The First Law of Debugging: all bugs arise from your false assumptions learn programming |
- The First Law of Debugging: all bugs arise from your false assumptions
- Some advice from a self-taught developer (no CS degree or bootcamp)
- Is it possible to switch careers in 3-4 months?
- What’s the best way to become more hireable?
- Today was the first time i felt like i was in "the flow"-state
- Question for any self taught learners - career change
- Learning JS with Books?
- Anybody planning to start learning data structures and algorithms from scratch?
- Concurrency vs Asynchronous
- Git commands suddenly not working and result in a blank terminal. What happened?
- Not a designer but I have to do CSS. What do you recommend?
- Was there a moment or concept that made recursively exploring binary trees “click” for you?
- learn Java or C++ for personal projects?
- Needed a little guidance on project
- Does anyone working at Elastic.co and know their engineering levels?
- Zero to Hero in 18 Months: How Realistic is My Plan?
- React for Beginners
- All react application will not load
- Java or C++
- Super easy leet code problem, can't figure it out
- TOP learner - code review request
- Are there self taught people here that didn't end up in web development?
- Python - What's the problem here?
- Is there anything wrong with including a "Currently Learning" section under skills and interests on my resume?
- Using Machine Learning to predict demand in bus lines
| The First Law of Debugging: all bugs arise from your false assumptions Posted: 14 Dec 2021 05:07 AM PST Literally all of them, because a bug is by definition a mismatch between what you think your code should do and what it actually does. Once you have realized this, you can scrutinize and test your assumptions. (This is what rubber ducks are for.) It helps if you know what sort of false assumptions you tend to make. Case study: here's a bug we've all faced. "It should do Y when X happens, but it doesn't." There's a whole lot of assumptions about the nature of the problem in that short sentence. Instead of just saying that, let's try and think about all the things that could be going on ... or as many as we can, at least. Of course, there are the simple programming errors. You meant to write if X then Y, but you wrote if X then Z, or if W then Y, or if not X then Y. And the trap for the novice coder is to (a) assume that this is necessarily where they've gone wrong (b) to try and solve the problem by just staring at this bit of the code until they see their mistake. But their mistake may be that they're staring at the wrong piece of code. (Staring alone is often not enough anyway.) Let's think of some alternative places where the problem might lie. Maybe you are wrong about whether X happened. It didn't, the bit of code you wrote to make X happen, or to check if it happened, is broken, but the bit that says if X then Y is fine. You are debugging the wrong thing. Or maybe Y happens just as it's meant to but the thing that tells you whether Y has happened is broken. You're debugging the wrong thing again. Or maybe Y happens as a result of X, but then something else makes Y unhappen before you output whether Y's happened. You're still looking in the wrong place. Or maybe Y happens as a result of X, this displays in the proper and suitable manner and then something else replaces this before you have time to see it. (This happened to me a couple of months back. My smartquotes feature was working perfectly. Then an unrelated bug elsewhere in the code was turning them back into normal quotes before I could see the smartquotes.) Or maybe when you make X happen with these particular parameters, doing Y should be just like doing nothing, and it's successfully ding this. Now call it with the parameters where Y rings a bell and whistles. Or maybe it's doing Y but you're looking in the wrong place for the output. Or maybe you've messed up the surrounding logic so that this bit of code never gets called at all. Or maybe although you've written that X should cause Y in your source and your code is perfectly good, you have in some way failed to compile it or commit it or save it or otherwise make sure that it's seen by the compiler/interpreter/regex goblins. Or maybe the code's fine but there's some sort of resource file that Y needs and you put it in the wrong place or accidentally deleted it. (Single most frustrating bug of my life. "Why is my code still broken even when I revert to an old version?" Because the code wasn't broken.) Or maybe your code as such is fine but the compiler/interpreter/library/component is messed up, and you were assuming with becoming modesty that the problem was in your code. (Yes, it happens. Very occasionally. Don't go there first. No, JavaScript is not "broken", someone would