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Pjay |
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Pjay World Chat Champion
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Riejufixing |
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Riejufixing World Chat Champion
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The Shaggy D.A. |
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The Shaggy D.A. Super Spammer
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barrkel |
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barrkel World Chat Champion
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Posted: 15:53 - 30 Oct 2018 Post subject: |
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Riejufixing wrote: |
A good GCSE in English, and at least some maths, and an interest in doing the job. |
That'll get you to programmer, maybe, not enough to be good.
The Shaggy D.A. wrote: | And a healthy dollop of autism/Asperger's. |
I've worked with people further out on the spectrum than me and there are definitely diminishing returns. One chap was absolutely fearless, technically; but he was completely blinkered, focused on his immediate goal, and didn't consider the systematic ramifications of his changes. We had to let him go - we would have had to pair him up with a QA guy full time to stop him breaking other stuff. Others are opinionated on a technical spectrum but don't consider the people factor; or focus on technical excellence at the cost of immediate return to the business, and get lost in rabbit-holes; or get frustrated with the general shittiness of everything without understanding how things got to the way they are now, and how to pragmatically improve things without starting yet another aborted initiative that ends up just adding to the mess. ____________________ Bikes: S1000R, SH350; Exes: Vity 125, PS125, YBR125, ER6f, VFR800, Brutale 920, CB600F, SH300x4
Best road ever ridden: www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2MhNxUEYtQ |
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Riejufixing |
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Riejufixing World Chat Champion
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thx1138 |
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thx1138 World Chat Champion
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Im-a-Ridah |
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Im-a-Ridah World Chat Champion
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Posted: 21:45 - 30 Oct 2018 Post subject: |
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Riejufixing |
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Riejufixing World Chat Champion
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Posted: 21:55 - 30 Oct 2018 Post subject: |
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"Of course you can, Malcolm!".
Question is, would you want to be?
A great friend of mine over the years claimed he'd only got a 15-Yard Swimming Certificate, and nothing else from school at all. It is possible, I suppose, he certainly did not go to university. Wonderful chap, excellent programmer, thoroughly decent all-round good chap, and once upon a time my boss! |
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thx1138 |
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thx1138 World Chat Champion
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Posted: 23:15 - 30 Oct 2018 Post subject: |
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Riejufixing wrote: |
A great friend of mine over the years claimed he'd only got a 15-Yard Swimming Certificate, and nothing else from school at all. It is possible, I suppose, he certainly did not go to university. Wonderful chap, excellent programmer, thoroughly decent all-round good chap, and once upon a time my boss! |
I got a couple of GCSE's, and ended up running a dept. where everyone under me had a degree, or a doctorate. Not programming, but yeah, same sorta thing. |
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Lord Percy |
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Lord Percy World Chat Champion
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- Super Spammer
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Riejufixing |
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Riejufixing World Chat Champion
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Andy_Pagin |
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Andy_Pagin World Chat Champion
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Lord Percy |
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Lord Percy World Chat Champion
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Posted: 02:19 - 01 Nov 2018 Post subject: |
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Riejufixing wrote: | Lord Percy wrote: | I ran a test on the database for our website with a few million dummy entries. Everything was a bit sluggish |
You need to be very careful, when you're testing, of the nature of your data and database structure, as the performance of your application may depend on those things. |
Oh it absolutely depends on those things.
I'm staring at the code right now and can see exactly where optimisation may need to be done. Some important stuff would need rewriting though, and right now it isn't worth the time or risk of messing things up. It can sit there as 'technical debt' for a while yet.
As far as database structure goes, I at the very least made sure to keep user profile images in a separate table from user profile data. I can thank stackoverflow for that fine advice . Actually I can thank stackoverflow for a bloody lot. Password and database security were all new to me, until I googled them*.
*On the topic of security, and the ease with which I googled how to do it properly. I almost took on a project a few weeks ago, inheriting a code base from an Indian company who had monumentally failed on their promised timeline (3 months turned into 12 and it still wasn't done) so the client relieved them of their duties. I looked at their code, which was all very nice for the most part, then discovered somebody had set it so user passwords are saved as base64 ecnoded strings. This was production-ready code that just needed some bits doing on the front end.
On the day I taught myself how to deal properly with passwords, this image was one of the first things I saw.
https://paragonie.com/files/blog/base64_a_password.png
I guess some programmers are too proud to google what they don't know. |
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Lord Percy |
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Lord Percy World Chat Champion
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Riejufixing |
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Riejufixing World Chat Champion
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Lord Percy |
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MarJay |
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MarJay But it's British!
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Posted: 12:45 - 01 Nov 2018 Post subject: |
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Can I tell you the worst thing that being a professional programmer (for a year - I wasn't great at it) has done to me?
