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I have a CS degree, but I had to teach myself the theory due to my school's sad excuse for professors. Here are the two things I did that taught me the most ab
by jplusequalt 3y ago
I have a CS degree, but I had to teach myself the theory due to my school's sad excuse for professors.
Here are the two things I did that taught me the most about programming: learning how operating systems and programming languages work, and writing a raytracer and a software rasterizer.
The former two put all my years of tinkering on computers into perspective. The latter tested my programming and problem solving skills in a novel way. Both made me more well rounded as a developer. Not to mention they were extremely satisfying!!
- marktangotango 3y agoThis x1000. Back in the 90's writing software 3d rasterizers was right of passage of sorts. Writing parsers and interpreters too. At least that was my impression. Doing "hard" things like this can be very illuminating, it's kind of a super power to know how these things work. "Pulling back the curtain" on things that seem like black magic before.
- jplusequalt 3y agoI absolutely agree. You need to solve hard problems to strengthen your problem solving skills. I want to implement my own interpreter next. I think I'm going to pick up Crafting Interpreter's whenever I feel ready to dive into my next project.
- trollied 3y agoIt's how I started too (before my CS degree). Ray tracing, fractals, IFS, demo scene effects. All good fun! Got me hooked. Now I write emulators for fun.