have noticed by now. But if it's some nonstandard library, then maybe.) --- If you're aware of these pitfalls, you can do something about it. You can look to see what your program is actually doing, and test your assumptions, you can use the debugger, you can log things, you can provide instrumentation. For example, when "the procedure isn't doing anything", the first thing I do is put a thing at the start of the procedure that shows a message telling me that the procedure has been called, and with what parameters. And this often shows doofus here what he did wrong. And you can be more alert to the possibility that you're looking in the wrong place. When someone's stuck on this subreddit, it's often because they've entirely misattributed the problem. "Why doesn't this thing work when I use it in a function?" they ask, for example, when the right question is "Why doesn't this thing work when I use it in a loop?" They could try with both hands for a week and they'd never answer the first question because it's not the right question. The right question isn't even "why doesn't it work?" in general, since it might in fact be working, as discussed above. The question is, "why am I not seeing what I expected to see?" Approaching this problem with assumptions and preconceptions about what caused it is fatal, because it is in fact some of your assumptions and preconceptions that were the whole cause of the problem in the first place. [link] [comments] |
| Some advice from a self-taught developer (no CS degree or bootcamp) Posted: 13 Dec 2021 12:44 PM PST I've been frequenting the sub for many years now and wanted to share some of my own personal insights and struggles in my pursuits to be a programmer with those aspiring to someday get hired. I will also add tips and things I would've done differently had I begun all over again myself. So, I begun to learn programming in 2016 whilst I was doing an art degree. The plan was to learn a little bit and then eventually save up enough money to do a bootcamp when I graduated. See, I didn't go into learning this because it was something I enjoyed, but rather the money was enticing and I didn't want to be a struggling artist once I graduated. Anyway, things didn't go to plan and I was struggling to start out. I began by doing a MOOC learning Java. As someone with a background in art, it was hard to wrap my head around it all. Eventually I gave up within a month. Then the summer of 2018 came around and I decided to give it another go. This time I went on freecodecamp and took step by step increments, eventually making it as far as finishing the HTML and CSS curiculum. It was starting to be enjoyable because it was all front end and visual, and as someone from the background I was able to appreciate it more. Anyway, I stopped that summer. Then summer of 2019 I tried even harder than ever and really got as far as to complete the HTML, CSS and Javascript curriculum. Bear in mind that I had mostly got the answers for a lot of the tasks online. I was a serial "cheater" constantly looking up solutions. It was at this stage that I began to copy tutorials from Udemy and some early React stuff (class based components... ooof). Again, I quit once the final year kicked in. Come lockdown and 2020, I decided to try again, this time learning Python. I did some online courses and really didn't enjoy it so much. I was beginning to wonder whether I really wanted to do this or not. Eventually I decided to go back and do what made sense to me, web dev. At least the front end stuff is exciting. From there on out I began to just copy the hell out of everything and everyone on Youtube. In the midst of it all I began to start applying for jobs. Eventually I got a free 'you scratch my back I scratch your back' gig. These backend devs needed someone to design their startup website for them and I said I could do it, not knowing a damn thing about it. I downloaded figma and watched a bunch of tutorials and figured it out for myself. My background in design made it easier to create a landing page they loved and in the midst of showing it to them I explained I was able to also code it. So, I coded the worst website ever but it was close to what they needed. I did raw HTML and CSS for it, but they told me to transfer the code to react and so I learned that and did it by force. Once that gig ended, it took my about 4 months to find a job. A contracting position for quite a lot of money. I had a little head start in that regard. Once that was over I took some time off to learn some more and eventually after 7 months I managed to land a proper full time role in which I'm at now. I love it. It's work from home and I'm building a SaaS product. That hard work and grind paid off. Now it's time for me to share some things I learned along the way.
