Programming • Page 11

Yeah all of IntellJ ideas are pretty good, the autocomplete is nice and I also found it use for being able to open a terminal in the IDE as well (there are Atom plugins to do the same thing but I've found them to be flaky at best).

Do you have a particular project you're going to be working on in Python or just seeing what you can do?

 

A lot of the jobs I'll be applying for ask for Java/Python/R. I have about two years of academic experience with Java, and a semester of R, but I haven't done anything in Python academically (ironically my program just switched their intro and intermediate data structure and algorithm courses to Python right after I finished them). I'm hoping to re-write a lot of the smaller projects I did in Java in Python. I made a genetic algorithm based program that creates a population of protein sequences and mutates them. If I could get that in Python for when I apply to jobs that would be rad.

 

I've gotta become a master of postgres and perl again since I'm going to be fixing a massive project soon and be the caretaker of it indefinitely lol.

 

Nice it sounds like you've got some interesting projects to work on. So are you mainly apply for data scientist/analysts jobs?

HAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAH HAAAAAAAAA.... I'm sorry that you have to work with Perl... At my previous job the vast majority of our enterprise systems (think customer billing) was written in Perl. It left a lot to be desired. It's always fun coming back to code that you wrote a week ago (or even a day!) and being like "what kind of moron wrote those, oh wait that was me..."

 

Perl is the worst thing ever. I had a professor who would shit on Perl at any moment he could.

 

In a way. I have a degree in biology, and extended my stay at school about 3 semesters to do their CS certificate, it's like a minor but a little more intensive. I had to take intro to computing, intermediate data structures and algorithms, C programming, computer architecture and organization, algorithms in bioinformatics, and advanced data structures and algorithms, along with calc but I took that for my degree.

If all goes well, I would love to be a bioinformaticist or computational biologist. There are also a ton of jobs in conservation and biotech in general that want data scientists as well. Ideally, I would love to be making tools and utilities used in biomedical research.

 

Yeah the only thing I really like using Perl for was quick and dirty scripts for manipulating text files or generating basic reports on servers because it has a solid RegEx engine. But I'd pretty much use Python for that kind of work these days.

 

This is a huge system that involves a lot of database manipulation. It's going to be such a pain lol.

 

You sound a lot like one of my co-workers. He's got a PhD in Microbiology but never really did anything with programming until a few years ago but now that he has he can see a lot of applications and use in the biology field. I think one of the projects he was talking about was modelling virus infection rates to see how it spreads in a population.

 

Yeah bioinformatics is huge, and growing, pretty much why I wanted to take this CS program. I bet in a few decades bioinformatics will be required in most biology degree programs.

 

I wanna get into programming. Just as a tool to be familiar with in the world. I'm trying to teach myself through baseball saber-metrics. I figured if its a familiar subject, it will make the programming language easier to grasp. So far have been slowly learning Python and R. What I would really like is to set up a desktop workstation in my spare bedroom for this but money...

Any tips or advice on this would be appreciated. So far I've been using codeacademy and Futurelearn.

 

So, I'm majoring in Game Design (the programming aspect) and I really need to start learning stuff outside the classroom, but I feel very far behind. I know an okay amount of Java, but I've heard that it's not really what I should try to become an expert in (accurate?), though I do understand most of the key concepts and ideas carry over to most languages.

From my googling, it seems like JavaScript is a good place to be rn. I started to try and make Pong a couple of week ago using Mozilla's resource stuff, but I feel like maybe I should be reading some sort of textbook. Anyone have any recommendations, for learning JavaScript or a language that you think would be useful.

 

If you want an introduction to standard JavaScript these are two good introduction books (both available online):
Eloquent JavaScript
Speaking JavaScript: An In-Depth Guide for Programmers

Also if you're serious about learning the ins and outs of JavaScript you're probably going to want to learn about ES6 (the next standard for JavaScript):
Exploring ES6: Upgrade to the next version of JavaScript

In terms of Game Design/Development I probably can't help you too much there (I have a passing interest in it but never dedicated a lot of time) but it looks like Mozilla has a good starting point for different web game development resources:
Game development

Have a poke through that and see if there's anything of interest to you.

