very.

As for open source projects, contributions are always welcome, but even just learning about a source code management tool like git will put you bounds ahead of many of your peers. Having a handle on the lower end of things with an understanding of C, and an understanding of OOP concepts through java, gives you a strong base to go out into the work world.

Your university (or college, whatever) probably has some sort of internship/co-op program, or hosts a job fair every semester. Go to your university's career center. Build a resume. Inquire about places that might want to hire college CS students for summer full time work.

Alternatively, many universities offer programs that allow students to work full time during the semester as well as part of a school sanctioned internship program while maintaining full time student status, which rocks if you're in the US and still on your parents' health insurance/stuff like that.

The best way to get your feet wet is getting experience in the industry you aspire to work in.

If your university somehow doesn't have a career center, then go find a resume building service/workshop (a free one, paid ones are a ripoff) and craft a resume. It might seem trivial and empty but it is a document showcasing your current skillset.

Then, with resume in hand, go to your school's career fair (having researched companies you think you might want to work for) and visit the booths of some companies. talk to them, give them your resume, tell them you're interested in getting some real experience and you like the company's product line/the job description/whatever relevant work thing that caught your eye.

Then go in for interviews with whoever wants to interview, take the job offer you like the most ,or the first one you get, whatever, it's a 3-6 month internship, its not a huge deal if you have reservations about whether the place is a perfect fit. and you will get valuable experience regardless of the position.

Just remember that even though this process is daunting and you might feel like a grain of sand at the beach when it comes to applicants, what it comes down to is how well you can demonstrate an ability to learn/apply concepts. employeers seeking to fill an internship position will understand if you arent an expert at what they do, as long as you can learn the basics quick enough to get basic work done. and if you know C/java, you already have a pretty decent understanding of the syntaxes and basic concepts of most popular industry languages not relating to webdev.

I'm guessing you're much more than a freshman if you've taken assembly and an OOP course relating to java. the farther along in your education you are, the more eager employers will be to give you an internship in the hopes you will enjoy your time working there and reapply for a full time position upon completion of your undergrad. You have just as much to offer them as they have to offer you (another reason to ignore the feeling of being a grain of sand at the beach).

Good luck and always ask questions!

Can Confirm. Little pressure, fun time.

I don't know what you mean by "truly decentralized."

The standard git workflow is centralized (see github) but the underlying models git use has no notion of which remotes take precedence. This all comes from outside sources like the user or the central service like github.

check out the forking workflow.

The idea for a need of a central repo server is unnecessary. at the end of the day to push to a repo, one needs to trust the remote, and the remote needs to trust the submitter at some point along the line.

I have no idea what the education system is like in NZ, but if its anything like the US there is no such thing as programming in school curriculum until maybe senior year of high school, freshman year college in a CS program.

Try to sign up for any decent programming course in high school. In the US they have "AP classes" which are pretty well accepted courses which are classes high schoolers can take in preparation for an end of year exam which some colleges will use to apply credit for certain courses. For example in the US if I took an AP English class and scored a 5 on it I could go to a lot of colleges with that info and receive credit towards my degree for an english class if I enrolled there.

If your high school has an option to take something similar, try to take an AP computer science class. Or look into if your high school has "dual enrollment" options with a local college. My high school had an agreement with a local college that I could take courses at the college on the high school's dime and receive both high school credit and college credit for the course. I ended up going to that same college that i took dual enrollment courses from so that worked out great.

If you come out of high school with CS related course already on a college transcript, that looks great even if the college you choose to attend doesn't accept it as transfer credits.

As for what to do for work, I'm from the US so I can't speak to how it works in NZ but it's probably not too far off: Usually colleges have job fairs. go to the college fair with a resume, wear a shirt and tie and look professional, show them a CV/resume/whatever you have. Go to your high school/local college's career center, ask them to help you make a resume, tell them your situation and that you want to do programming work. I don't know how they'd react but if they're not douches they'll help you out to give you tips on how to write your resume well and even edit it with you in person.

This is assuming you have at least a page worth of content that you can fill out into a nice looking document.

Once you get to college start going to career fairs, go to literally all the places offering programming internships and talk to every rep. tell them about yourself, as long as you don't lie to them they won't be douches. Maybe they'll be terse and say they're looking for a more experience person but that's just how it goes for an inexperienced high school grad, it's nothing personal to your character. Companies like to pick up college seniors so they can groom them for full time positions so the closer you are to graduating the more a company will try to snag you, on top of having more experience from classes in college. The hardest step is getting your foot in the door as an inexperienced freshman/sophomore, but if you talk to as many people as possible and express enthusiasm, and show them you have some experience with their set of tools so they don't literally have to teach you how to program, you have a good shot at getting a job.