Sorry if this is grammatically all over the place. I kinda rushed it, but wanted to just reach out to peopel and tell my story to those who may feel like you need a degree or bootcamp to get there. I'm happy to answer any questions. [link] [comments] |
| Is it possible to switch careers in 3-4 months? Posted: 14 Dec 2021 06:41 AM PST So background information im a excavator operator who loves tech and have since i was young and i finally have the ability to take the winter off (here up in canada winter months suck) and ive been doing stuff after work ( angela yu's web dev course on udemy) and i have abit of background in python and the HTML & CSS portion of the course is just a refresher. I plan on starting with the web development route to get my foot in the door Once i start coding i really dont wanna stop i find it really rewarding getting things working Currently im doing about 1-4/5 hours a night after working 10 hours and the end of this month i plan on doing about 8 hours a day minimum with doing 1 small project every day or two & doing lessons for the rest Any advice will be greatly appreciated [link] [comments] |
| What’s the best way to become more hireable? Posted: 14 Dec 2021 03:09 AM PST I am working at a software engineering job at the moment and the programme they have set out seems strange to me. Basically, I go to different teams within the bank to gain experience in how the company works and see how different teams work. However, I thought, as a programmer if I'm jumping about doing different languages for about 6 months each team then I'm not really going to get good at it. And I think this isn't a good way for me to build my programming skills. A good way to network and learn the more soft skills by seeing how different teams operate but when it comes time to actually do coding, I don't think saying I know bits of this language and that language are acceptable. What is the usual approach to becoming a good programmer such that you are seen as more hireable? I am planning on just concentrating on one language in the background when the new year starts so I am at least competent in one language. Do you have any other suggestions? [link] [comments] |
| Today was the first time i felt like i was in "the flow"-state Posted: 13 Dec 2021 06:10 PM PST Hey guys, you know at the beginning programming was quiet frustrating because programming never felt really natural or like something i can work on..like with writing a paper, where correcting feels natural..never had that with programming. it felt more like learning something really hard where you are sure you will never understand it. But today, at the end of my first course, i really felt like i was "in the flow". I programmed for hours straight (with little eating-break) and i would do a lot more but its late and i have to sleep but..it was really motivating and the first time i really felt like i knew what i was doing...at least to a certain degree. Creating all this classes alone, without help from the exercise, was really great because it only said "yeah...this and that the program should do" and thats it. Its fascinating how learning programming shows you all the time how little you know but in the same moment you see how many things you already learned. For loops, while loops, if statements..importing stuff like collections...arrays..arraylists...and so on. The biggest problem for me is, still, that i dont have a clue what i can do with it...i mean i see it all the time in my exercises but i think i will feel that a lot more if im at the point where i can create my own interface, so it really feels like a program, because at the moment it feels more like using a calculator or something. Maybe you guys understand what i mean. [link] [comments] |
| Question for any self taught learners - career change Posted: 14 Dec 2021 10:16 AM PST Currently looking for a career change. I am working as a civil engineer in the construction world and just had my first child. I am 30 years old now and am looking for a career change with a better work life balance as well as interested in software dev. I started the Odin project and gave myself a year to complete the foundations and full stack curriculum. Rather than give myself x amount of time to get hired as a software dev I want to complete the course in a time frame. Does anyone have any experience with self taught learning curriculums and the process/struggles you guys went through? [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 14 Dec 2021 09:52 AM PST Hi! After a month-long break from programming, I have returned to learning JavaScript, using a Udemy course on the latest version. However, I have been finding this course increasingly boring, especially as I am already relatively proficient in Python - the "beginner friendly" nature of the course seems to slow me down, and the way that concepts are explained through projects makes it difficult to skip to bits I don't understand. I was wondering if learning JavaScript using books is a good option - I am worried that I will learn with a book that is 1-2 years old, then struggle to understand the newer features, but I still want something that moves pretty quickly. Does anyone have any experience here? Any books suggestions are greatly appreciated :) [link] [comments] |