As for languages I'd probably steer away from Java. While it's possible to write games in it (Minecraft was) it's not really an industry standard. C# or C/C++ would probably be languages you should look into.

I'd have a look into the Unity3D game engine, they have a free personal edition. You program in it using C# and they have some good introduction tutorial for building games Unity - Learn - Modules. They also have a pretty good community market place were people upload game assets and tools (like Adventure Creator which can be used to make 2D and 3D adventure games).

 

If you're just starting I'd probably stick with Python. R is a good data analysis language but you'll get more versatility out of Python.

A good introduction to Python is Learn Python The Hard Way. It's targeted at people who are very new to programming so it may be a little basic if you've already been doing some but it also a good resource to just brush up on semantics.

Also it looks like put a blog post up about doing saber-metrics in Python so that might be a good blog post to have a look over and try and implement it yourself:
http://adilmoujahid.com/posts/2014/07/baseball-analytics/

If you're interested in trying out different data analysis projects it might be worth checking out Kaggle: Your Home for Data Science. They run data analysis competitions for various organisations and they also have a couple of "101 primer" competitions to help you try out some different techniques.

 

Linear algebra and C++ are the two things I hear tossed around a lot when related to game design.

 

PyCharm is rad, I dig Darcula a lot, in fact, any IDE that has a non-white background I like a lot.

Java to Python is a little odd at first. I'm wondering how big programs are organized in Python? I am used to OOP in Java.

 

Python has rather nice OOP support as well.

 

Oh really? I didn't know it supported OOP. I'll look into that, thanks!

 

To iOS devs, I've stumbled upon an embarrassing stop. Can't seem to successfully import the NXOAuth2
(OAuth2Client/README.md at develop · nxtbgthng/OAuth2Client · GitHub) framework manually to my project.

I run through the first procedures easily but at this part I'm at a loss. What exactly does this last line mean?

* #import "NXOAuth2.h"
* add the Security.framework as a build dependency

When I try to build it just says NXOAuth2 isn't found.

Using it alongside Spotify SDK (which I just found out DOESN'T even have an updated podfile). I usually am very patient but it's a non-code related problem and taking me way too long. If anyone can get this to work and help out I'd be very grateful!

 

Friends, i'm getting ready to apply to jobs in a few weeks. Is there like a threshold of what employers want to see in a portfolio? Like I have three things right now, should I try to get more in? Note that the jobs i'll be applying for are interdisciplinary and use programming to apply to biology related problems.

 

If anyone is interested in doing some code critiquing, a just made a GitHub with a little project I started. It's just the first part of it, and I'm sure (and hoping) a lot of it will change, including the pieces for future directions that I mentioned in the readme. I would love to hear things about documentation, coding conventions, and just anything in general.

GitHub - drewcaruso/GeneDiversityGenerator

 

So I just got a call from a recruiter, where I had to pass a screening test, which I did. This would be for a Jr. Software Developer and he said the first 6-8 months are contracted at an hourly rate, and then brought on full time. Is this legit in the industry? It seems like a way to pay me less for whatever they need done, and then maybe not hire me full time.

 

The same thing literally happened to me this morning. I got an email for a contract to work on restructuring the MBTA in Boston, but mine would be 2-3 years long. It's not the worst thing in the world...it would give you experience and help you move on to better things once the contract is done!

 

I'm not sure it's right for me. I look at the reviews on the company on Glassdoor has an employee saying "when we do find someone we want to hire, we send them a lowball contracting offer where they are paid hourly and won't even get vacation time or sick leave."

I think i'll go through the interview process if offered, for the experience, and then if I am offered the job, probably say I am only interested in full salary and benefits.


Also, I'm in Boston too.

 

Relatively little experience, but the target dependencies are under Build Phases in XCode. Idk if that's what you meant.