I was 8 years old the boy in the block invited me said I have something to show you. His parents bought him a Macintosh. He typed my name on the black screen and there was a response.
He said look it says “How are you?” And I was mesmerised got so excited I was like wow 😲
Guess what the text was actually saying? syntax error 😂 Little did I know at that time!!
I went home and told my parents, can you believe what I’ve seen today?? Computer responded me talked to me!!
On my birthday I got a Commodore 64 that year and the story begun.

!rant
... so... maybe not that much of a thing, but i think it is:

a gal (27 years old) i started teaching programming two weeks ago, who had literally no previous experience with programming, algoritmization nor c#...
... just now, after 3 lessons of 6 hours altogether, and after yesterday when i explained to her what arrays are and reminded her what loops do...

... invented bubble sort. on her own. no googling. on paper. no "trial and error code typing and running".

i'm actually pretty proud of her :)

... putting the algo concept into actual code will still be a bit of a struggle, but yeah, hell, can't help thinking that she's actually pretty smart :)

(p. s. fist lesson was i drew uml of a fibonacci algo and forced her to understand what it does, second lesson was i explained the minimum required c# syntax for her to be able to implement it and forced her to write it (with as little help as i could), third lesson was the concept of array and "okay, now here's array of numbers, make a function that will sort them")

looking forward to what will happen when i explain recursion and nudge her towards quicksort O:-)

Hired a new BI developer. She tested reasonably ok in SQL, and certainly showed good strengths in visualising data, plus had a good attitude in the interview. We hired her. She broke her laptop the first day. We got her another then she complained the camera didn't work but didn't realise the lever in front of the camera was to move the privacy shutter off and on.

Assigned her some work of taking queries that are used in a BI tool that targets the transactional database directly, and re-jigging them for Snowflake which we're using as a data warehouse now, aggregating all our data into one place. Yet, she's struggling to understand why the SQL query she's pasted in doesn't work as-is.

I go over it again; the source schemas and tables are this, but in Snowflake we've named them this. She then bemoans how much work that is to change them all - I say use find and replace. She then struggles with Snowflake syntax errors and asks for a guide on T-SQL to Snowflake. I show her Google and say "this is what I did when I hit these problems - search for 'Snowflake equivalent to T-SQL getdate()' or 'how to get current date in Snowflake' but she still doesn't understand. I ask if she's every had to work between T-SQL and MySQL or MySQL and PostgreSQL or Oracle and so on and she says yes. I say the syntax isn't the same, is it? And she goes oh, now I understand.

She scored reasonably in her SQL test but I'm now concerned there's something fundamental missing in her grasp of SQL. I gave her a detailed demo of the tools, I explained in the interview and on her start about our move to a data warehouse for all our apps, and put her through some training plus gave her time to work through our Confluence pages - not expecting she'll remember everything, but more to ensure she recalls they exist and what the general contents are.

Anyhow, that's my rant.

Americans be like "I'm offended! My compiler said I have a syntax error!"