A little background: Through my teens in the 90’s I did a lot of the things you may expect. I was a script kiddie on mIRC, made a tank game in Unreal Engine, and did some Quake modding. From 2002-2004 I landed a job doing Java web dev, SQL, and overall database administration because my father’s friend needed someone that could do that. I was ok at the job, but not great. Being young, my hobby that turned into a 9-5 made me want to stab my eyes out and I quit.
With that said, I can understand a lot of what’s going on, but it doesn’t “click” anymore. I spent 20 years as a career machinist, but I physically can’t do that anymore. Here’s the rub - my twin brother is a brittle diabetic and can’t work (lots of other stuff going on as well), and our mother is getting old (father passed this year). The only reasonable way forward that I can see in order to be able to support my brother is trying to get back into development.
When I stopped, subversion was what we used. I’m trying to understand Git, but it’s a giant conceptual leap. I guess, what I’d like to hear from you all is a way to jump back in as quickly as possible in such a way that it may be a career.
Thanks
For getting a grip in current web development, I would recommend fullstackopen.com - it’s a free online course by the University of Helsinki and starts from basically zero, and gives you a lot of insights into web dev.
It may take some time, but it’s really worth it and an overall great course.
This is great. I’m going to try it out.
FSO is good, but it does assume some JS knowledge to start. I would argue that App Academy’s is more comprehensive (over 200hrs of material).
Or The Odin Project if you don’t want to cover Python in the curriculum and just stick to JavaScript.
https://www.theodinproject.com/
(The Odin Project also has an option for Ruby along with JavaScript)
When I stopped, subversion was what we used. I’m trying to understand Git, but it’s a giant conceptual leap.
It’s probably not ‘that much of a leap’ as you imagine. If you’re looking at Git tutorials, they’re usually covering all kinda complex scenarios of how to ‘properly use Git’. But a lot of people barely care about ‘properly using Git’ and they just kinda use it as a substitute for SVN… You create branches, you merge them back and forth, and that’s about it.
Like if you want to contribute to an open source project, all you have to do is create a fork (your own branch in SVN terms) - commit some stuff to it, and create a pull request (request to have your changes merged) back to the original branch.
git pullis justsvn update- getting someone elses commitsNot saying there aren’t more complex features in git, or that learning git properly isn’t worth it, just saying, I don’t think you have to see it as a ‘giant conceptual leap’ that’s preventing you from jumping back into programming. Easiest approach just to get started would be probably to just download a GUI like Sourcetree or Fork, and you just kinda pretend you’re still using SVN - approach wise
Someone will probably shoot me down for this but I actually find ChatGPT good for explaining concepts to me. Especially when I just want a high level understanding of a concept as I try to understand another one without getting too bogged down. A lot of Google results go into way too much detail.
It’s also great for solving issues when you’re stuck. Not because of its superior reasoning skills but it can solve beginner issues and write you a list of things to try when it doesn’t know the answer right away. It’s like a rubber duck that will talk back.
A few months back I would have said the same. Lately, however, ChatGPT very often returned very incorrect information on very basic topics. Each wrong answer erodes my trust a little bit more. Lately to a point where I consider googling first instead of asking ChatGPT
It’s great for explaining entry level information on a wide variety of topics. More advanced / obscure topics are more prone to hallucinations. I used it to learn React and it was a great introduction.
I’m doing this now as I learn Unity and come back to C# after a couple decades away. It’s great for helping with syntax and reminding you of libraries, also with debugging steps as you mention. I haven’t had it full on hallucinate, but it has given me suggestions that fail to do the thing I specifically asked it for. I also went down a couple rabbit holes following its suggestions to later realize there was a much simpler answer that it didn’t tell me about. All in all, I’d still highly recommend it for my situation and OPs. If you’re able to follow the logic and point out the flaws, it’s a hell of a lot faster than googling or following tutorials.
Just remember: imposter syndrome is real. Everything you learn exposes you to ten things you don’t yet know. Successful devs are comfortable with this reality - the job is one of constant learning. Best of luck!
You said it. I spent the first six months at a FAANG convinced that everyone could look at me and instantly tell that I didn’t belong there. Glad I was able to flip my thinking on that one.
First of all, you can totally do it! The field is massive, but also full of very bad programmers, and seeing how you were able to write a coherent text of three paragraphs, that already puts you ahead of the curve. Determination and perseverance is key.
I would suggest to play to your strengths. Java is still Java. Most of the progress since the 1990s was in the libraries and tooling, which only recently have become passable. The language itself also evolved somewhat, but there’s nothing that you won’t pick up in a couple of days of working with it.
Start with [1], work through all the boxes that are unfamiliar to you, practice a little on a pet project, or an open source project, and you’ll land a job in no time.
