karanguni | (no subject)

Care about code that's not work? *chinprop*

I'm thinking of helping out with the fork of xkit - https://github.com/hobinjk/XKit - and the codebase is a giant sort of somewhat out of date snakepit. Plus I'm about 6 months in to my Actual Learning How To Be A Developer Phase, so it's... interesting.

Also trying to put together (and learn at the same time) a thing for Promises/async for javascript.

And then determined to learn Angular just in time to have it go out of date when they release Angular 2. /sigh

I suspect xkit can use all the help people are willing to give. Even a small debugging project could probably offer a lot of opportunity for learning.

For the past year I've been out of the loop for various webdev technologies. Just looked at Promises for javascript. Interesting. Makes sense. (bookmarks for later exploration)

Angular is very interesting. I played with it about a year and a half ago to evaluate it for a project. I liked it a lot but never got to do anything more than toy examples and, unfortunately, the final architectural decision nixed the angular aspects. :/

After not touching code for a while, I just started playing with the meteor framework but haven't had time yet to get past toy examples. Will hopefully be able to dive deep over the next month. My javascript isn't the best so I'll have gaps to fill while learning.

Yeah, I figured, but they just started putting issues on github because I asked, and now it's like A FLOOD OF EMAILS OMG and since it's mostly two or three of them at it there's no real... attack plan? V. intimidating for a new person to try and pick up when they're pulling/releasing what feels like every hour. Seriously. So quick. So madness. But I'm going to try...

Code any javascript that needs a bunch of asynchronous calls that rely on each other and promises start to look good right quick. I think Angular 2 is going to have them inbuilt; a lot of Node modules return promises to help devs from going into callback hell, too (check out q-io, for one, and I think mongoose returns promises, too).

Meteor is a TONNE of fun if you're okay just sort of throwing your hands up in the air and saying, MAGICAL FRAMEWORK, DO EVERYTHING FOR ME. It really does. Do everything. So fast. So fast to get things stood up.

Pulling and releasing that fast? Yow. That will be a learning experience while wading through that fire storm. Good luck with it! It could be chaos but it could also be a really awesome experience.

Meteor and magical framework syndrome: heheh, yeah, I felt that straight away while going through various toy examples. Speak incantations and -- *POOOF* -- super functionality appears out of nowhere. Luckily I've done dev in the past that made low-level magic happen so part of my goal is to pick through meteor's magic and attempt to understand its plumbing.

That said, meteor appeals to me because it allows a tiny team or even a team of one to do a lot really, really fast. But it also appeals because the magical they are using seems like a good thing for me to study so I can catch up on where fullstack dev is going, allowing me quickly (hopefully?!) ingest a lot of what I've missed during the years I didn't touch code. Or, at least, that's the plan. We'll see how it goes in the coming months. ;)

I'm pretty sure a bit of their team is in my area -- one of their devs came to the coding bootcamp that I was in this last winter -- so shout out if you run into something! They have meetups in my town all the time.

Cool. Will do. :)

btw, how was the bootcamp you went to? most people i know got into software dev the old school traditional route (CS BS -> CS MSorPHD -> internship at a software co --> full time job in software industry). Although coding bootcamps weren't even around until just a few of years ago. Curious because, imho, unless one is hired to do reallllly low level software design on the tiny percentage of projects/products that require it, i suspect a fulltime year of deepdive coding with mentorship is all someone needs to become a solid asset on software dev team.

Edited 2015-08-01 05:21 (UTC)

I'm doing mostly Sort Of Full Stack C# webdev, so it's not so much software engineering -- all of those people that I know did what you're describing. The hilarity of my situation is that I did 3 months of bootcamp - entirely in Javascript - and then sort of conned my way into my current position by virtue of having a shiny degree from a shiny university and a brain &c.

At least for webdev? I think bootcamps are a great way to break in, in terms of it being quicker, less expensive than a four year degree, and full of networking ops. Comparatively, getting a CS degree (I took a couple of those classes here and there) doesn't do jack to prepare you for WEBdev, so... There's no real replacement for what you learn on the job.

On the flipside, I get the feeling that these bootcamps are fast turning into a Shill People For A Quick Buck central, but there you go. Whence demand, thence supply... I think you've got to definitely have a good brain for code beforehand to graduate and get a good job, but where I am? The market is so in demand of developers that people I never thought would get a job are getting paid more than I am because they've been picked up by startups that are SO DESPERATE that they'll hire anyone who says "I know node.js*****", no matter what those asterisks mean.

I was also only one of four women in that camp, so I wonder if there's something there, too...

Heheh. Yeah, I know a few things about the hiring end and how shiny degrees from shiny universities open doors. ;)

Agreed about CS not necessarily preparing people for WebDev, although it is a YMMV situation per Uni x Student. If someone is in a university that offers a wide range of tech-focused degree programs and the student is self-motivated, they can piece together courses over a half dozen departments to get a lot of the breadth needed to make it through the interview. Add in time on a research projects that requires webdev skill and/or summer internships for good measure.

Bootcamps seem like a good way to take whatever university pathway one has and then add on an extra summer/quarter of hardcore job training.

At a much higher level, all of this eventually circles back to the argument of whether a university degree should be "education" or "job training," and what this even means when technology changes quickly and much learning happens on the job (although this too is a YMMV situation depending on how forward facing your company is, because one can stagnate on the job purely because the company's approach is all about stagnation). Meanwhile, most large U's have been creating post-graduate professional certificate programs that tend to be part time versions of these bootcamps, although across many topics, not just a specific flavor of programming. And quite a few of those feel like Shilling People For A Quick Buck now that universities are hard pressed for quick cash, especially when the program puts too much emphasis on how to turn the crank and not enough emphasis on why the crank exists in the first place.

If you push my rant button on Issues in Higher Education (I$$ue$), I won't shut up. ;)