Hey there! -first rant-

I need your advice mighty ranters.. I'm an introverted gal studying Computer Science at uni, and i love this field. Wanna be a web or app developer..

I need your help about 2 things:

1. Literally ANY advice, or things you wish you knew, when you were a rookie

2. I'm currently living in solitude, because of hard times in the past and i find making friends much more difficult at uni than in high school. It even starts to affect my productivity in a bad way. I have a hard time trusting people.
So any advice about this? How do you cope with too much solitude? Is there maybe a group for girl programmers? I don't know..

All advice are welcomed! (and IT jokes too, to make my day :D )
Thanks a lot !

Ps.: You are great! Awesome community.

Welcome to your new second home!

1. Take a break once in a while, and have a beer, keep improving and exercise (eat healthy too).

2. Welcome to engineering, it is hard because in uni everyone is busy with their own shtick. Just stay social, go out, take your work to a cafe every now and then. Don't neglect friendships and keep online social life to a minimum (sounds counter intuitive but it is the healthiest option)

Wouldn't recommend women only alliances just for the sake of having female friends, get into a community that challenges you friendships will come naturally.

Again, welcome to theDevRant

Awesome! And welcome! If your ambition is to become a developer why not study software engineering instead?

Tips: pay great attention to lessons about software quality. It is one of the most important aspects to keep software maintainable. Software maintenance is growing and will be growing next decades. If you write good quality code you are half way there. Everyone likes good quality code and hates crappy code. I'm sometimes in the position to hire devs & I'd rather hire a junior that writes awesome, clean, quality code than a senior that writes shitty code. Pay attention to lessons about design principles & patterns. Make sure you grasp the whole full stack, if possible. You'll have max. flexibility when you can design and realize an application from beginning to end, including front end, back end, services, databases, etc. all that is needed for a professional app. And maybe the most important tip: never stop learning! Always challenge yourself, try new things, learn cool skills!

Patience, patience and learning from mistakes. It’s easier if those are not your errors and when you got people to learn from that would tell you why particular approach is better.

Welcome 🙂

Don’t listen to Alex. Computer Science is where it’s at. Full stack is for work horses. Pick something and learn the shit out of it and do what you want to do.

1. Failure is better than success. Success is a one time thing. And then it's over and you move on. But failure is a lesson, and that stays with you. Fail early, fail often, and keep trying. Always.

2. Making friends has always been hard for me. Just do things you like in public places. If you see people doing those things, approach them, and hopefully they will do the same.

Not sure about your uni, but if there's a computer science student organisation, join them. Get active in one of their work groups. You'll get to know people plus they know how your uni works. There will be more expirienced people being able to give you hints and so on.

My two pennies ..

1. If not extrovert. Be a welcoming person. Make some time to listen to them and explain to them. So that people feel home with you.

2. Be a person ppl strive to be. May be in some of fields. Make time for Excercise , eat healthy

3. Books are still best friends for introverts. Read in public places library, park, outside

4. Dont fgt you are you no matter what you do. Be good and gentle in your own way.

I'm a rookie myself, but less rookie than you I reckon. So, here's my rookie 2 cents.

I wasn't even a Computer student, but I was bent on to be a Software Engineer.

During my college days, I studied Java and learnt Android Dev. I pursued two internships, on Android Dev and JavaScript. I also tried my hand at free lancing.

My first job (been 3 months on my first job) requires me to work on Python, Shell, JavaScript, Mysql etc. Nothing is done on Java.

My advice is, whatever you learn whatever you like, but always go for core concepts. Learning Python was easy for me because OOP was clear to me.

I hope you get my point.

Also, don't overstress yourself. That will hamper your productivity. It's better to take a break and then easily solve a bug than rattle your tired brain for it.

1) After any school the real working environment is kind-of full of tech(and different personalities of people to deal with(aka managers/coworkers)) never dealt in school that can be perceived daunting. Getting in touch with that(blogs/podcasts of programmers talking about their job) is, at least, a start.