It's my understanding that if you're using the SSH protocol to access a git repo, the whole connection will be secure and commits can be completely anonymous. Your face is an email address at most, which can be protected with gpg or other pgp implementations. I don't use any other tool but a quick google for "Mercurial ssh" indicates mercurial has similar support.

The technology certainly exists to be secure with modern version control tools. The trouble is if the government is at war with the internet, there is more trouble than just ensuring anonymous access. The internet itself is nowhere near decentralized in its present form and the people will have more problems than decentralized anonymous development if the government gets nasty and starts say chasing down anyone that uses "encryption not on the approved list."

I'm curious what you mean by git not seeming resistant to government pressure. Has something happened in the past where developers of git caved to government whim?

This is an article listing a bunch of places to look for standard library functionality one might not expect from a language but are very useful when the situation calls for it, and a bunch of nice code snippets which illustrate some of the powerful things D can do.

I've been looking into becoming more familiar with D in my free time and the language continues to surprise me. It certainly isn't a suitable beginner language, but coming from C/C++ or Java, D has a ton of refreshing characteristics and I think so far it does a good job of living up to its design goals

giving inconsolata a run for its money!

so when do we change GNU/Linux to systemd/Linux?

Glad you like it!

I was googling for how to time some slightly different implementations of an algorithm in python and I found this guide. Definitely useful if you ever have a need for more serious performance metrics in Python.

I didn't know you could go deeper! Good stuff.

if you want to search voat in the future try using the site functionality of your favorite search engine. (this is what I always did in reddit because reddit's search was and probably still is shit)

For example on google:

site:voat.co <search term>

I guess people love their vimscripts... and their emacs configs...

I g uess it kind of makes sense though. every linux guy I know and their brother put the majority of their dotfiles in a github repo at some point.

I'm probably a bit ignorant to the design vision of Go but I thought part of their philosophy was to avoid dynamic linking... did they go back on that decision or is there another design rationale that supercedes the original stance on dynamic linking?

I always feel like I have a decent grasp of C.

Then I see presentations like "The Darker Corners of C" and you realize that there's a lot of language quirks that are avoided for best practices but should probably be understood too.

Then you see the winning submissions to previous iterations of this contest and just wow...

Haskell is for plebians. Both Haskell and C++ are designed by committee. Haskell and C++ now have lambdas, and lambda's look like triangles, therefore illuminati.

The only way to get anything done is in an Arch Linux or Gentoo environment using C, implementing all your data structures by hand and using triple indirection :)

Might try asking at /v/privacy

I forgot to answer your other question regarding the github "drama" type content.

I'll start with saying that I find the ability of publicly hosted FOSS projects to stay on topic and not degrade to political quibbling impressive and admirable. It isn't unreasonable to expect that a programming forum should exclude politically charged pieces from either side of a controversy and focus on technology. It's almost guaranteed that any discussion about politics regarding things like the github posts degrade the quality of a "programming" sub because a post like that will inevitably be 98% circlejerking against SJWs and 1% complaining that the sub has gone to shit. I think the remaining 1% is worth it: discussion about the invasion of political correctness not just in the workplace (where it can be a good thing) but in online communities where it has no place, and ways to mitigate the effect that SJW censorship types can have on programming communities, whether it be switching hosting platforms or taking some sort of activist role (the organization of which would definitely be off topic and should be required to move to a different sub than this).

There are two main reasons why I disagree with starting an entirely new "programming news" subverse to segregate politically charged content. The first being that even though news like github's CoC + related recent events aren't 100% on the topic of programming, I think they are stretchably enough to permit, as long as they are upvoted by the community. The second reason being that suggesting a certain type of post be segregated into a more specific sub is often a thinly veiled way for a mod to say "I'm tired of seeing this content on my sub so I am going to take a hand in segregating it instead of letting votes decide." Obviously that's not the sole intent here, @Craftkorb might be tired of political posts but he has been commendably patient with posters posting things that he reasonably views as off topic to the sub.

But forcing posters to segregate themselves to a smaller more specific sub is often the death of any poster's hope for visibility. look at /v/githubinaction. The posts on /v/programming concerning github are some of the most upvoted in the sub's history! That sub should be booming right now! Github has gone off the deep end, throwing out their stance on meritocracy, adopting a blatantly racist left wing SJW code of conduct which they intend to force all their service's users to comply with which amounts to thought policing more than it does making the community be friendly to one another, and they forced a repo to remove the word "retard" when you can search github for objectively more offensive terms and get pages of search results. NSFW example Some topics just aren't broad enough to give users a want to subscribe. They just want to occasionally discuss (and circlejerk). The solution, I think, is to let the posts run their course in popularity (even if it happens over months) because these things do rise and fall in popularity. I think the best way to control topics like SJW drama in software communities is to contain it to a megathread because that way, the posts are still here and its still the same community that wants to have their circlejerk/anti SJW discussion, and posters get almost the same visibility as if the topic is popular enough at the time then the megathread will be huge. I think its part of our job as mods to keep our ears to the ground and know when to pull the trigger on things like a megathread (or just set an automatically recurring one), so that topics that are barely appropriate but still popular can be nipped in the bud before we end up with /v/programming being dominated by anti-Github articles.

