Ask HN: Young developer looking for some guidance

10 points by duketon 11 years ago | 14 comments

I'm currently in my first year of a two year masters degree in software engineering. I'm comfortable with the coursework and am really enjoying it.

Where I feel lost is in my spare time. I have a bookmarks folder with about 200 links to articles, resources, videos, etc. I'm incredibly overwhelmed with the amount of 'stuff' out there; languages, frameworks, tools, and so on. I feel a bit lost every time I sit down at my laptop and try to do something productive.

My short-term goal is to secure an internship/junior position in Europe (Poland) over my next summer break (I live in Aus).

I'm looking for some ideas on what to do in my spare time to make myself the most competitive for an entry-level position.

With only a few months of experience I haven't really been exposed to enough different areas of development to say I want to work in X, Y or Z.

I'm suffering from the fact that pretty much everything interests me. Web dev, data analysis, machine learning, databases, and so on. I think that for me I need someone to pigeon-hole me into an area so that I can self-study in depth and get an internship in this area.

Would some more experienced developers offer some advice? Where did you start? Where would you have liked to start? What are some good ways to kick-off a successful development career?

I hope this wasn't too much of a ramble. Cheers

valarauca1 11 years ago |

Algorithms.

Yes boring old pure data and programming algorithms. This skill is more useful then learning a dozen frameworks. In interviews you'll have people asking you dozens of questions that will all boil down to, "Do you know algorithms?" And not to mention that toolset is applicable over nearly every development domain. You'll very very rarely find software teams who will scoff at somebody who knows their algorithms. You'll rarely find times in your developer life time where you'll think, "Jeeze I wish I didn't know how trees, bloom filters, hash based indexing, etc. works this has been such a determent to my career!"

Most fields of development end up needing to use algorithms at some time or another. How does your data analysis work, How is machine learning done? What are databases doing to make 10,000 queries per second? What are the pros and cons? Are you entering data in inefficient ways to slow this down? Are you or the tool the problem?

When you learn algorithms you can answer these questions. Then apply those answers to your job! Impress your friends and enemies! Demonstrate counting sort running circles around their quick sort implementations because your data is highly specialized.

Yes it isn't sexy. Its not a buzz word. Its horn rim glasses, dnd nerd boring stuff. But at the same time it isn't. Rock-stars learn music theory one way or another, how are you gonna audition for the rolling stones if you don't know what an G cord is?

duketon 11 years ago | |

Thank you for your response.

This is something that I really have been trying to cover in my spare time. Unfortunately (in this regard) my degree is very 'industry-focused' and hence discards the more 'theoretically inclined' units. Something which I disagree with personally, however that's a discussion for a different time and place.

I'm currently undertaking Intro to Algs from MIT (6.006). With my given course load this is about as much as I can commit to this area at the moment. I however feel like I need to be doing more in this area. What would you recommend? I feel like getting results on Topcoder/et.al would provide a nice tangible learning experience. Would you agree with this or recommend some other activity/resource?

Cheers again.

mattm 11 years ago | |

Any recommended books or resources? I'm out of university but feel I need to brush up on algorithms.

qohen 11 years ago | | |

For anyone looking for an easier on-ramp for algorithms -- i.e. not a textbook -- I got an email last night from Manning about a book-in-progress of theirs called "Grokking Algorithms" [1], which looks to be pretty user-friendly (i.e. it's conversational, has pictures, etc.). There's a free sample chapter on the book's page if you want to see the style.

Sadly, the book was 50%-off yesterday as their daily deal, but if you sign up with Manning, there will likely be other sale categories that'll include the book (e.g a 50%-off sale on all books-in-progress or whatever). Given that only the first 2 chapters are available at the moment, you might be able to wait for another sale to come round.

[1] http://www.manning.com/bhargava/

valarauca1 11 years ago | | |

The Art of Computer Programming is amazing. Its honestly one of the most difficult and impenetrable books you'll read, and that's being generous. That being said it is amazing. If you enjoy math and programming (and have post calculus mathematics skills) you can stumble your way though it mostly, it will be challenging.

But what you will learn even skipping parts, getting frustrated, coming back, leaving again. Is a lot. Knuth crams a lot of knowledge into, well a lot of pages.

Complete disclosure I have honestly haven't completely cover to covered every single volume. I skip around a lot.

radnam 11 years ago | | |

You should also try going through MIT's online course on algorithms based on CLR: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

ithinkso 11 years ago | | |

Cormen's Introduction to Algorithms. It is almost biblical book about algorithms. And solve online judge type of tasks. A lot.

mkremer90 11 years ago |

Instead of thinking about the area of study (web dev, data, etc), how about you look at the openings in Poland to see which companies are hiring, and for what languages. Then pick a few of those companies that you think are cool, and concentrate on the technologies that they are using. That way instead of shooting in the dark, your aspiring to fulfill a need in your community.

hcarvalhoalves 11 years ago | |

Spot on.

chris_va 11 years ago |

Experience is significantly more valuable than reading 200 articles (and as a result, I am inclined to view CS grad school as a waste for many people).

Build stuff. It doesn't really matter what it is, there is enough overlap between all of the disciplines to compensate.

Having said that, and as was mentioned already, Algorithms is probably the one topic that truly differentiates people.

doobiaus 11 years ago |

Programming is the 'easy' part. To be employable learn the rest of the process, which is typically language agnostic: Dev Processes & workflow (scrum), DVCS (git), TDD, CI/CD (Travis/Jenkins/TeamCity), devops (puppet). etc

They're the things, regardless of language or project you will need, but which are rarely taught properly.

duketon 11 years ago | |

This is good to hear. I'm currently attending a program through a software consultancy here in my city in which we create a project in teams of devs/BA's using Agile/Scrum, a heavy git focus, continuous integration, and testing frameworks. I'm learning heaps (things we don't really cover at uni) and hope it will help in internships/junior positions.

qzervaas 11 years ago |

You need have a specific target, otherwise you're just shooting in the dark and you'll get bored easily.

But if you say, "I want to make a web site that does ABC", or "I want to make an app that does XYZ", you won't just be - as mkremer90 said - shooting in the dark at a whole bunch of different technologies