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Don't you think you've learned a lot of things that way which you wouldn't learn otherwise? I try to use technologies I want to learn/master in those projects a

by comboy 7y ago

Don't you think you've learned a lot of things that way which you wouldn't learn otherwise? I try to use technologies I want to learn/master in those projects and I don't know any better way to learn them. The project which you care about is not a good place to learn if you ever want to finish it.

markus_zhang 7y ago
It's complicated. Here is a bit background: I have been working as a data analyst for a few years but I feel an inclination towards programming. Programming is, however, a huge field and I'm interested to many of its sub-fields. Thus the reason that I opened a lot of projects. For example taught myself C++, did a half-project about a crude tile map editor with SDL2, and then went down another route with Python, etc, etc. And now I'm learning C trying to do some parser stuffs. So the thing is I can never drill deep in any of them, which is really bad. But the root of it is that I changed my TOOLS too often but never learned enough PROGRAMMING. I recognize that I have a weak will and whence the topic went deeper I tended to drop it. The other reason is that I never got a full-time programming job so I don't have to focus. I have been going on like this since high school (back then I was interested in other fields). I could grasp the easy part of any tool pretty quickly, but do not have a focus/objective so I never truly learned anything.
- comboy 7y ago
  So you're a scientist. And you think you need more understanding of algorithms/data structures and what's actually happening underneath the code that you are writing, right? It does help. But from my experience from hiring coders, most science oriented people already had better understanding of the basics than your average coder. That's because they want to understand more deeply what's happening and what they're doing. It sounds like you have a decent background and I doubt these side projects went to waste. Even technologies that go away in a year still build some abstractions in your brain that you may not even be aware of that make learning much easier in the future. Also, remember that with the stack nowadays it's really rare for somebody to have a decent grasp of what's actually happening down to the hardware. Plus you can do some great science using a microscope without having any idea about optics. So to me you just sound like somebody who you want to hire. "I know very little" because you keep exploring and want deep understanding so you know about vast amounts of knowledge and experience to be had. Many coders would say "I know a lot" just because they know how to achieve goals they had in the past.

by comboy 7y ago

markus_zhang 7y ago

It's complicated. Here is a bit background: I have been working as a data analyst for a few years but I feel an inclination towards programming. Programming is, however, a huge field and I'm interested to many of its sub-fields. Thus the reason that I opened a lot of projects. For example taught myself C++, did a half-project about a crude tile map editor with SDL2, and then went down another route with Python, etc, etc. And now I'm learning C trying to do some parser stuffs. So the thing is I can never drill deep in any of them, which is really bad. But the root of it is that I changed my TOOLS too often but never learned enough PROGRAMMING. I recognize that I have a weak will and whence the topic went deeper I tended to drop it. The other reason is that I never got a full-time programming job so I don't have to focus. I have been going on like this since high school (back then I was interested in other fields). I could grasp the easy part of any tool pretty quickly, but do not have a focus/objective so I never truly learned anything.

comboy 7y ago
So you're a scientist. And you think you need more understanding of algorithms/data structures and what's actually happening underneath the code that you are writing, right? It does help. But from my experience from hiring coders, most science oriented people already had better understanding of the basics than your average coder. That's because they want to understand more deeply what's happening and what they're doing. It sounds like you have a decent background and I doubt these side projects went to waste. Even technologies that go away in a year still build some abstractions in your brain that you may not even be aware of that make learning much easier in the future. Also, remember that with the stack nowadays it's really rare for somebody to have a decent grasp of what's actually happening down to the hardware. Plus you can do some great science using a microscope without having any idea about optics. So to me you just sound like somebody who you want to hire. "I know very little" because you keep exploring and want deep understanding so you know about vast amounts of knowledge and experience to be had. Many coders would say "I know a lot" just because they know how to achieve goals they had in the past.