The other reason is that I don't really think the current github will invariably be accessed by any programmer at some point in their career for the forseeable future, and it is an icon of the open source community. I don't think political topics are necessarily off the topic of "programming." For example, something that might get a ton of traction and be a one hit wonder post is the event where a Congressman who studied computer science in college put different prosecutors/law enforcement who were requesting backdoors into encryption systems on blast. That sort of post has nothing to do with any specific programming technology but I definitely think it is relevant to programming and something that might be allowable as a one time thing here especially if it gets votes, because even though it doesn't have a single LOC a congressman actually agreeing with and articulating the views of the crypto community and calling prosecutors out for being overzealous rights tramplers is a wonderful if minor success for programming. But obviously a post like that is 100% deletable and off topic, it depends on how soon you catch it and what the consensus is between mods/users.

TLDR: off topic posts that become too popular for the sub's liking should either be segregated to a megathread or let run their course instead of having a delete and repost to a smaller community policy. I definitely take the free market/conservative stance when it comes to modding by saying let the community decide with votes and eventually things will return to a state of equilibrium as long as its clear we're not being brigaded by an outside entity. If for example we proved that the folks at /v/kotakuinaction were the ones inflating SJW post counts on /v/programming, then delete and ban. But in my experience those guys don't rely on malicious methods to spread their views. just a hypothetical.

I think the most interesting development isn't an actual development, but the fact that there hasn't been a major breakthrough in making traditional computing faster in software. The fact that for reliable performance, C is the language that teams go to.

I recently watched a presentation from Scott Meiers on youtube which summed it up nicely. Essentially, the speed of any program regardless of language is determined by how well the compiler can optimize the code so that the CPU can branch predict and keep relevant data in CPU caches instead of main memory. Nothing revolutionary has changed this. We can distribute data over different clusters if the problem can be parallelized but at the end of the day if the algorithm that runs on each node is constantly causing cache misses and pipeline flushes then the code is going to run slowly.

There's things we can do in software to help make better assemlby, like use a well written compiler or testing different variants of algorithms to see which run better. For example in Scott Meier's video he talks about a Row-Major traversal of a 2d array vs a Column-Major traversal. The two styles of traversal look almost the same in code, but when one uses significantly large data sets one algorithm will take exponentially increasing time because one algorithm jumps all over memory and causes cache misses while the other stays in contiguous (easily cacheable) memory and plays nicely. At the end of the day that determines performance for any nontrivial amount of data and we cannot figure out a way to get around this by using pretty things in software.

This isn't exactly a "languages" development but it gives us guidance as software engineers on how we should code, regardless of language. No one wants to program in assembly for each target and we shouldn't, better processes exist. But programmers shouldn't ignore the underlying implementation of their software. The best way to make a language perform is not just understanding and using every idiom of a given language (and in cases like C++ that would be terrible/impossible) but to understand what the compiler is going to do with it.

For a more language specific example I actually just watched a talk from DConf, where Walter Bright talked about a solution to dynamic memory management and problems with cache coldness which really just avoids allocating heap memory. I drag my feet when at the end he suggests that templates are the future (maybe I'm just not where he is in developer maturity) but otherwise I find that his implementation's strategy to avoid garbage collected memory a noteworthy take on a low footprint array-like container.

The harsh answer is you need more than just an affinity for programming to be a good software engineer. But I think there's hope for many types of people in the software engineering field.

Attend some career fairs at the school you've attended and see whats out there. Explain where you are academically and what sort of courses/programming you've done.

Depending on how far along you are in schooling, you can apply and interview for internship positions.

Don't be selective. Throw your resume at every internship you can find and apply and pester people with emails. I never thought I'd be doing GUI but I got a really nice offer. I had done a lot of C/basic C++ before but had no idea how to GUI before I walked into the internship. They didn't care, they let you learn as you did progressively bigger software tasks for them. I've never learned more than when just starting a new job or at an internship. Maybe it will go extremely well and you'll find motivation to continue schooling (and if they like you, part time work instead of retail during a semester). My friend is currently degree-less, working towards an associates in CS and has a part time job doing software dev. So positions do exist out there that you want.

The important message is, don't be discouraged, as long as you're willing to work and learn, there is a place for you somewhere.

Also, absolutely not does having trouble in school mean you're unfit to do CS. I failed almost all my classes one semester because I got depressed and discouraged and fell off the horse. but everywhere I've worked or interned, it is a whole new environment from school. You have days at work where you get imposter syndrome and feel like you're lying and you can't hack it but as long as you be open about struggling, and demonstrate that you're trying to find a solution to your problem your managers/teammates will be kind and helpful with more than you think, and give you the time you need as long as you aren't consistently failing to perform.

