Become a better programmer

After talking to people they seem to say that although I did Chemistry as my degree, if I’m willing to learn I can be a junior software developer for my first job…(!) At the moment I know FORTRAN (which no one “out there” seems to use) and some shell scripting. I have taken a course in python, but didn’t make much of it because I don’t have time to. It will be really interesting to be able to move into this field. At the moment I have exams to revise for, but what should I learn/take up after I’m done?

Yeah, my programming project at university has just started. I hope I will learn a lot through this and the other subjects I chose this term.

Went to a conference about web technology. Now I want to learn Ruby (and Rails), Python (and Django), PHP (and Zend), (more) Perl, AJAX, Blueprint, maybe even popfly. First thing to do is decide which to do first :-)

Probably due to the conference too, I have joined twitter. And that prompted me to create a robot to post Spanish vocabulary ( http://twitter.com/spanishvocab ). So I’ve got back into shell scripting! Yay! And learnt a few new things, like how to nest backticks and about using jot to produce random numbers. The next techie thing to do to it is to learn about cron and set up a job, but to make it better, what I actually need to do is add more vocab. I only have about 20 words.

im not all that good at the moment. im kind of familiar with C++, C#, Java, and VB, but im nowhere near professional. next year im considering a software engineering degree

I haven’t had much programming experience the last couple years since I dropped out of college, and I want to get back into it. I really want to go back and finish my computer science degree. I‘m working on getting past the barriers to going to back, but in the interim I know there is tons I can do to reacquaint myself with Java and C++, although I think I want to focus on Java for now at least. I’m wondering if there is a way that I could maybe find an entry level position to get myself experience somewhere, w/o having to have my degree first. I’m exploring an attempt at getting certified. Sun Certified Java Associate starting out, and then working my way up from there. Just learning new compiler features takes forever.

do {program(stuff);} while (idea=>1);

Don’t you just love the C/C++ programming language?¿?

I’m starting to learn how and when to apply higher-level prototyping languages (python in particular) against when to write in compile-only languages (c++ in particular). It’s an easy thing to say but hard to force yourself when you know c++ a lot better than python.

But I think in this increasingly agile world it’s worth it.

I just got a great job as web developer at a great company thats growing like crazy and although I got good PHP skills, I feel very unknowledgeable at work. Although my boss is great my own thoughts make me feel like I’m not good enough for this great job. I fell like I lied on my resume and the interview to get the job even though I didn’t. I guess I need more practice and more self confidence.

I’m going to start by reading “Code Complete” by Steve McConnell – I hear it’s pretty good. I mostly code in PL/SQL at work, so I’m also going to read “Oracle PL/SQL Best Practices” by Steven Feuerstein.

I started as a Trainee Programmer and worked my way up to a Programming lead. I worked for an organisation that supported this and encouraged us to get better at what we did as well as meet deadlines. I have since discovered that this is rare :-)