I remember when I was at vocational school, my teacher sat us down and had use start web development with HTML, (HTML wasn’t my first programming experience but that’s a rant for another day) and after I printed Hello World and changed it’s color, I was even more hooked than ever. This is something that’s fun, and interesting and I don’t need to pay to do or be around specific things to be able to practice. I can do this at home or at school and I can make my own programs if I need them, automate mundane tasks, and learn so much more about technology than ever.

And the final thing that sealed the deal was I could do this and make money and not be stuck in a field I would be miserable in. Which was a very important factor for me.

Finally got around to installing Manjaro Linux (XFCE) on my desktop, which is replacing Ubuntu.

I’ve always looked at Manjaro and experimented with it, but I’m more experienced with Linux now, and I am hella enjoying Manjaro. Definitely my fav distro.

Today my day was spent getting bent over by ASP.NET (Core) and for some of it I for some reason for the fucking life of me could not get to work.

And even though I didn’t end the day on a good note in the project, I DID make some small progress, the problem I ran across was that I wasn’t inserting the ID into the database, but the real problem is that I tried to have the database generate the ID itself and increment it, but that didn’t work out so I’m stuck and I have no clue what I should do and I tried to manually set it too for one case but even that resulted in error, so 🤷🏻‍♂️

Feeling very intimidated while doing this. I’m hoping I’ll be able to write code that can actually scale and handle production.

That’s been my day.

So uh does anyone have any advice on freelancing/contracting? I’ve been considering doing it a little while going through college since it would be a little better than a full on job (or at least for my current situation) I’m realizing, but I have concerns like the myths I hear about clients, or with my own performance, or just the pay in general.

Idk what do you guys have to say

Now is the time for me to start projects to get the hang of ASP.NET (Razor Pages then MVC), although it doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot I need to worry about but I fucking feel like I’m messing it up already. I’m just worried about how I’m going to work up to sumn I would do at a job and remembering everything I have to do in the project and why

So for awhile now I’ve been preparing myself for my first dev job as a .NET dev, and I’ve mostly just been polishing my C# knowledge with OOP, Entity Framework, ASP.NET and it’s been going really well.

So my self assigned time limit (end of August-beginning of September) is coming up and that’s when I’m gonna apply, so I decided today to take some time from programming to actually make my resume.

I did not use a template so it looks boring and I don’t have a lot to put on it but what I did put on it was important and I feel is solid (for not having worked before).

I’m having a few people I know look at it from a professional stand point and gave me feed back I implemented and it is better now.

I already linked my github, should I link my LinkedIn?

will people actually care if I don’t use a template to make it visually pop because I’d honestly rather keep it how it looks as is if I can.

I’m pissed because there’s so much I want to do and explore in the programming world but I feel like I’m never going to get around to it.

What programming books do you all recommend?

Language wise any books on C, GoLang, Python, Rust, and LUA are welcome

And topic wise I’m interested in books about computer science theory, network programming, low level programming, and backend programming are welcome.

I know it’s a wide variety of topics but some are stuff Im currently doing, I’ve already messed with and just really want to learn more or focus on, or plan to do it when I get around to it

I wish the feeling of not being productive would go away. I’ve actually been making pretty nice progress with my project and I still feel like I’m not working on it enough.

So I’m not having too much trouble with my project. Does that mean I’m doing something too easy or have I actually just absorbed the knowledge I’ve been reading?

I’ve never actually used EF Core before and I thought this would be harder, and more time consuming.

I can’t describe how good it feels to have a project again.

And the pain of having a bug that I literally can’t fucking solve for hours even after asking for help which fucking sucked cause that was a waste of time to only realize it was because I WAS USING THE WRONG ACCESS MODIFIER is immense and fucking euphoric when I figure it out and I can clear all my browser tabs and don’t have to stare at that same fucking error again.

I’m just having a really good time with it and watching it grow.

I started a project to practice and familiarize myself with SQL more and Entity Framework Core and prove how much I’ve learned from reading this book.

It was originally gonna be small program with a small database but over the course of me designing the database I thought of more features I could add. It’s been awhile since I’ve had a project and it feels good to have one.

Right now I’m only messing with SQLite but since the position I want to apply for asks for SQL Server I want to mess with that eventually.

I have a list of favorites but the first person that always usually comes to mind is John Romero.

I love listening to the talks Romero gives and even though I don’t partake in the practice of developing games I still love hearing his stories about his projects development or having to work with old/retro tech and learn something from those stories.

Ive been shit lately and my only escape has been programming and even so I still feel just bad.

Going through a C# book I have helps, but the last thing to get me to just feel good was this Python script I wrote to download a lot of images within a thread of a post and just seeing it go from nothing to working how I wanted is such rush and to watch it work and go through a LARGE thread of pictures that ARENT pornographic and download and save them is extremely satisfying.

That’s how I’ve been lately.