Ruined Superman III ____________________ British beauty: Triumph Street Triple R; Loony stroker: KR1S; Track fun: GSXR750 L1; Commuter Missile: GSX-S1000F
Remember kids, bikes aren't like lego. You can't easily take a part from one bike and then fit it to another. |
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Hong Kong Phooey |
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Hong Kong Phooey World Chat Champion
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Posted: 11:11 - 04 Nov 2018 Post subject: |
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panrider_uk wrote: | I did COBOL programming back in the day.
A smattering of BASIC, Fortran, Z80 assembler and Pascal
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I think somebody is showing their age!
I did A-level computer science and didn't use it in my career path until the last 15 years. I've been programming since the age of 10.
BASIC & C as a hobby, then in the last 15 years in the workplace, VBA, VBscript, more recently (last 5 years) Javascript, PHP, HTML and some server side shell scripting. A bit of SQL, and a lot of reporting experience as an advanced user.
What I've learned is that VBA can do a hell of a lot of useful things. It might not be the fastest at runtime, but the agility of being able to develop something there and then, and its ubiquity more makes up for that. It's IDE is simple to use, and its integration into the apps everybody uses (Excel, Access, Word) means I'm forever being called upon to streamline everybody elses job. I joke (with some irony) that I'll program them out of a job within the next 5 years.
I have adapted to use other languages as the basics are similar, I tend to google the solution, a lot of Stack Exchange is solving the same issue, which can easily be adapted. It's the most pragmatic & fastest way sometimes, and for sure gives inspiration & niche streamlined methods that I would never have considered in solitude. Once you've built a little library of these gems, they tend to get reused quite a lot.
I've spent a lot of my time shifting data from one platform to another, this is also an ongoing theme in any industry. Extract, transform, check, upload, verify. Also a hell of a lot of time programming purely because I want to avoid doing the work, and get the computer to sort it out.
All of the above are in addition to my main job! ____________________
'81 CG125, '97 FZS600 : '99 CBR600F4, '09 KTM RC8 |
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panrider_uk |
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panrider_uk World Chat Champion
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Posted: 15:01 - 04 Nov 2018 Post subject: |
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Hong Kong Phooey wrote: | panrider_uk wrote: | I did COBOL programming back in the day.
A smattering of BASIC, Fortran, Z80 assembler and Pascal
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I think somebody is showing their age!
I did A-level computer science and didn't use it in my career path until the last 15 years. I've been programming since the age of 10.
BASIC & C as a hobby, then in the last 15 years in the workplace, VBA, VBscript, more recently (last 5 years) Javascript, PHP, HTML and some server side shell scripting. A bit of SQL, and a lot of reporting experience as an advanced user.
What I've learned is that VBA can do a hell of a lot of useful things. It might not be the fastest at runtime, but the agility of being able to develop something there and then, and its ubiquity more makes up for that. It's IDE is simple to use, and its integration into the apps everybody uses (Excel, Access, Word) means I'm forever being called upon to streamline everybody elses job. I joke (with some irony) that I'll program them out of a job within the next 5 years.
I have adapted to use other languages as the basics are similar, I tend to google the solution, a lot of Stack Exchange is solving the same issue, which can easily be adapted. It's the most pragmatic & fastest way sometimes, and for sure gives inspiration & niche streamlined methods that I would never have considered in solitude. Once you've built a little library of these gems, they tend to get reused quite a lot.
I've spent a lot of my time shifting data from one platform to another, this is also an ongoing theme in any industry. Extract, transform, check, upload, verify. Also a hell of a lot of time programming purely because I want to avoid doing the work, and get the computer to sort it out.
All of the above are in addition to my main job! |
At least I avoided slide rules (just)
VBSEdit is a nice little editor for vba which will compile your little utilities into .exe files. ____________________ Current bike: Honda ST1100 |
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M.C |
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M.C Super Spammer
Joined: 29 Sep 2015 Karma :
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Posted: 15:17 - 04 Nov 2018 Post subject: |
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Hong Kong Phooey wrote: | panrider_uk wrote: | I did COBOL programming back in the day.
A smattering of BASIC, Fortran, Z80 assembler and Pascal
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I think somebody is showing their age!
I did A-level computer science and didn't use it in my career path until the last 15 years. I've been programming since the age of 10.
BASIC & C as a hobby, then in the last 15 years in the workplace, VBA, VBscript, more recently (last 5 years) Javascript, PHP, HTML and some server side shell scripting. A bit of SQL, and a lot of reporting experience as an advanced user.
What I've learned is that VBA can do a hell of a lot of useful things. It might not be the fastest at runtime, but the agility of being able to develop something there and then, and its ubiquity more makes up for that. It's IDE is simple to use, and its integration into the apps everybody uses (Excel, Access, Word) means I'm forever being called upon to streamline everybody elses job. I joke (with some irony) that I'll program them out of a job within the next 5 years.
I have adapted to use other languages as the basics are similar, I tend to google the solution, a lot of Stack Exchange is solving the same issue, which can easily be adapted. It's the most pragmatic & fastest way sometimes, and for sure gives inspiration & niche streamlined methods that I would never have considered in solitude. Once you've built a little library of these gems, they tend to get reused quite a lot.