Also, if you remember enjoying hacking, maybe pick that up again? There’s a massive shortage of security engineers at all times.
Best of luck to you!
I’m trying to understand Git, but it’s a giant conceptual leap.
Git is not that different from svn (I mean, the biggest hurdle is going from a shared folder to any version control system)… I’d say the main difference is that branches live in a different namespace than files (ie. you don’t have trunk/src/whatever but just src/whatever in the main branch). On top of that there’s that commit and push are two different things (and the same with fetch and checkout) and that merges are way easier than in svn (where you had to merge stuff manually).
If you create a repo locally and clone it twice in two different directories, you can easily simulate what would happen when you and a coworker collaborate via a centralized repo (say, github) - do a few experiments and you’ll see it’s not as complicated as it seems (I’d recommend using the CLI instead of some GUI client: it’s way easier to figure things out without the overhead of learning to differentiate between git concepts and how the GUI tries to help).
To piggyback, the true main difference is svn stores commits as snapshots and git commits are deltas from previous. This is why git is depicted as a tree since it’s inherently a node-based structure.
A git commit is a snapshot. The node-based tree structure is an artifact of recording pointers to other snapshots and labeling snapshots with a branch name.
You are correct. Technically a snapshot, but unmodified files are not duplicated from the previous. Imho that is one of the key things to understand about how git works ( and why rebasing and branch manipulation works so well)
Just use a good GUI tool for git and Google how to do stuff with command line when needed, you’ll eventually pick it up. Chatgpt and it’s ilk can also be helpful with figuring out things when Google fails.
My personal recommendation:
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Pick up Python, it’s easy to learn and highly productive. If you also learn fastAPI, you can benefit from highly validated, declarative models to build REST APIs in the backend, well fast. It will yield quick results, you won’t become demotivated and you can pick up a paid project soon.
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Pick up Rust. It’s “in” right now and I get requests from marketing people that know nothing about programming, asking if their project could be implemented in Rust
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Go with memorizing the shell commands first, try to understand git later. Get productive, try to get where you were with e. g. svn or cvs. If you are comfortable, look at something in depth if you have a problem that you can’t solve with the knowledge you have.
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Fuck Java, seriously.
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You have commercial interests, so it is probably wise to look into becoming a fullstack dev to maximize the kind of projects you can do. Look into React, vue.js, svelte. React is probably still the most widely used framework, you’ll quickly do a project with vue.js and svelte is a super interesting look into things to come.
Fuck Java, seriously
Toxic…
You can find a lot of good work doing Java.
I was going to say this. I hate Java as much as the next dev, but everything runs on Java. If it’s web -> Spring, DevOps -> Jenkins, Event Streams -> Kafka, Big Data -> Spark, Logging & SRE -> Flink. All of these are built on JVM based languages. I am fortunate enough to program Rust daily at my job, but my options for getting another Rust job are severely limited. Everybody always wants Java or Go. They always ask for C++ , but I’m convinced that day 1 they would have you switch to Java.
Java have had very bad press lately (since the log4j fiasco I guess? maybe since before).
IDK why people blame Java for any issues with any library/project written in it… it’s as dumb as blaming C/C++ for all the windows fuckups, and nobody blames php for the various cpanel vulnerabilities or python for all the shit people write in it.
Side note: please don’t abuse the word “toxic” until it becomes absolutely meaningless. Let’s keep that to a more fitting context, having a
I was expressing an obviously personal opinion about the language itself, which is objectively a dull, barren wasteland that sucks out your soul while you walk it. That is precisely the reason why it’s so widespread and loved by business entities and managers - there is no excitement, no surprises, just an everlasting monotony of keys clicking produced by a horde of clones wearing button-down shirts while sitting in absolute identical cubicles, creating yet another instance of FactoryProducer. It’s very easy to plan and schedule for, while at the same time being unnecessarily verbose and mildly unproductive (compared to other languages).
Look, the JVM is fine, just pick another language. There is plenty of work doing Kotlin. But yes, if you’re doing this only for the money, go ahead. I’ve always been unable to separate my job fromy personal life and my other interests, I couldn’t imagine being cursed by Java again.
If you can sit somewhere for 8 to 10 hours each day, doing something that isn’t fun and separate yourself from it, not going insane, all the power to you. I also get that not everyone has the luxury of picking their favorite toy and making it their job, but I firmly believe there are options that are not Java.
Now, if you’re one of the rare types that actually enjoys Java, meet me in the closest Denny’s parking lot, I need your cranial measurements.
Please note: this post contains hyperbole and humor. I don’t hate any of you, I just hate Java
“Toxic” was the correct word choice, thanks.
