There’s also SoloLearn. I just looked at their app and they have C++
You can do more on a laptop with them as well
Nice well start off with the basic, when I was learning I stayed on the basic stuff to make sure I understood the foundations.
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I listened to a loop on the way home. I’ve been doing SQL exercises to get ready for my final on Sunday. I took a break from SQL and decided to try a LeetCode exercise in C#. Here is a screenshot. I’m excited because this is the first problem I’ve solved on there without having to look up the solution.
Here it is:
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Would stacking IG and Ultimate Writer X be a good idea? Would they mesh together?
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You might write computer books 
Seriously though. Like some of the best advances I’ve made have been in ignoring official documentation for certain APIs and just look for stuff by actual devs with examples of how they made their project work.
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You’ve said someone “who knows nothing about programming at all”.
That’s describing what they know.
But what we’re more interested in is ‘what is around them’ (Environment), ‘what they’re interacting with’ (Environment), and ‘what they would like to do’ (Motivation) and ‘how they would like to develop’ (Motivation).
How it would affect a person who knows nothing about programming at all?
The short answer: they’ll probably start learning something about it.
Programming is more than just sitting in front of a computer. It’s a set of ways of thinking, understanding, creating, and dealing with problems/questions.
It involves applying the skill of ‘Operationalizing’.
You’ll probably become more skillful, strategic, and resourceful in how you organize and navigate the world around you.
You’ll probably become less mentally and cognitively rigid, less prone to discouragement, and better able to pivot into an alternate strategy for solving a problem and getting things where you want them to be.
You’ll probably become more observant and better at ‘reading’ situations, or translating situations into elements that can be read.
But where and how you apply this potential of the Programmer’s Mind will be influenced by your Environment and by your Motivated Plans and Actions. So, it will vary from one person to the next.
(You can see from the above that people have been programming since long before there were silicon-based, electronic personal computers. Whenever a person reads a situation or system and develops algorithms for more effectively reaching goals, they’re doing it.)
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@SaintSovereign I’m hoping you’ll be able to provide some insight for me here.
Reading the copy for this makes it sound like a valuable tool for a beginner or junior programmer to help develop some of the necessary skills for this profession. But what do you think this can offer a more experienced engineer?
I usually avoid saying too much about myself on here, but briefly, I’ve been in this industry over 25 years, worked for some of the most recognizable names in the world in senior roles on some really cutting edge projects, travelled and lived around the world thanks to this profession (I’ve accrued 3 citizenships and am eligible for a 4th next year for my current country of residence), and made a great deal of money along the way. I’ve already achieved or mastered most of what is listed in the description, and I’ve often been considered that “miracle worker” the copy mentions.
So when you released this title and I read the description my first thought was “ok, I don’t think this would offer me much”.
But I saw this post:
The Revelation series has been excellent so this comment really sparked my interest.
Given the above do you think this title would provide much value for someone like me?
Additionally, I’ve struggled to maintain my interest in this profession over the last couple of years. Nothing seems like a challenge anymore. Do you think this could help rekindle some of that passion I use to have?
I’m happy to devote a few months to a sub that could potentially have profound effects on my career, but I don’t want to commit to that if it’s mainly designed for those just getting into the profession.
Would really appreciate your thoughts on this.
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I’ve used to think the same.
But I am uncertain of going into this field, given the growing influence of AI.
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do you think AI won’t be able to replace any other workers if it can replace programmers?
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Yes, it will help you understand coding in ways you’ve never considered before. It also has an element of understanding the deep aspects of the creative process that will change the way you approach coding in a beneficial way. I can’t really explain it, hence why I compare it to a Revelation title.
I’ll give an example that happened to me, which again is hard to explain. Once I understood how the simulated time in Unity worked and how that affects the way the game is rendered (it does so in “ticks” —intervals that you can modify), it dawned on me that this seems to be a lower, simpler reflection (game world) of a higher reality (ours). And as the creator of that world, I’m not subjected to the laws of time and space of that lower world. If we raise that concept by an order of magnitude, it could indicate that this reality — if created, would operate similarly as this universe is proven to be fractal. Then I began to wonder, how far does this go, then? Nested realities within realities and the such.
I don’t know why this result had such a crazy effect, but suddenly my ability to understand code skyrocketed and not just understand it, but actually utilize it as if I was speaking my native tongue. I realized that I’m no longer creating for money (though of course, I still want to generate an income), but for the act of creation as alchemy. By creating worlds and realities, I’m delving into myself and externalizing that for the sake of enhancing someone else’s experience.
Probably doesn’t make any sense, but it was a profound shift for me and changed me. And that was on the prototype.
For an individual like you, I would imagine that this title would help you understand why you were drawn to coding in the first place and what part of you needed expression.
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In that case I’ll commit to a few months running this to see how it expresses in me, alongside KBC.
Thank you.
