I started out learning Python. And before you "tsk, kids these days", it was before Python became the go to starter language for a lot of universities. No, I started learning around age 12.

My dad (a programmer himself), bought "Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner" and we went through it together. He started out holding my hand as I went through the exercises, but pretty quick I was getting through them mostly on my own.

It was really fun, and I'm absolutely going to do the same if/when I have children of my own. The books exercises were all games, which made it really fun. Instead of "hello world", the first program printed "game over". I was super proud of the hangman game I eventually wrote.

It gave me a leg up when I started taking actual classes, and really instilled a love of coding and puzzle solving in me that propelled me through two degrees.

Anything of the form "write a <complex data structure>". To be expected to do that from memory is ridiculous. It's far far far more important to understand the data structure and be able to explain how it works.

My neighbor blasting shitty trap and EDM at 8am after I had a long night of coding is just *fantastic*.

I didn't want to sleep anyway.

My feature branch is not yours! Stop pushing unrelated things! GO AWAY.

// meta rant
I promise you'll get more ++ if you take a screenshot rather than a picture with your phone. Please - it's not difficult.

I can't read your screen on an awful blurry photo with scan lines.

When the work isn't as interesting as I'd like, sometimes I accomplish the easiest, smallest incremental task and waste time the rest of the day.

I guess because it feels like work, I'd rather apply minimal effort. It's a bad habit, and one I'm trying to break.

We need to be learning from other's mistakes. A good weekly topic would be "a time you really failed as a dev, and what you learned".

I was an intern - as a high school student. They had no idea what to do with an intern, let alone a high school student that was only there around three hours a day.

They tried to saddle me with a massive "how to use Perforce" manual, but I flat refused and told them to give me some real work.

In the end I wound up writing a text parser in Python to get some specific info from some files. They decided it wasn't actually needed after I finished it (I don't think they expected me to), on my last week there. I just played solitaire the rest of the time. I learned a few things:

1. I never want to work at Adtran.
2. Perforce should die in a fire.
3. Experience != Expertise.
4. Don't be afraid to put yourself on the line if it means potentially accomplishing something.

Spent two goddamn hours writing a Python script to convert exported JSON from Trello to an Excel sheet, only to find a Chrome extension that already does it, and better. 😧

Confession time.

I mix naming styles in my code. Some variables will be camelcase, some will have underscores, some will be all lowercase.

Classes are always title case though. Anything else is barbaric.

!rant

She's the best rubber duck of all. 😍

I was grading for the Data Communications course (it's just networks), and the professor leaves me the first quiz to grade, along with the solutions.

Half the solutions are wrong, and no problems are assigned point values. I asked him how I should grade it, even how many points total it was worth.

"You decide."

Nearly every student got a perfect score on every assignment from me because it was clear the prof. didn't care, and I wasn't about to make my own answer keys for often incomprehensible problems and incomplete solutions.

Was accused of plagiarism because I could write a bubble sort algorithm without a reference (and therefore without a source) in my SECOND year of courses.

Their low expectations bit them in the ass when the admin. made all undergrads take a basic test (for loop going through an array, average of values, etc) and lots of people in their third year failed.

Just reinstalled Windows to an SSD, so I'm reinstalling​ MS office. Office 365 is helpfully provided by my university. I also use Visio a good bit, and again my University helpfully provides Visio 2016.

Install Office 365.
Download 2.2GB Visio iso.
Mount Visio iso, run setup.exe.
Get this message.

🖕

Fuck you, carpal tunnel.

Even Kroger has trouble booting sometimes; it's hard to see, but that's a grub prompt.

I like to teach sites that don't escape HTML/js in input fields a lesson, and put in a redirect. Where would you redirect them?

I tend to go SFW, like redirecting to a competitor or the NSA.