Programming • Page 8

What kind of wall are you hitting? Do you feel like your skills are good enough? you aren't working on rewarding projects?

I have moments (quite a few actually) where I feel like I know absolutely nothing, especially when it comes to Javascript and rapid development is happening in the community but I try to look at my lack of knowledge as an opportunity to learn. I don't always succeed but I think it's a good mentality to have.

I would try to work out why exactly you feel like you're hitting a wall, is it skills, projects, etc. Once you identify that you can then start taking steps to rectify it (like you've started by asking on here).

As other people have suggested working with other people you consider to be at a higher skill level can be a good motivator and I've started looking at doing that by contributing to an open source project. The project I picked was the Calypso project run by Automattic (they're the company that build WordPress). The reason I picked it is because they're building it using React and Redux and they are two JavaScript libraries that I'm looking at getting better at. If you want to check it out you can get started here.

Also working on a personal project can be rewarding as well. I linked to one earlier in this thread and that was a project that I started while I was looking for work. I wanted to learn some new skills and also build some confidence up that I could complete something that was challenging to my skills at the time. Completely a project and deploying it can be immensely satisfy. If you go down that path I would pick something that's a little beyond your skill level but set clearly defined goals and keep the scope small to begin with. Once you have the initial concept completed you can then build upon that. Make yourself accountable. You can post what you are doing here and give us status updates and we can help you when you're stuck and keep you honest about completely your work.

You're definitely not alone and it's actually an exciting place to be because you get to look for something fun and challenging to do.

 

Most of the side projects I've done recently are just apps I want for my phone. Current one I'm working on I'm doing in Xamarin for the added fun/practice of learning a new framework. I think they've certainly helped my programming skills, though not as much as on the job experience has.

 

Here's the article I mentioned earlier. I thought it was a good read on the topic.

Shut Up, Imposter Syndrome: I Can Too Program | Laserfiche

 

They're live streaming the keynote from their conference next Wednesday. I've been tinkering with xamarin for a couple years. Now that it's included in VS, I'll be taking a much bigger dive. Could save me a huge amount of work managing an app in three operating systems.

 

Any iOS/Mac developers going to WWDC? It's looking like I might get to go this year which I am super excited about.

 

Every time I import JSON into a program, I always think that I'm importing @Jason Tate

 

Every time I read it I read it as my name.

 

Now that's all I'm going to think when I do the same thing. Thanks for that haha.

 

I work with a guy named Jason, we've started making him fix all JSON issues in our software.

 

If I am applying for jobs in a biology/medical research setting, would they care to see sample code of something I made for my dad's business to help him estimate how much material he'll need for paving driveways? Should I only push material that I've done in a biology setting?

 

Depends.

Is it something that is fundamentally useful in that setting? I.E. applies advanced mathematics in a usable interface or is measurably faster than an alternative?

I try to include any major project I've worked on, but highlight the parts of it that are relevant to the position I'm applying for.

 

i'd bring a copy to the interview and mention it, depending on the science there's a very good chance they'd be looking for you to do some form of data analysis, and programming is a ubiquitously useful skill

 

Thanks both of you. Ended up going with Wheelzoom as it fit my needs perfectly. Funny that you both recommended plugins by the same dude.

 

Should have mentioned the jobs are specifically bioinformatics/computational biologist positions, from what I've gathered in my area sample code is generally desired. Just wasn't sure if they wanted bio only. So I would be interviewing for a programming related position. Or at least one that is very programming heavy. Most requirements around me for it are Python, R, Java, C++ or some variants of that.

 

I don't know if it would be super useful for that setting. Generally the utilities built by the positions I'd be looking at are for protein modeling, docking, drug interactions, or data analysis. But, it's one of the only useful things I have, besides school projects and such.

 

Turns out I now have to learn Objective-C for my job...darn I was getting excited about learning more about React. For any of you ios programmers out there, any tips? My background is primarily intermediate Python, a teeny bit of java, as well as high proficiency in javascript. So this is my first low level languages. I started learning yesterday and the syntax is so freaking strange haha... Any books,tutorials or videos that you can recommend?

 

Why Objective-C instead of Swift? Are you supporting a legacy software?

 

The company that I'm transferring to has a lot of older developers, so all of their legacy code is in Objective-C. Not too sure if they're trying to move to Swift anytime soon. I know that Swift is "the future", but I'm kinda forced to O-C...

 

I'm in the same boat. The Mac product we have right now is stable, but if anything every goes wrong with it I'm going to push to see if we can move it to Swift. We're really hoping that .net core becomes a reliable thing and we can just write one product for Windows and Mac in C#.

About Objective-C though. It's a C language, so you have header files to deal with. Other than that, it's similar to every other object oriented language. Just has it's own syntax. I believe pluralsight has some decent tutorials on it. Otherwise, it may just be a matter of learning as you go.

 

I don't mind the header files (at least not yet; I'm still in the elementary stages). But damn, the syntax is so annoying and a ridiculously different than what I'm normally used to.

 

Obj-C has worse syntax than Java, which is about the meanest thing I can say.

 

So I'm quite possibly just being dumb about something (its been several years since I had to use Java) or maybe there is something configured wrong on my machine, but I'm trying to get into android development and am having problems locally referencing a library module. Anyone experienced with android development have any idea what I'm doing wrong?

I create a new project called TestApp09 (been testing a lot lol)
Company domain is musicmink
Package name defaults to musicmink.testapp09

I have API 21 selected as the minimum sdk

Start with an empty activity named MainActivity

Then I do File -> New -> Module and select "Android Library"

Application/Libary Name: My Library
Module name: mylibrary
Package name defaults to musicmink.mylibrary

I then add a TestClass to the musicmink.mylibrary package

I add a dependency in the app module to mylibrary. This adds compile project(':mylibrary') to the build.gradle for the app module

everything builds fine at this point.

But if I try to import musicmink.mylibrary, or reference TestClass from the app module, it doesn't build. I can an error

Error:(6, 17) error: cannot find symbol class mylibrary

do I have to add something else somewhere in order to start using TestClass?

think I figured it out. was doing

import musicmink.mylibrary;

instead of

import musicmink.mylibrary.*;

java is dumb

 

Speaking of, I wish Android would switch to Kotlin.

 

Being able to wildcard dependencies is nice though. We use a lot of dependency injection and I would love to be able to just use "using project.library.*;" and have it work instead of having to address every folder in the hierarchy.

c# isn't dumb, but it makes me less angry than Java and objective-c.

 

With Xamarin, it may not matter much.