• 1 Post
  • 45 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
Cake day: December 5th, 2023
  • mhredox@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What were the consequences of you going to college? Do you think it helped you in life or did it only hold you back?
    1·
    8 months ago

    I managed to get into web-dev without a CS degree, but I definitely consider myself one of the lucky ones.

    I got a bachelor’s in Chemistry, but realized very quickly after graduating that there are precisely zero decent paying jobs for a bachelor’s in general chemistry. Literally the only place that even called me back was offering $14/hr to do urinalysis… working the graveyard shift.

    I ended up getting a job doing content review as a contractor for the largest video sharing platform (you know the one). A lot of the work was really monotonous, mostly just copying and pasting stuff. We had a quota that once we hit, we could stop working (and still be paid a full day). I could already hit the quota in around 3-4 hours, but I realized if I didn’t have to copy/paste, I could cut that down to only 1-2 hours.

    So, in my spare time at work I ended up learning JavaScript and making a chrome extension to do just that. I showed my bosses and they ended up putting me in a full time programming position.

    I don’t use my chemistry degree at all, but my math minor definitely comes in handy.

  • mhredox@lemmy.worldtoProgramming@programming.dev•looking for c++ learning recourses
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    8 months ago

    Thanks for the very thorough response! I will absolutely check this out. I would say I have a fair bit of experience in OO programming. A decent amount from JS and also a good bit from C#, which I dabbled in for a good while during my “I’m going to make a game in unity” phase haha.

    I know enough C++ to get myself in trouble, but it seems every time I have to use it I get super frustrated that things aren’t as simple as they are in other languages I’m familiar with. That, and I never seem to know the exact terminology to look up my particular issue (which is half the battle anyways).

    I actually needed to write a UDF in C for my mariadb instance just the other day. It ended up taking me several hours for something that would have taken me just minutes in JS or C#. It ended up being a pointer + memory allocation issue. Basically I wasn’t clearing the allocated memory and resetting the index between function calls. It also frustrates me to no end that I can’t just array.push() to add a new char to the end of a char array lol.

    I also wrote a VST with Juce in C++ a few years back. I got it working eventually, but God I remember it being an absolute nightmare.

    I guess really I have a hard time understanding when and why it’s even necessary to use pointers etc since that stuff has been abstracted away in the higher level languages I know. It seems like you could essentially get the same functionality by just knowing when things are passed by value vs passed by reference.

  • mhredox@lemmy.worldtoProgramming@programming.dev•looking for c++ learning recourses
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    8 months ago

    Piggybacking on this:

    I’ve been wanting to learn C++ as well. I am very experienced with JavaScript, and also am very fluent with Arduino. I’ve messed around with actual C++ before but I get lost with all the pointers, header files, and memory allocation stuff.

    Are there any resources y’all would recommend to someone who has all of the programming fundamentals, but wants to learn the specifics of C++?