Children's Day from a bad code

The post is dedicated to the Children's Day. Any matches are not matches.

When I was 10 years old, I had my first computer and a disk with Visual Studio 6. Since then, I have been creating tasks for myself - to automate things, build some web service for three people, or write a game that will be removed from the playmarket from old age. Of course, I was losing the source code and writing code that I’m ashamed to show people. And in 10 years I would definitely not refuse to receive from the future an archive with all the jambs - so that they would never be allowed.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked my colleagues from Yandex.Money what they would advise a child who wants to become an IT specialist, and then remembered something about himself. So this text appeared. I suggest to talk about it.

I do not recommend spending a lot of energy on the flour of choice, it is better to try everything and do everything. When you understand what is what in general, you will be able to decide in which direction you need to move, and which one is better to give up.

Sergey, junior programmer

Childhood

What is the most fun lesson in programmer childhood, when there is no internet yet?

I had two of them - to disassemble all the games from the disc “800 games in Russian” with all the programs from the disc “All that a hacker needs”, and then rewrite all the games for which I spent more than 10 hours from scratch in BASIC. It makes no difference what happens - even if that happens.

You take, try, rearrange blocks in places, experiment and reach for everything you can reach. You demolish Windows, you put Windows back 10 hours. Trying to get the drivers back. Understand how DOS works. Understand how jumpers should stand, so that your hard drive wound up in a computer from a friend (there are 200 megabytes of new games!). You twist a software, you twist iron, you disassemble and you collect the computer. You write a football simulator for 13 years, after all.

When there is nothing, you become happy and from such.

Don't underestimate the importance of self-checking. In my opinion, newcomers to IT underestimate how strictly it is necessary to control their product (and analytics too) and how much time it takes compared to the purely creative part. And the more interesting what you do, the more difficult and longer the test will be.

This is, of course, some abstract advice, but if I knew right away.

And I do not recommend to dwell on one direction in IT. Here, too, the outlook matters.

Anna, Senior Systems Analyst

secondary school

At some point, programming was discussed on the forum of the county town P - and there appeared a thread with the heading “PHP Programmers are looking for a large company”. The ad text was:

     PHP:  ,  ,      ,   :    php,       x, y  z,  x^5+y^5=z^5. (^ - ).   . 

In this thread, only a few people unsubscribed - I was there. With all my sixteen years of naivety, I replied:

   .     ,   ...   x,y,z <=1000   -   (   vb,    ),     .     , . 

Yes, a joke, a novice trap, Yes, padonkafsky, well and INTO . Obviously, I spent some time on a simple script, but completely forgot about the existence of the Fermat theorem — which the author of the thread, the Honorable The_Kid, specified at the very end.

   -  .   ,  ,       .   ,        ,      ...     .    -    ,     ,     . ,      6  6     «   ».       ? 

Then it caused a storm of indignation in my spirit: “If I did not write about Fermat's theorem, this does not mean that I don’t know about it,” - a classic excuse. Am i sad now No, this is also a lesson for life. As when my game was recorded in the Indonesian Windows Phone Store, and after two weeks it was deleted, because I did not update any of the conditions of the EULA.

And it’s completely incomprehensible: if in one large company there is no one to hire, then who then to be? What to do? Where to grow?

You should not think that, having got an education, you will be a programmer / taxing engineer / mathematician or someone else.

The time has come when the diploma becomes much more important basic subjects (mathematics, physics, computer science, philosophy), and not applied (programming, design in specific areas, etc.). Higher education began to be divided into layers - basic (engineering) and applied. One should learn not specific skills, but thinking, a scientific approach, understanding how to solve problems, software skills.

This is for the university. On the applied skills of a person will still be the rest of life.

Oleg, Leading Systems Analyst

University

You write the code on the pros, you write the code on Java. You touch the assembler, take away your hand, plunge into Qt and think what they are doing to you. The course for the fourth all makes no difference to what you write next important labs, the teachers look at the code somehow.

So, of course, not everywhere - there are universities where powerfully and well, but there they take the guys, who at school solved problems from ACM, took extra lessons from graph theory and wondered how much memory all the existing algorithms in the world need in the world .

I did not decide, did not go to dopa, but just finished my studies in my math class, doing interesting things along the way. Spoiler - at the interviews they will not need anyone.

First, it is better to decide what you like from IT. If you like all the directions, it will be difficult. Learning a language will lead nowhere; there will only be confusion in the future.

Jan, a specialist in fin. monitoring

The real story - for the Windows simulator, made with a friend on the knee in 10th grade, at the university you can get a couple of exams and tests automatically. You can even then tell everyone how cool it was. The problem is that it was not cool - it was a tangled architecture, disgusting code and the complete absence of any standards for anything.

Such things need to be done with one goal - to have its own directory of rakes. Although it will not save an impostor from the syndrome, when you find yourself in a big company with some superficial knowledge of everything and you think that you will be exposed now.

I will support, it is more important to help with advice, what can be done and where to get info, and not vice versa. And it’s not at all scary if he first does something to the touch, the awareness will come later. It is important to like.

Eric, Test Engineer

We all write development plans - what to learn, what to do in the near future and how to improve ourselves. But it seems that it would be useful for all of us to write a letter to ourselves from the past — this is mine.

1. Spend time, find a book and put the same distribution Ubunt, which you sent for free from Canonical. There is clearly some kind of a simple problem, Ubunt starts up everywhere. And Linux will be very useful for you.
2. Do not be afraid of the console. Volkov Commander, of course, fits on a single floppy disk, but try to figure out why you need all these commands, make friends with the command line. And the floppy will die. The disks will die. Flash drives will also die. Don't worry too much.
3. Read about the algorithms, sort out the sorting, trees and heaps. Read books.
4. To understand the basics, paid courses are not needed. YouTube will be here soon - you'll be surprised.
5. Do not focus on BASIC. There are hundreds of technologies in the world that are worth your attention, and a million things that are more interesting than once again drawing user forms in Excel. Take at least Python - and then figure it out.
6. Learn to use the Gita, zabekap all the sources. Write at least one client-server application to understand how they work. Understand the networks, switches and routers.
7. And if you read it now, then everything is not in vain.

Tell us in the comments, what would you write yourself from the past? Advise something for current schoolchildren and students who are still at a crossroads and are trying to find their way. Let's talk about it.