2) Solitude is one of those states/struggles that will never be "fixed" in your life once and for all, and applying always a "patch" from time to time to something that doesn't-work/is-unreliable is maddening(for some). I don't feel solitude anymore because I fucking hated it so much in my teenager years that(working around it in the normal way(aka socializing) was a pain) I literally trashed this human condition from my head, which made me feel an alien without empathy for a while, but after that alienating period I just started to socialize again(as a joke on myself) but without taking human socialization seriously and without any expectation of a positive outcome.. continue...

... and with that I had the best of both worlds, in one I learned to accept and enjoy solitude and the other to still live and experience socialization.

And soon I'm gonna marry someone special for me :3

So relax gal, people who succeed at something that the majority of people struggle with is just, sometimes, someone who took the human condition and made it it's b*tch ;)

Ps: try to not close yourself in social circles that maybe have your same struggle, it may blind you from your problem, but only for a while.

Just sharing my experience; use as it fits.

In my first year, I was fully focused on studying whatever the classes threw at me. This really helped cementing a strong base. Subsequent years will draw on this base. I also bought the bigger books (we had a smaller books which were just selective chapters from other books packaged up nicely - these help in clearing exams, but not in giving actual knowledge). Besides, the bigger ones are just so much more beautiful to read - the pretty much tell as stories and sinks in easy. You'll know the what, how & why.

When it comes to friends; I actually made them by pretty much helping out in their assignments. They noticed how in classes I ask/answer questions - so slowly they would come & ask doubts. I felt much better interacting this way, since we'll be together trying to solve something, instead of talking for the sake of becoming friends. As time goes, other interests will come out naturally. Plus, teaching is the absolute best way to learn

@devios1 Full stack is for work horses? Are you insane?? I'm doing software development for more than 20 years now, worked on many challenging projects for well known companies and guess what? They all prefer full stack engineers over non full stack! You know why? Because they are able to realize complete solutions with all that is needed included. Saying that it is for work horses is pure bullshit. It's for passionates. In practice it'll give you many advantages in getting (contract)jobs as you can do anything and not only do front end, back end, databases or what ever. I speak from experience.

And why would you recommend someone that wants to be a developer to not study software engineering?!! Are you even aware of the differences in curriculum of computer science and software engineering? Because in general sofware engineering is meant for... software engineering! Computer science is broader & covers a wide variety of topics yet doesn't cover all the software engineering topics.

Huge thanks for everyone! I took notes
Feeling motivated af
so wow, much love

@CodeMasterAlex fullstack nowadays isn't what it once was. The bar to enter in the frontend part is higher in my opinion. Every one is talking about webpack, es6, react/vue/angular/...

"Back then" we needed to deal with IE and stuff, we didn't have fancy css stuff like grid or position sticky. No ajax but framesets and so on.

There where some frameworks but you've written a lot of code for the backend yourself. Some used SVN, most just copied code to a folder and uploading was done using ftp. Nowadays you need to have docker, git and travis (which is a good thing, but still is "harder" to learn...)

Now I do agree with what you've written. The point @devios1 is trying to make, at least I'd take it that way, with the "fullstack == workhorse" comment is, that it's less work to just get to know one thing well than the full spectrum.

About computer science vs. Engeniering: I currently study CS but I've worked a few years before going to university. My two cents on the topic would be that CS at university has nothing to do with the working world for most software developers. So if what you want to do is writing software, probably CSE would be a more direct path. If you want to understand the theoretical base that lead to design decisions in modern computers or algorithms, then probably CS is the straight path. However CS is a lot of theory, a lot of math and not that much writing code.

I'm bad with this stuff but at least: welcome to this awesome place!

@linuxxx Thank you 🤗

@somodys Welcome 🤗 by the way, question: what is (living in) solitude? 😅

@linuxxx its a nice city in skyrim lol

i meant something like isolation btw
i'm hungarian, sometimes i use weird words 🤷

Btw. How's university? Did you find a study group?

@somodys Ow that doesn't sound too nice 😬