Two years ago I moved to Dublin with my wife (we met on tour while we were both working in music) as visa laws in the UK didn’t allow me to support the visa of a Russian national on a freelance artists salary.

After we came to Dublin I was playing a lot to pay rent (major rental crisis here), I play(ed) Double Bass which is a physically intensive instrument and through overworking caused a long term injury to my forearm which prevents me playing.

Luckily my wife was able to start working in Community Operations for the big tech companies here (not an amazing job and I want her to be able to stop).

Anyway, I was a bit stuck with what step to take next as my entire career had been driven by the passion to master an art that I was very committed to. It gave me joy and meaning.

I was working as hard as I could with a clear vision but no clear path available to get there, then by chance the opportunity came to study a Higher Diploma qualification in Data Science/Analysis (I have some experience handling music licensing for tech startups and an MA with components in music analysis, which I spun into a narrative). Seemed like a ‘smart’ thing to do to do pick up a ‘respectable’ qualification, if I can’t play any more.

The programme had a strong programming element and I really enjoyed that part. The heavy statistics/algebra element was difficult but as my Python programming improved, I was able to write and utilise codebase to streamline the work, and I started to pull ahead of the class. I put in more and more time to programming and studied personally far beyond the requirements of the programme (scored some of the highest academic grades I’ve ever achieved). I picked up a confident level of Bash, SQL, Cypher (Neo4j), proficiency with libraries like pandas, scikit-learn as well as R things like ggplot. I’m almost at the end of the course now and I’m currently lecturing evening classes at the university as a paid professional, teaching Graph Database theory and implementation of Neo4j using Python. I’m co-writing a thesis on Machine Learning in The Creative Process (with faculty members) to be published by the institute. My confidence in programming grew and grew and with that platform to lift me, I pulled away from the class further and further.

I felt lost for a while, but I’ve found my new passion. I feel the drive to master the craft, the desire to create, to refine and to explore.

I’m going to write a Thesis with a strong focus on programmatic implementation and then try and take a programming related position and build from there. I’m excited to become a professional in this field. It might take time and not be easy, but I’ve already mastered one craft in life to the highest levels of expertise (and tutored it for almost 10 years). I’m 30 now and no expert (yet), but am well beyond beginner. I know how to learn and self study effectively.

The future is exciting and I’ve discovered my new art! (I’m also performing live these days with ‘TidalCycles’! (Haskell pattern syntax for music performance).

Hey all! I’m new on devRant!

In case data scientists read devrant:

"never trust statistics that you haven't faked yourself"

Most kids just want to code. So they see "Computer Science" and think "How to be a hacker in 6 weeks". Then they face some super simple algebra and freak out, eventually flunking out with the excuse that "uni only presents overtly theoretical shit nobody ever uses in real life".

They could hardly be more wrong, of course. Ignore calculus and complexity theory and you will max out on efficiency soon enough. Skip operating systems, compilers and language theory and you can only ever aspire to be a script kiddie.
You can't become a "data scientist" without statistics. And you can never grow to be even a mediocre one without solid basic research and physics training.

Hack, I've optimized literal millions of dollars out of cloud expenses by choosing the best processors for my stack, and weeks later got myself schooled (on devRant, of all places!) over my ignorance of their inner workings. And I have a MSc degree. Learning never stops.

So, to improve CS experience in uni? Tear down students expectations, and boil out the "I just wanna code!" kiddies to boot camps. Some of them will be back to learn the science. The rest will peak at age 33.

Are there statistics here in devRant that shows how many users here are PHP developers, C# devs, Frontend devs, Full stack LAMP devs, DevOps, etc? Something like that. 🤔

the number of ++ in devrant and the -- in stackoverflow I get , are random variables with equal distribution.

DevRant-Stats Site Update:
The future projections statistics should now be available for most of the supporters!

Have fun!

I'm really curious about how many people use the light and black theme in devRant (I'll call the default dark one dark, the pro one black)

I'm a dark theme user (it's kinda unique to devRant)
My guess is 5% Light, 85% Dark, 10% Black Theme.

Hi ppl of devRant! I’m not really a dev but I love reading your rants :) I decided to post my first rant because I think I could use some advice from you.

Background: I’m a student just finished my first year at uni. Earlier I applied for a developer intern just for fun and somehow magically got in. However, I'm a statistics major (not even CS!) and only know basic java stuff. I guess they hired me because I speak ok english and a little french? I live in a non-English speaking country but the company has a lot of foreign customers.

The problem is, the longer I stay, the more I feel that they only hired me out of charity *sobs* There isn’t much for me to do, and most of the time I couldn’t understand what my co-workers are doing so I can’t really help them either. Plus, they don’t seem to need my language skill as much, so I kinda feel useless here.

It’s my 5th (maybe already 6th?) week here and the only thing I did was fixing an itty bitty bug that literally needed only one additional line of code. Yes it took me a while to set up the environment, learn js from scratch since they use js for this project, and locate the issue but I’m pretty sure it’d probably take someone who’s familiar with the project, like, 3 mins? And now that I’ve fixed it and the merge request was passed, I’m out of work to do again. I talked to the lead and he pretty much just said “read more of the code”. Guess I can do that. I’ve spent like 4 days going through the code but is this really promising?

I want to spend time on learning actual stuff rather than yet another resume ornament. So what should I do? Should I ask for more help/more work to do, or keep learning on my own (I’m quite interested in algorithms, maybe I could make use of my time to study that?), or even leave?

Sorry for the long rant. I know ass-kicking devs probably hate useless, underqualified ppl at work in real life but believe me it really hurts to be one and I hate myself enough already so I’d appreciate any thoughts/advice :/

@dfox @trogus would you guys mind sharing some statistics on devRant? I've been very curious about the following metrics:
- Daily active users
- Weekly active users
- All time rants count
- Monthly comments count
- Total users count
Thanks for reading and thanks even more for making this beautiful platform 😃

So, any idea how many users on devRant after the spike and drop of yesteryears?

Any statistics of how much rants are on devRant yet? (or maybe some other)

!rant

Are there any statistics about devRant?

@dfox

I think this has been asked for before but I think it would be cool to add polls to our rants. Even if rsnts with polls are confined to their own section or something. I think this would benefit the devRant team too, as I know they like to collect statistics on strange things about the dev community.

Vote if you think this is a good idea.... Wait... 🙃

Hi devRant!
I'm here asking for your advice!
I'm a MSc student in my mid 20s, I took a gap year to work as an IT consultant and I'm planning on going back to studying, keeping at the same time a part-time job.

I already have some experience as a data engineer, developer and sys admin. I'm also mastering in applied statistics and data science and have a BSc in physics. I'm planning to relocate around Europe. All I want is a salary I can live with and a good work/study/life balance (perhaps work 24-30hrs a week?).

So far I've checked out a few IT jobs website and I've found some suitable positions. Problem is most of them are fulltime.

Where would you search for such a job? Is there any website/portal I should prefer? How would you proceed?
Should I prefer any place in particular (i.e. Northen countries)?

Thank you in advance <3

Note: I know it's a very broad question, that's because I'm open to any piece of advice you are willing to give me