| Anybody planning to start learning data structures and algorithms from scratch? Posted: 14 Dec 2021 09:08 AM PST Was looking for a study buddy. I will be using python for implementation btw. Discord- Kolv loves#7709 [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 14 Dec 2021 05:13 AM PST I was learning go and came up with concurrency in go. But had doubt how is concurrency different from asynchronous ? Concurrency is not parallelism as there is switching between threads same is with async approach as it waits for task to complete and then switch to another one and once the first task is completed it continues that process. That keeps me wondering which is better method and why? If anyone could help me with this Thanks in advance [link] [comments] |
| Git commands suddenly not working and result in a blank terminal. What happened? Posted: 14 Dec 2021 11:32 AM PST I literally used the exact same repository last night and committed and pushed without any problems. Today when I do git push and git remote show origin it seems like it freezes and nothing happens. After a few minutes it finally says [link] [comments] |
| Not a designer but I have to do CSS. What do you recommend? Posted: 14 Dec 2021 11:19 AM PST I'm gonna be working on websites soon, using mostly reactjs for SPAs or Nextjs/handlebars for SSR or SSG. I used to play with css and html back in the day and decided to stay away from it because I had no talent for designing and I suck at choosing colors, placing components and all that stuff so I'm not completely ignorant about css but I just hate it. Unfortunately, for the next few months(maybe years) I'm going to have to do it. I don't have the slightest idea what the best practices are or how experienced programmers style components or what kind of technology they use. I hear names around me like sass, postcss, tailwind, bootstrap etc etc. I tried researching a bit and found out that lots of people bash on tailwind just when I thought that it will free me from writing and wasting time on css. tl;dr: • I'm not a designer but I know basic css. • I'm going to have to build websites soon using react for medium-large websites or handlebars for small stuff • I don't want to waste time re-learning css from scratch. • What should I do? • How do you style your stuff in the real world? [link] [comments] |
| Was there a moment or concept that made recursively exploring binary trees “click” for you? Posted: 14 Dec 2021 11:01 AM PST I've been doing them for a while now and they still make my brain hurt. [link] [comments] |
| learn Java or C++ for personal projects? Posted: 14 Dec 2021 10:53 AM PST one of the teachers in my school want me to use Java because it's everywhere, which is good and all, but I don't know if I'll make something that's "everywhere". also the only software I want to make is FOSS software to please my linux-ass so, I don't know, C++ looks promising. sorry if this question is loose or doesn't make sense ;-; [link] [comments] |
| Needed a little guidance on project Posted: 14 Dec 2021 10:45 AM PST Hello everyone, was wondering if I could get some help with my school project. My room mate and I are pretty sick so we cant really leave our room as we dont want to get anyone else sick. Our project is supposed to ask the user to pick a sport, pick a food item from the choices above and pick a brand from the ones above. We've created a CSV with athletes and their favorite foods and their selected brands but were having trouble getting our program to just print out the one athlete that compares the most to the selections they printed out. We got a little help from our TA before we got sick but were kinda stuck now and don't really know what to do next. we stuck on actually getting the users inputs to compare to the actual athletes our TA told us to use for loops but we don't know if we did them right. any help is appreciated [link] [comments] |
| Does anyone working at Elastic.co and know their engineering levels? Posted: 14 Dec 2021 10:42 AM PST I am looking for some information on how Elastic software engineering levels stack up compared to the likes of Google and Facebook. If you have any information, please post some details. [link] [comments] |
| Zero to Hero in 18 Months: How Realistic is My Plan? Posted: 13 Dec 2021 04:49 AM PST Edit: The general vibe from most of the responses seems to be, "Dude, f&@k off, this is absurd." And that's great! I wrote this post because I noticed myself fantasizing about this dream world and I thought, "Hold up, is this even remotely possible?" So for those of you who served me up some humble pie, much gratitude, it was delicious :) To those who respond in a more nasty way, I totally get you. I work in a marketing agency and I deeply respect our programmers, and many clients really have no idea how much work goes into the coding they do. You are probably very used to people who have no idea about your job acting like they know everything and not valuing your work because they don't understand it, maybe even saying 'psh, I could do that' and this post came across that way. I get that programming is not easy and that doing this work would be a lot of...work! To me, it seems like interesting work that I could be good at if I really