You plan your code, you're better than 90% of other CS students out there. Stop worrying :)

I'm drowning in a sausage fest of male programmers over here, the problem is just finding one that's GOOD. God, some of the code some of these dudes write. Scrubs, all of them.

Similar to tic-tac-toe, writing Blackjack is also a good one. You can make it as simple or complex as you like: start off with just text-based and then create a UI for it.

Jesus why do identity politics weasel its way into programming? You would think it would be the one thing free from it because computers are the farthest things from humans, but somehow being otherkin or some shit is perfectly valid next to your actual job title.

Why can't they just shut up and code like the rest of us? Any person who's obsessed with titles is not the type of person you want working in your company anyways.

I disagree, I teach weekend coding workshops for middle school girls and you'd be surprised how fast kids pick up coding principles when it's wrapped up the correct way. The code has to serve a greater purpose than just "oh write some commands that add 2 and 3 together" to get kids interested. Lego Mindstorm robots are an excellent introduction to programming for middle to high school kids, or working on a coding project with an experienced mentor that ultimately has a real world effect like programming a roomba. There's also Spheros (super awesome) that you can program apps to control them with and MIT AppInventor for kids to learn to make their own apps. The cool way to get into programming when I was growing up was Neopets and Myspace HTML/CSS which, even though it isn't a "programming language", is a great introduction to code and syntax. I still think very basic web dev is a great intro to programming because written code has a visual representation and kids love making personalized things about their interests and personality.

You shouldn't teach kids programming by just handing them C++ or Python and expecting them to be interested. You need to show them the applications of code and the power that programming has to do cool things.

I liked C much more after I taught myself how to use GDB. I ate shit in my introductory C class because they wanted us to just pump out projects without actually teaching us how to use the language with finesse. It wasn't until I took Systems (which had a huge emphasis on assembly and the binary bomb) that I learned to love the simplicity of C.

Do we have a gamedev verse yet? I do a lot of Javascript game dev and tend to have plenty of questions.

Outside of that I have a lot of experience with C++ and Java, hopefully I can contribute some :)