Postgraduate Degree in Something Computerscience(ish)?
2 24 Feb 2017 23:18 by u/saintPirelli
Hi faggots, I'm getting my bachelors degree in content production and digital media management right now and it is time to start thinking about what to do after. During my studies I have rather late found my love for programming and development. Therefore I am not extremely deep into the matter, but I know my way around code and some architectural concepts, encryption concepts, I can tell the difference between imperative programming and functional programming etc., you get the jizzed.
I was wondering if there are any postgraduate/masters degrees in the field of computerscience (preferably in Europe) that you can do even if your bachelor is not strictly technical. I'm not really seeking to be "more employable" or anything, I don't care about what those bootcamps promise, I'm way more interested in a curious and academic approach. Is there something like this around? I have been googling this for a couple of months now, but no luck :(
Any hints much appreciated, fuck you very much!
9 comments
3 u/roznak 24 Feb 2017 23:31
Real programmers don't do degrees. They say "fuck you" take a book a PC and learn it all by themselves.
Programming can't be taught, you either have it or you don't. 9 out of the 10 developers that are now out there are just mindless code monkeys. That is why modern software has deteriorated so badly.
1 u/saintPirelli [OP] 24 Feb 2017 23:42
Yeah I agree and I have done that to a certain extent and I am actually quite glad I am getting my degree in a wishy-washy field, because there you really need a degree to "prove" you "know" your shit. But I am not as much interested in learning how to code in ES6 or how to make a facebook clone in Ruby, I want the explore lower abstraction levels or like say the Lambda calculus and why the fuck this is apparently so very useful for science.
2 u/roznak 25 Feb 2017 00:40
If you want to have a useful degree go for electronics. Great for science because now you can create your own sensor network using ESP-12 modules to create sensor networks.
Even though I don't like IoT because there is no reason why my fridge should be connected to the Internet, you can create local networks (using a second wifi router that is disconnected from the Internet).
1 u/RevanProdigalKnight 25 Feb 2017 01:53
If you want to explore lambda calculus the best languages to pursue are probably purely functional ones such as lisp and Haskell, though Python has very good support for lambda functions (
lambda x: x), and ES6 JavaScript makes it easier to use lambda functions with the new arrow function syntax (() => {}).My personal recommendation if you choose to explore lambda calculus through code is to just pick a language and start a personal side project with the purpose of solving a random problem. Let's say you want to create a fractal generator. Just start writing code in your language of choice, get it to work, and then start tinkering to see what works better or worse.
When I tinker I like to mess around with the guts of the internals to see if I can eke out an extra 0.1% performance or make future modifications to the program as a whole easier by introducing utility classes, because those are the things that interest me most. This usually means that when I've finished tinkering with something I have to do a major refactoring of everything that influences, though.
0 u/saintPirelli [OP] 25 Feb 2017 08:07
I have tried Haskell, but I haven't come far, I do however use arrow functions in my new js, also I do love to challenge myself on codewars and I have solved quite some katas (just to be blown away by the optimal solutions). I also have a github account with some side projects on it that would prove to people that I know at least something. So you too think I don't need a formal thingy if I just keep learning?
0 u/RevanProdigalKnight 25 Feb 2017 13:55
Based on my experience, yes. What most programmers look for in a new hire isn't necessarily their degree or even how well they did in school, but how passionate or knowledgeable they are about the subject of programming. I only graduated from college with a 2.9 GPA, but because I tinkered and worked on side projects, I was able to give answers to questions that weren't just memorized from books, but from my own experience.
2 u/DickHertz 25 Feb 2017 03:01
No math no CS degree.
1 u/saintPirelli [OP] 25 Feb 2017 08:10
Well I do have the "Matura" in math, which is a strange Austrian piece of paper that no other country has. I guess you could compare it to A-levels? Too little?