develop the skill, and could combine well with my other skills. In any case, I still plan to learn coding. At the least, it will make me much better at my current job. At the most, I'll get really into programming and might pursue it as a career. We'll see what happens :) I have devised a plan to escape the rat race by learning programming so I can start earning more money while still having a relatively free lifestyle, but I want to check with you guys to see how realistic my plan actually is. I'll learn programming either way, but I might need to adjust expectations, which I'm also willing to do. The goal: Start Launch School, learn javascript and ruby, and start earning $100-$150 per hour in web development in 12-18 months and work freelance for 20-25 hours per week. My coding experience: None. I'm a good learner, and when I commit to something that I enjoy, I'm dedicated to learning it as well as possible. I did do the intro to programming section of App Academy's free online program, and I enjoyed it. I know that's all really basic stuff, but at least I didn't feel like "Damn, this is not possible at all." I understood the concepts and was surprised and delighted to find out that I really enjoyed working on the problems and found myself looking forward to working on it. My background: I come from a marketing, SEO, and conversion rate optimization background. This gives me some confidence because once I do learn programming, I think I'll be able to build really good websites. The value offer is strong, because I can do keyword research to find the client's best opportunities, build the site with those keywords in mind, and design the site and write the content in such a way that it is compelling for the target audience and should generate leads. I feel this can help me to stand out from people with a pure web development background. In addition, I understand how to generate leads for web development myself, I'm just not capable of doing the web development yet. (By the way, if you're a very good web developer and you want leads, let me know. I'd consider starting to generate leads now and sell them while I learn" My Plan: I'll do Launch School, spend 3-4 hours a day 6 days a week studying and complete the program in around 12 months. From there I will work on lead generation for myself, and simultaneously build my portfolio by building a few websites for free for different organizations. After three months of that, I'll aim to land some jobs for $50 per hour to build my portfolio and start earning money. At the same time, I'll study Ruby on Rails for around 6 months. After I've learned Ruby on Rails and built my portfolio a bit, I'll up my hourly rate to $100-$150 an hour, work freelance for 20-25 hours a week, and enjoy the fruits of my labor. The alternate route is that I stick in my marketing work, but vastly level up my capabilities because of all the technical knowledge that I gain. The coding experience will certainly help me understand the technical side of SEO better and deliver much higher value and command more money from clients. Your Reaction: Does this plan of action sound naive? Is it harder to get web development work than I'm imagining? Is learning to build a website the way I'm imagining going to likely take me a lot longer considering I'm learning from scratch? I know none of these questions can be answered for sure, but I'd like to hear what the holes in my plan so I can adjust my strategy accordingly. Final Note: Thanks very much to this community! You've given me the drive and inspiration to realize that leveling up my life is totally within my reach through the power of sweet, juicy code. I look forward to updating you all on my journey :) [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 14 Dec 2021 10:22 AM PST Hello, I'm looking for some easy to follow resources for React. I'm currently in a curriculum that goes through full stack, but the React portion makes no sense to me and I'm starting to really fall behind. I understand javascript and html, but don't really understand how they're 'married' in JSX. I also get the basics of what components and props are, but I don't know the syntax or the file organization system with all the imports and exports. Looking for resources just gets me even more confused, and I know that there's a lot of sub-par coding resources out there, so I was hoping someone had a recommendation. Thanks! [link] [comments] |
| All react application will not load Posted: 14 Dec 2021 09:59 AM PST Alright guys, I'm out of options so here I am. I'm in the middle of creating a full stack MERN application. A couple days ago I went to install some delete icons from MaterialUI and all hell broke loose. First my application wouldn't load at all and I got this error `` `` its obviously longer then that but I don't want to run out my character limit. This error also popped up if I tried to load ANY of my other previous projects. I went on SO and found a solution that said to change some package.json scripts, so I did. I changed my start and build scripts to `` `` Now it ran longer, but then crashed with this message. `` throw err; ^ errno: -2, code: 'ENOENT', syscall: 'stat', path: '/initrd.img' } `` SO said to uninstall and reinstall node and npm, so I did. Nothing