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One thing I’ve been exploring while using this is the benefits and problems of test driven development, or TDD as it’s known. Agile, and especially DSDM, has a very heavy emphasis on TDD, but also on “enough testing”. As I began considering TDD in Rust, there are very clear documented ways on how to do this by decorating your unit testing functions with compiler directives, so that the testing code is not compiled into the final build. And this is very useful for the libraries and aspects of your code that you can unit test.
However, there is also QA testing and integration testing. Something I found when developing the first version of VAERity in Python is that, were I to rely on a solely TDD approach to testing, it would quickly become a nightmare. I found myself doing a lot more QA testing and catching bugs in the QA testing or integration testing phases than I did in unit testing. There are limits to TDD, and yet if you want to become a developer who works on a large development team, you’re going to inevitably come upon the need to consistently unit test your code and use this strange paradigm of writing your tests before you write the code.
When you’re developing a program that is fully event driven, such as a GUI based program, or a VR game for example, TDD creates its own problems. How do you unit test some code that dynamically generates a web form or a 3-D model or a mesh? Some might argue you know what the properties of a correct object will look, and your asserts can test that. Okay, but as the complexity of the objects grow, you spend more time writing your unit test than you do writing your actual code. And how can you test all the possible inputs to a callback that a third party library might throw your way? What is the definition of enough testing?
Then the problems get worse when you have to have confidence that your code will work on different architectures or hardware which you might not have access to. To some extent, IDE’s like Android Studio and methods of writing test harnesses that allow for those aspects to be mocked on your own hardware make this easier.
While pondering all this, I came across this video.
And the accompanying article on mocks.
https://medium.com/perry-street-software-engineering/unit-testing-experts-on-mocks-d5accda2d537
Here were some of the greatest advocates of TDD and testing integrated throughout the development process, asking the question is TDD dead? And discussing, in a very roundabout way, the exact same concerns I had. And Kent’s admission of how his psychological makeup influenced the development of this paradigm. Ultimately, TDD was developed in order for someone who was not a confident programmer (someone with a lot of anxiety, as he pointed out) to have confidence in what he was writing.
So that was interesting. And it was a good confirmation that, despite the benefits of TDD and how much it is hyped, and how important it is to understand that paradigm, it should not be made so important or used in the wrong ways as to ruin your code-base, or to hamper your development process.
I’ve always relied the most on QA testing and on-the-fly integration testing the most rather than formal integrated TDD tests, so it was good having IG: UPX help me manifest the right material to validate the benefits of my own paradigm and tease out where TDD can be used and where it can’t.
EDIT: Also, there’s this that I found on Meta’s website which is actually helpful for a change:
https://developer.oculus.com/resources/automation-performance-testing/
(although some of their suggestions aren’t my bag baby)
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This was also very insightful about how a big gaming company tests their own products and how complex it can get. And I laughed my a$$ off at the Twitch reaction right at the end. Never mind the fact that it’s four years old. I still think there’s still a lot of relevant stuff here.
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Posting this here too
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I’ve had related thoughts about natural language processing and word context in language. When you’re reducing a word or set of words within a corpus to a vector, it has its own unique position within the dynamic system known as language. As the size of your corpus grows, if words continued to have the same context, you should start to see the vectors converge towards a fixed value as more data becomes available, particularly if you have a large enough LSTM buffer size. The vocabulary should approximate a multidimensional fractal with clusterings of words in well defined relationships to one another, all interconnected in the multidimensional space.
But what about hermetic drift and the weaponisation of language? How do things like this affect the ability of a machine to grasp the structure of language? When the meaning of words change, the structure of that language fractal changes, maybe only slightly at first but over time as the changed meanings affect the word vectors more and more, will it cause difficulty for a machine to come to accurate conclusions? The implications of changing word meanings or even just new euphemisms or idioms and its impact on a machine trying to grasp language is a fascinating thing to consider.
Even humans have a problem with context when translating things, one of the interesting subtle examples I found recently was Galatians 1:16, in which some translations use “in me”, others “to me”, which in English creates no end of confusion and can only be resolved in a wider context. How much more trouble would machines have grasping this fractal structure against the background of language changing over time?
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This is such a cool title would defnitely have used This if i was still into coding
Here’s something for all you AI aficionados looking to write the next big LLM using Index Gate to consider very, very carefully 
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The crazy things we do on IG: UPX and EB.
Creating and texture painting from scratch a realistic mushroom with 4K texture on a laptop with 8GB RAM and no GPU (in Blender) 
EB’s stubbornness won out in the end over my computer’s protests.
(For context: I re-installed Blender 3 days ago after over 10 years of disuse and little success prior, and was doing other stuff during those three days that took much of my time, so the skill pickup is pretty incredible. Plus I’m battling my own not-so-hot fine motor skills)
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Probably now I’m having a recon, hence the interest that made me to learn programming all the time has gone for some time. But, nevertheless, a fire happens when I actually learn programming. It might be coding, reading according literature or grasping information from any other source.
By the way, now I prefer learn theory rather than actually coding. I even bought one book about algorithms and another one for a language I’m using and using the language for making apps.
Yet, I’m very satisfied with the product. Still believe it’s a game(life)changer for me.
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