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One of the best tutorials on really “grokking”
gitconcepts, and it’s online and interactive: https://learngitbranching.js.orgFor programming, start with buildings things for yourself. Be practical, start small, and iterate, regardless if you consider the previous iteration was a success or failure. I’ve heard good things about https://automatetheboringstuff.com/ (in Python) in this regard.
Best advice I have:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPO4fm4nxc
Keep at it. Do actual projects. Actually use the tools for a while. It will eventually make sense.
I want you to understand how surreal this particular link is for me. Video edits are my hobby, and I’ve just recently started yet another play-through of Morrowind. I get the whole “do actual projects” thing and that’s valid, but I’ve no clue where to start here. Should I finally learn C#? Is Rust the only way forward? Should I just try to catch back up on Java? I guess what I’m asking here is should I just try to find a FLOSS/OSS project and try to contribute or think of something new?
You can either decide by what is currently in demand in the industry and then pick a project that you can exercise that language with or you can think of a project you’d like to do and then go by what the best language is for a given project.
In the end, languages are just like different wrenches. First you have to learn how to use a wrench, size or features don’t matter much at this point (unless you already know that you want to become an expert with one particular wrench).
I think starting a new project is way easier than contributing to an existing one.
All the cool kids right now are mostly on JavaScript/type script. It’s probably a good place to get started since you’ll need it on the front end.
I’m guessing most work on the U.S. side is react. You can probably pick up a bit of node/react native as you go for the backend and for native dev.
Java is the new COBOL. Big corps luuuuuuuuurve it. It’s not what I would expect a single dev to use. C# is similar but smaller, if you forget unity game dev. And you should forget unity game dev.
Rust is basically a less bad C. If you do things you used to do in C, learn rust. If not, don’t.
Python is also still a thing. If you like it you can probably use it for most things, but if not there are other options.
If you do decide to go the web route, I recommend Build Responsive Real-World Websites with HTML and CSS and The Complete JavaScript Course 2024: From Zero to Expert! as a good starting point. Being Udemy, you don’t have to pay full price. If they don’t have a sale on now, they will fairly soon. The courses are worth full price though!
My heart belongs to Vue.js
I like Vue better than react tbh.
My latest project is alpine.js. It’s not bad, it stays out of the way.
That said, I don’t do front end often enough to keep up.
Mixing js and template like react does with jsx has always rubbed me wrong. I like how Vue separates everything.
{!found && <p>Not Found</p>}😕<p v-if=“!found”>Not Found</p>🙂Yes!
But I’ve learned that there are A LOT of people that are incredibly pritective of react, so I generally don’t wade out into that particular debate.
I think for me it is because my background is in the web first, as opposed to having gone to school for general computer science and then entered web apps second. The idea of returning blocks of HTML with JSX makes more sense to them.
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I’m trying to understand Git, but it’s a giant conceptual leap.
To start with, start with just using git locally. Don’t worry about GitHub or similar. Then git and SVN will work very similarly. The main difference is that you need to
git addfiles with changes inside before you commit them.Once you’re comfortable with using it by yourself, then I suggest running something like
forgejolocally to be your own code server. Then you can play and learn how the two parts work together.Generally, you need to give yourself a little time. You need to do the work. Be efficient…sure, but don’t try to force it to be quicker than the time you need to learn.
As for git, many basic concepts (e.g. staging area) clicked for me after reading some articles that Atlassian (people behind BitBucket) wrote. Other than that, I’d recommend adamj.eu 's book “Git DX” which is on gumroad. Haven’t read it, tho. But I read his Django DX and like 90% of it was stuff I had to learn on my own, and thought: oh, how come I didn’t find this book earlier…
Did you use Spring back then? It would be a useful thing to learn. Might as well see if you like to do frontend things such as React / Vue
Yeah Spring wasn’t 1.0 until 2004. We had XML files upon XML files just to describe one single Java “Bean”. I did java programming from 2001-2002 and the again from 2011-today. Things dramatically changed (framework-wise) in that short decade I was away from it.
I would agree, Spring Boot and Spring are very useful to learn. React, despite having its origins in Facebook and still with Meta’s hands on it, is a good web framework especially if you use it with Typescript.
No, we didn’t use that. I did both front end and back end in a sense. I developed the web UI for the customers and managed the PHP and SQL back end since it was purely a web interface. Yeah, yeah, I know that’s not true back end but that’s where we were at that point.
Get a book on Spring Boot and jump back inro Java web development.
With git, you don’t need to master it, just find some subversion to git howto and start using it. It’s half a page of text. Once you learn the basics you can learn more as you go. There are many otherwise competent programmers who don’t know git too well, I know because I support them from time to time.
I guess, what I’d like to hear from you all is a way to jump back in as quickly as possible in such a way that it may be a career.
You might check job listings in your region/country to figure out what languages and technology stacks are in high demand, as where you are seems to matter a lot.
