Being a video game programmer is a labor of love. You will work long and hard, programming, testing and debugging trying to mert deadlines. When things don't work, it's stressful. When deadlines loom, it's stressful. If the game isn't fun, or an animation isn't slick, it's stressful.

The entire thing is stressful, more so than your normal peogramming job.

you were born at the wrong time to go to college

This is complete utter horse shit.

I can easily tell when someone has just learned programming on their own, vs someone who has taken CS. The academic stuff is very important to know and separate the programmer from the software developer. One of those jobs is grossly overpopulated right now due to all these shitty Learn How To Program in 24 Hours classes. One of those jobs easily earns 80k+.

college route and supplementing it with stuff from home aswell

This is the PERFECT combination for getting a job and being very good at that job. Go for it OP.

I used to work in a Bioinformatics lab. Depends on what you want to do. We used R, Matlab, Perl, ImageJ, you name it. We also worked on DNA sequencing and similar fields of study. If that's what you are interested in, let me know and I can PM you some more specifics.

Does the kernel have unit tests or any other type of tests that could easily spot these types of bugs?

The licenses were already yearly. It's not that much of a difference since most companies will purchases yearly subscriptions anyway. Also, it's not ransomware. Your code won't magically disappear or get encrypted or anything.

$20/mo is pretty steep, although I only use PHPStorm, so I guess $8 a month wouldn't be THAT terrible.

You can always look at their Github repo for more barebones information :)

Here's some questions we asked:

Given two sets (as arrays), write a function that takes both as inputs and returns an array of the union of the arrays.

Given two sets, write a function that takes both as inputs and returns and array of the intersection of the arrays. Order doesn't matter.

Given stubs of a class (our example is a class that handles browser functionality, which has method stubs like back(), forward(), etc), what tests could you provide to test core and edge case functionality. No code is expected to be written in this exercise.

Hmm I don't remember a pop up. But yeah, I wish they at least had a video or something that I could watch before giving them my email.

Are you making a RESTful API call on the server, or on the client? If it's the server, most of the time, you can just use cURL. See this Stackoverflow answer as well.

I think the Google idea of having a day where someone can work on anything is a good way to keep creativity up. If someone has had an idea during the week, they get the chance to work on a prototype of it. If someone just needs a break from the project they are working on, they can work on something else; which helps give them different experiences, thoughts, etc, which also helps boost creativity.

Just let your devs do something different. Go somewhere new as a team, have them read something unrelated to work, get them to experience new ideas.

C# is a language everyone hates until they try it. I think it's a great language that just feels right.

You can link to lines you know: Lines 588 to 592

Any community will get its power users that basically bring attention to topics by simply posting in them. I mean look at this guy: http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/Jon-Skeet

Jon Skeet can be considered a power user at SO. He will post an answer and bring with him tons of upvotes to the question, his answer, and other answers just by being there. So, yeah, it seems almost natural for the top 20% to control content.

I love reading about this optimization. It's cool to look back and see all of the tricks people used to get their games/apps/software to run fast back when processors were much slower and memory was limited.

Thanks for the insight! Yeah, I feel like both could work just fine which is really the hang up here. When my friend and I discuss it, we're probably going to base our decision on who will be the person who will put most of their work towards the web app and what language they are most comfortable with.

I have actually deployed some Java apps before, and the amount of resources can really vary. I have had Java apps completely stop responding because there was a memory leak. At least with PHP, it's much much harder to cause memory leaks.

Also check out the BWAPI repo! It's basically what every SC AI runs on!

They don't even hazard a guess at what went wrong, they just throw their hands in the air.

I've had that happen to me as well. We had a student worker that would just point to the screen when it didn't work and look at me. I was like, "Yeah, that's an error. What do you want me to do about it?" It was really baffling.

and sometimes the only solution is to kill the code and start fresh

I try to get this point across at my work, we can get things done quick and dirty now and have to completely rewrite it later. Or I can spend a little extra time planning and writing maintainable code and we can use that time in the future to add a new feature.

I don't think students coming out of school understand how much code is just such utter garbage that it's easier to just start over and throw out the old code.

It's novelty is wearing off, and people are finding out that it isn't the magic bullet they thought it was. You should not be using NodeJS for simple CMS websites (I have literally seen people waste 4 months making a simple blog in NodeJS instead of just using something like WordPress or Laravel), but Node does have it's place. It's nice for simple APIs and handling websockets.

StackOverflow uses the .NET stack and C# is a very nice language to use (it is by-far my favorite language even though I don't get to use it at my job). The Windows, IIS, and ASP.NET stack feels weird and a little dirty at first, but you get used to it.

LINQ is also pretty fun (although I'm not sure about the latest developments in C#, do people still use LINQ?)

Damn, this site really is better.

One more barrier I feel like really new people often have: the inability to know how to look something up.

When they get an error compiling some code, they have no idea how to Google for an answer to that problem. Or when their syntax is incorrect and the JavaScript terminal just throws a scary error, they have no idea what to look for.