I’ve tried to think about it and all I can come up with is that I think my biggest insecurities are my procrastination and lack of faith in my abilities to get and keep a job as a dev.

VSCode for C#, Python, Web dev
Sublime for big boy files
Nano for editing things in terminal
And VS if I need it

I’m going through the book automate the boring stuff and I’m working on the chapter with web scraping right.

Well I wanted to just count all of the comic links that are in the xkcd archive as a small exercise to help me get used to and better learn web scraping.

I go through hell trying to do this but after more than a few hours later I finally have done it I returned every link of ONLY the comics, so it was time to start counting them.

I implemented the counting. The total number as of today is 2279 and it my code counted 2278, and I started to lose it.

So I go through this motherfucker manually to see where my loops count and the count on the tags start to differ. I found it, whoever made it went from 403 to 405. The euphoria I felt for this incredibly small task was incredible. (Still haven’t pieced it together yet)

I found the email of the guy who I assume owns the site and I started writing an email that basically said “hey the count of your comics is off by one and you made me rethink existence trying to figure out why, you skipped number 404-”

I look at the gap between 403 and 405 Then the words “Error 404 Not Found” popped into my head. I proceeded to scream for a second and stopped writing the email and now I’m trying to come to terms with this.

TL:DR the guy who runs xkcd comics trolled me with a simple error 404 joke

Not gonna lie. Automate the Boring Stuff With Python lives up to the hype.

As of now C# has taken the crown from Python as my favorite language.

I wish I had programming friends I could talk to. I have no one I can really talk about all this with

Okay so what’s the difference between Blazor and Razor Pages??

I’ve heard Blazor is an alternative to Single page apps made with angular and that it’s not server side, and I personally don’t like that I’d rather have it run on the server side.

ASP.NET Core (MVC) is frustrating me.

I’m a big fan of ASP so far but I’m just struggling to understand a lot.

First off to use it you have to fucking memorize every class in the fucking framework and the functions within them. It just expects that I automatically know which classes I need to implement or inherit from and why, but if I don’t? I can fuck off. But this is also just a C# problem in general.

And it does so much for you and that bothers me so much. I was so excited to actually implement protection against SQL Injections, using HTTPS, validating logins, interacting with the SQL for the database but FUCKING NOPE BECAUSE IT DOES IT FOR YOU.

I don’t want my hand held I want to feel like I’m actually doing things and I want to learn how shit works and how it’s made. It’s just disappointing. I appreciate that it wants me to focus on the app and I will appreciate it a lot more when I’m done learning how everything works but I won’t actually get to understand how those features work or how I can implement them myself because it’s spoiling me too fucking much.

I guess I’m just gonna have to practice more. And don’t bother telling me to look at the documentation, I’ve never seen such a fucking piece of shit mess before I laid eyes upon the docs for C# & ASP

I’ve made a list of things I want to learn. Languages, frameworks, etc and i don’t really have too many things on the list that way I can learn them well.

I’ve been struggling with this choice because I’m honestly not sure whether or not I should consider Rust to be on the list.

I like the modern features it contains, and I don’t mind the syntax.

I don’t like it’s way of memory management, I’ve heard it’s performance can be very lacking, and I’ve heard a lot of negative things about the compiler and the efficiency of the language (although I feel like efficiency comes down to the person and how the code is written)

So please redpill me on Rust and try to convince me to add it to my list because it’s close.

I feel like I’m putting a lot of pressure on myself because I haven’t done much developing lately. I started a ASP.NET Core tutorial/book (that I already made a rant about) I’m enjoying it and the imposter syndrome that accompanies learning something new. But I’m scared I won’t be able to grasp anything from the project I’m building with the tut and won’t be able to actually do anything with it. But we will see hopefully when it’s complete I’ll understand it better. And I also have college to worry about so fuck that and my teacher that never likes my answers no matter how accurate they are

ASP.NET Core (MVC) is very cool, organized, and so fucking confusing

So far in 2020 the only work I’ve done is front end and even though I’ve improved (a little) It makes me sick. But today I actually get started working on backend in ASP.NET Core for the first time. I am excited.

I want to start another project but I have no idea what the hell to create. I was thinking of a Twitter Bot but idk what to make it do. I just want to make something.

One of the worst programming feelings is the feeling you get when you want to make something but have no inspiration or drive to even think of a good objective (whether it’s something I get hyped about or not)

I’m not good at frontend and I’ve accepted that but it’s frustrating because I just am not good at making things look good and I hate spending the time on the looks when I want to just go have fun with the back end.

I will say though getting it to look the way I want is super satisfying as well.

Any advice or resources?

I know taking breaks is needed, and deeply appreciate my breaks I take, but I can’t help but feel so unproductive.

How do you guys keep motivation in a long term project? Cause I could be completely motivated in the first like half but then just lose interest even though I love the project itself.