I've spent a lot of my time shifting data from one platform to another, this is also an ongoing theme in any industry. Extract, transform, check, upload, verify. Also a hell of a lot of time programming purely because I want to avoid doing the work, and get the computer to sort it out.
All of the above are in addition to my main job! |
Bit of a hijack here but what would you recommend for a total noob starting out? I did an introductory Codeacademy course recently, and learnt about the gender pay gap, a lack of diversity within the range of makeup on sale, and the Bechdel test... not a lot of coding though
I was thinking python as I have a Raspberry Pi although would it be better going back to the roots of coding (basic etc.)? I've downloaded the Spectrum coding manual (its like 200 pages ). Sorry again for the hijack just wanted to ask while the experts are in the room. |
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Hong Kong Phooey |
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Hong Kong Phooey World Chat Champion
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Posted: 18:09 - 04 Nov 2018 Post subject: |
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VBA wouldn't be a bad place to learn a high level language. If you can record a macro in Excel then you can amplify the power of that macro by editing it in the developer environment, shortcut is alt+f11. By looking at the code generated by macros is also a simple way to learn.
You can for example rename a worksheet, and reuse bits of that macro in your own routine then wrap it in a for each worksheet in thisworkbook type loop and add one on to the worksheet name variable to consecutively number and rename every sheet. It's a poor example but you get the idea.
It's also very well explained on the net, fairly forgiving with loose variable types (a pain and a blessing), and you can add in other library reference functions as you get more advanced. Every place I've worked I've used VBA. It doesn't have to do anything at all in a workbook, you can use the Windows filesystem objects to touch files.
Downside is if you need managed code. Then it's the devil incarnate as it's spread throughout hundreds of secreted docs. You could write a VBA app to gather it all up though
---edit---
If that doesn't float your boat then you could always look at installing a LAMP/WAMP stack, this is a web server install with php and mysql. It's a great way of learning how to setup and configure a web server and the apps and databases that run on them. It's also free, as in open source. ____________________
'81 CG125, '97 FZS600 : '99 CBR600F4, '09 KTM RC8
Last edited by Hong Kong Phooey on 20:40 - 04 Nov 2018; edited 1 time in total |
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Hong Kong Phooey |
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Hong Kong Phooey World Chat Champion
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talkToTheHat |
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talkToTheHat World Chat Champion
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Lord Percy |
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Lord Percy World Chat Champion
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Posted: 03:56 - 05 Nov 2018 Post subject: |
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M.C wrote: |
Bit of a hijack here but what would you recommend for a total noob starting out? I did an introductory Codeacademy course recently, and learnt about the gender pay gap, a lack of diversity within the range of makeup on sale, and the Bechdel test... not a lot of coding though
I was thinking python as I have a Raspberry Pi although would it be better going back to the roots of coding (basic etc.)? I've downloaded the Spectrum coding manual (its like 200 pages ). Sorry again for the hijack just wanted to ask while the experts are in the room. |
Going to have to go against the words of Mr Hong Kong Phoeey here.
VBA is frankly a little bit of a dinosaur now, I've not heard of it being used at all for anything any more, other than Excel spreadsheet stuff. Of all the things I think I should learn in order to broaden my career prospects, VBA isn't a consideration at all.
Here's what I would recommend.
1. Sign up to Code Academy. And learn Java first (not Javascript, SQL, Python, R or whatever). I can't stress this enough. Learning Java will teach you good habits and give you a much better understanding of how to program properly. The other languages are too niche, too industry-specific, or are just crap. If CodeAcademy isn't enough for you, try learning C# here instead. C# is almost exactly the same as Java, but a little bit better technically. I learned C# first and it's what got me my first programming job.
2. "Why shouldn't I learn Javascript? It's the most popular and widely used!" you may ask. In industry Javascript is seen as a massive zit on the programming world. It just happens to have become the language of web browsers, meaning its global footprint is huge. That doesn't make it good though. The Javascript language was created in 10 days. It's terrible. Do not learn Javascript first. Sure, learn it at some point because it's essential for making websites. Just don't learn it first.
3. Join Quora and follow the programming topics on there. The advice is frankly brilliant. Loads of common sense attitudes that people tend to overlook. For example, in newbie programmers there's a belief that algorithm knowledge or how many lines of code you type in a session are measures of your ability. In reality, the most important factor is whether you can make stuff that works. It's more like being a car mechanic than a rocket scientist, you just need to put the right bits together. The folk on Quora are full of great common sense advice like that.
Finally, have a look at the 2018 Stack Overflow developer survey . Loads of interesting stats in there. But try to keep in mind that it's heavily skewed by industry, society and academia (where people are taught easy/'accessible' languages instead of robust ones), rather than technical standards.
Quote: | I've downloaded the Spectrum coding manual (its like 200 pages ) |
I used C# 5.0 and the .Net Framework. |
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Old Thread Alert!
The last post was made 5 years, 166 days ago. Instead of replying here, would creating a new thread be more useful? |
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