changed. Since then I have made lots of minor tweaks to my package JSON, pretty much anything I found online that could work with no success. I have uninstalled and reinstalled my modules, react, react-dom, and others. I also tried to load the projects on older versions of node without any success. I'm baffled because I commit to git hub religiously and in the past this has saved me, a lot. This time even though the previous version was working. It didn't make a difference. I have spent a long time on this project, its my baby. Any and all help is appreciated. My github is below, the project is under the branch "proto." I have added the full error in a .txt file labled "error.txt" for you all too look at. The project isn't finished, but the version on github did work Sunday. If you would like any other information don't hesitate to ask. EDIT: Why my code looks terrible on here I'm not sure. I did indent by 4 spaces. Why is ``` not implemented on here is a mystery to me. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 14 Dec 2021 09:57 AM PST Hi [link] [comments] |
| Super easy leet code problem, can't figure it out Posted: 14 Dec 2021 09:44 AM PST Preface this by saying, horrible at LC and programming so trying my best to think of my own solutions as best as I can but essentially it's just a palindrome for numbers https://leetcode.com/problems/palindrome-number/ Thankfully I passed a lot of the test cases - 11505 / 11510 test cases passed, but can't pass the 5 remaining ones - for example, 1000021. I have tried to make sense in my head why my code wouldn't work but I'm just not getting it, I know it's supposed to be false, but instead, it returns true. I know there is that modulus 10 solution but I was a bit frustrated that, that wasn't my initial thought so I stuck to the two-pointer thing. Any hints why this doesn't work? Thank you! [link] [comments] |
| TOP learner - code review request Posted: 14 Dec 2021 09:24 AM PST Hello! Github link: (also has a live preview): https://github.com/dodyxx001/Calculator Thank you! D [link] [comments] |
| Are there self taught people here that didn't end up in web development? Posted: 14 Dec 2021 09:23 AM PST Seems like most people here get into web development. Could just be anecdotal from what I see, but it's definitely some sort of pattern to me! Nothing wrong with it of course. Just curious if some of you ended up doing something like Python or C# programming after learning at places like freecodecamp or other sites / resources. Or maybe some of you started in web dev, then made your way to some sort of other corner of programming? I'd really love to hear some stories about people that aren't just web developers (again, nothing wrong with it. It's my direction right now!) Thanks! [link] [comments] |
| Python - What's the problem here? Posted: 14 Dec 2021 09:01 AM PST This prints nothing but why exactly? [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 14 Dec 2021 09:01 AM PST It is clearly separated from my actual skills, and I feel like it demonstrates that I am still actively learning things. Plus, it may get my resume past some automated filters. On the other hand, I don't want to make a fool of myself if employers ask me tough questions about the technologies listed there (although I'm not sure why they would because I'm not claiming proficiency). [link] [comments] |
| Using Machine Learning to predict demand in bus lines Posted: 14 Dec 2021 08:31 AM PST I'm doing this project on the demand of bus lines and i'm feeling theoretically a little lost. What I'll have soon is the following data (this is a random sample so I can build the model while the full data doesn't arrive), with the ID being the code of the card used to get on the bus, the data and hour that was used, I will also have the line where that card was used to get on a bus (I didn't include this on the sample to simplify). My idea was doing several analysis on this data using Machine Learning, i know a few algorithms, like Neural Networks and Decision Trees, but i'm facing a few theoretical doubts. The first and most simple analysis I tried was to calculate with Python the total number of travels per day on the year, and trying to simulate the number of travels of an artificial year based on the last ones. I feel the data I'll have is enough to do this, I'm trying to get the info from the period 2021 - 2017, its likely 100 GB of info in total (20GB per year). But then I tried to use Neural Networks and saw I didn't have X and Y variables crystal clear as they should be, like a Spam detector, where you have the text of the e-mail and a label telling "Spam" or "Not Spam", I only have Y variable which is the total number of travels per day on the year, but not X variables with relations to the number of travels to predict a full artificial year. Is this problem demanding a unsupervised learning method? I'm felling they may not be enough to do what I wanted. Also, do you think of other analysis I could do using ML and this data? I also feel like doing that first analysis again separating per day and per bus line to get an idea of which lines are being most demanded by the city and which lines are being less demanded. [link] [comments] |
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