Your time zone and active hours

UTC -5, usually in the evening hours, occasionally afternoon, rarely morning.

Why you think you'd be good at this. You don't need prior experience, so newbies are welcome too.

No prior experience modding large communities of strangers like this. I came from reddit and I didn't like what the community turned into there (not specifically any sub just in general) and I'm curious to see what I can do to help out in a more active role than lurker/occasional poster.

Your programming related knowledge. You don't have to be a senior, but knowing what you're interested in would be interesting.

I'm currently working full time as a software engineer.

Very familiar with C/C++ on linux systems for networking and multithreading. Used to have a job using Qt in C++ for gui stuff. I don't particularly like doing gui development but I didn't have any too horrible experiences with Qt.

Currently learning java for work. So far I like it's take on OOP and I think its a clean language with a nice set of supporting tools and libraries.

python, for scripting and computing.

I know the syntax for Haskell and Racket/Lisp but I'm quite bad at being a good functional programmer.

I'm interested in picking up Rust, D, Clojure, and Go, and in free time I look up language/compiler design and networking topics most frequently.

I dual boot Arch Linux and Windows 8.1. I use windows just for gaming. I want to upgrade to 10 because I think it's much better visually than 8 but I'm a privacy nut and don't want to make the jump until I'm sure I can lock it down.

Discuss the above rule change. What do you think? Do you think it's the right call? Or a bad idea? I know you'll hate this one. There's no correct answer to this. As stated above, you don't have to answer all questions, so if you don't feel comfortable, don't answer it.

I think a "programming" subreddit should be very general and be inclusive of anything that "programmers" might like and if a post can somehow relate back to programming then it should be left to the users to vote on. I'd lean heavily towards allowing things like the posts that have been raising awareness about github's loss to the PC crowd. I also came to voat to avoid the opaque modding of reddit because I was tired of seeing posts removed with no reason given after generating a ton of feedback. So even though I disagree with the rule change I'm appreciative of the removal/recommendation comments that @Craftkorb has left on various posts instead of flat out removing them and taking their time to choose what action to take.

That being said, I think the rule change comes too quickly and excluding "politics/drama" is a broad rule which might lead to a quality post's removal before the community at large can decide on it. I think moderators should be janitors that clean up shitposts and communities should for the most part be responsible for deciding their own content via votes.

I think that a day dedicated to posting political topics is a good compromise if the active leadership of the subverse is deadset against allowing content that might be more appropriate for a /v/githubinaction type subverse. I'm curious to poll the community to see if there is interest in other days with megathreads dedicated to specific topics, not just ones that are against the rules here.

Edit: as a clarification of intent, I would do my best to not use mod powers (or purposefully not use them) to undermine a rule which I personally disagree with. I hope that is implied but I'd like to emphasize that since I voiced my qualms with the decision.

Someone who got into the same situation as you:

The education system sucks but that degree doesn't just mean that you're qualified to write software, it means you're qualified to put up with the bullshit of a well established system and come out ok. see /u/tame's comment.

Stick it out, do everything you can. take a night course here or there, but always be pursuing the degree in some minor way. Get an adderal prescription, it sure helped out some of my class mates. Hell I should probably have one.

In my experience, if a company interviewed you, they gloss right over certificate type things. The important part of the interview is your technical ability, prior work, and school if you lack work experience. The 4 year degree helps show them you've at least probably been exposed to things they want to have in an employee and unless you have some nepotism in your favor you're unlikely to be noticed they'll gloss right over you in favor of someone who does have one unless you're a degreeless Richard Stallman.

Hello again,

It looks like you're still tired of the github in action type posts... I don't think they will die any time soon, either.

In light of this,

I would like to again request thinking about changing the rule that submissions must contain code/ be directly related to programming and the sub rules be more inclusive about the content that can be posted here, since the user base seems to appreciate a lot of posts that might not directly relate to programming.

@atko specifically referenced the way r/technology on reddit banned Tesla posts, just because the mod was tired of seeing Tesla content dominate the sub.

Once again, I appreciate the discussion and transparency that you've had.

remember that it's your responsibility to make your fellow Rustaceans comfortable

I am offended by this. It's Rust's responsibility to remove this from their code of conduct and make me feel comfortable.

Thank you. I came to voat hoping for mods that interacted more with the community (and because it's clear the other site is trying to cash out by sanitizing their community to appear more PC to potential advertisers).

Your work and openness is appreciated and it seems the opinion of the sub on the other site and here is that posts like these talking about the politics/downfall of popular programming services like github are welcome contributions even though they dont have anything to do with code.