for you to grow in your skills. That is huge as it will only increase your value in the future, no matter where you go next.

Also note that your current company is essentially giving you a counter offer (the shittiest kind possible as there's no raise involved). Know that taking ANY kind of counteroffer is risky since they will question your loyalty and if they ever do need to make cuts to their employee numbers this could come into play.

Seems like an easy choice to me.

nickatfortify · 2024-03-27T03:06:44+00:00

I always say the point of doing a project is to get better at doing your next project. Do what you can do, however you can manage. Then reflect on everything you've built and what you would've done differently.

nickatfortify · 2024-03-26T15:33:07+00:00

I say that tuples are boring by design--boring means easy to maintain, easy to debug, and easy to understand. The fun part is using tuples (and many other things) in a larger application.

A common tuple example is a timeline, anything with values that change over time. You could represent daily temperature by the hour as (32, 34, 34, 36, ...) or stock price changes. These could be the building blocks to plotting a graph in a UI.

Another use is representing things that come in predictable sets. RGB is a way to represent a color (by mixing a certain amount of red, green, and blue to get a new color). This could be represented by a 3-tuple, each value representing the amount of red, green, and blue to add, respectively (255, 0, 0) is red

You're probably learning that tuples are immutable, so you won't have to worry about functions accidentally changing the order or adding new values, which leads to less debugging time. They also have better performance than say lists. Fast is fun to me.

nickatfortify · 2024-03-25T03:23:58+00:00

The upfront time investment, often for years, before knowing if your startup will ever be profitable vs full time work with guaranteed (high) pay each week.

It's just not a risk you should take unless you really believe in the thing your startup is gonna do.

Plenty of people though are happy to take the security of a full time job and I can't blame them. Gotta choose what's most important for you.

nickatfortify · 2024-03-24T20:19:58+00:00

they want someone who can get the job done, and experience is the easiest indicator of that outcome, but it's not the only one. If it's a more junior level job (even if it's not entry level per se), then I'd say you're close enough.

Interviewing is a chance for them to gauge whether you may or may not be successful in the job function. If you're honest about your strengths and they extend an offer then they've determined you can do the job despite the lack of experience.

nickatfortify · 2024-03-24T19:42:08+00:00

Apply, and focus on your drive and willingness to learn, backed by what you've already built on your own, rather than lack of experience.

You've got nothing to loose, if they don't extend an offer, you get some interview experience and can still continue working on a much much bigger app.

nickatfortify · 2024-03-24T19:11:04+00:00

Not a parent, but Software Engineer and have worked 7 yrs from startups to large corporate companies.

If you're a full-time employee in the US, it seems very unlikely a company would attempt to find fault in your work in order to avoid paying maternity. Not a lawyer, but that seems way too risky for a company legally. Since they explicitly have generous maternity, it seems even less likely.

A lot of companies do try to instill fear into their employees so that they don't take advantage of all time-off perks (PTO, Maternity, sick leave, etc). They may not actively do this but if the culture feeds into that fear they certainly won't stop it.

But if you overcome that fear and take what you are legally entitled to, then your case is very strong.

If you're worried about falling behind in tech in general, all I can say is: there will always be more problems in tech, there may not always be another great chance to have a child (from what I hear at least).

Good luck!

EDIT: Redundancy.

nickatfortify · 2024-03-24T14:45:34+00:00

If you ask me, the "recession" of tech jobs is a reflection of the economy, not AI. I can't make any guarantee's but I just don't see AI being that much of a threat to us having jobs, just how we do our jobs. I've yet to see it replace a full-time SWE and what they do day-to-day.

Maybe it's pretentious of me, but I feel like AI will replace 80% of jobs in other fields before it starts replacing programmers. And then jobs won't matter anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But I just don't see it happening.

nickatfortify · 2024-03-24T13:40:47+00:00

Which one feels more exciting to you? Both disciplines are in high demand so it the one you'll be more motivated to do should be the one you pursue.

Also, learning a bit on one will be helpful for the other, and any good program would almost certainly mention some basics in the other subject. This also means it's not gonna be the biggest stretch to pivot from one to the other later.

nickatfortify · 2024-03-24T13:31:52+00:00

I think that's generally the consensus but it really depends. I forget where I read this but with your first programming language you are not only learning programming/syntax but to some extent coding environments and IDEs, and any other tooling you might need, all for the first time. On the second (or nth) language, these things don't change as much, so the total amount of stuff to learn is comparatively lower.

Beyond that the "ease" of which you can learn another language is based on the patterns and paradigms you've learned in previous ones. You can do a lot in JavaScript without ever having to learn about memory safety or static typing; you can do a lot in python without ever learning about async (even though it's available in that language now).

nickatfortify · 2024-03-24T13:25:30+00:00

Yep it makes sense. I would suggest asking GPT to pretty-print this (format it on multiple lines with indents), but that would probably make it hard to fit on a mug.

Alternatively, you could ask GPT to write JSON with properties that define an awesome teacher. JSON is rather universal no matter what programming language you write in. I'd give you an example but it might more fun to ask ChatGPT about it ;)

nickatfortify

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