"When... This song... Is gone...!"

And a Python developer is born!

Source: I moved on from an abusive relationship with JavaScript to a healthy not-at-all-controlling equal partner relationship with Python. And four spaces makes perfect sense, once I really considered Python's point of view...

Have you ever been to PowerShell Summit? It's the only nerd conference I've ever attended where only about half the attendees actually realized they are nerds at a nerd conference. I love the vibe. It's got style and pizzazz.

That said, the added entry for PowerShell would still be: "You are a nerd."

Well shit. It's got me dead to rights on a couple of these.

Those are both excellent points.

Hiring people is a big risk. Anything you can do to mitigate that risk (evidence that you're someone they should hire) will increase your chances of being hired exponentially.

That's a great summary. Well said.

Let your mentors know you're looking for work, and how many hours you can work per week.

New programmers provide negative value, so there's not a lot of demand.

I'm very good and studied hard, but my first couple of programming roles I got entirely because a mentor of mine recommended me to someone who took a chance on me.

Also keep adding code to your public GitHub. Two of my top developers today I originally hired directly away from their retail roles. One had a ton of academic coding experience and had just not yet landed the right job. The other was just getting started, but posted a ton of low quality homework code to GitHub so I could read it and know who I was hiring.

Edit: In contrast, one of my other top developers has one of the top CS degrees in the world. So that works too.

And more than one of my top developers have IT help desk experience. I have had excellent luck when hiring folks with IT Help Desk experience.

Edit 2: As someone else mentioned - your long term goal is to connect with an IT Recruiter that you trust, and work with them to get your resume, and GitHub, and/or binder full of code you wrote into shape. I've hired more than one candidate who admits the simply presented themselves exactly as their recruiter coached them to. And I've hired candidates I would have skipped, because their recruiter was someone I trust and they asked me to take a second look at a candidate who made a poor first impression.

Edit 3: Since this is for newbies, some information about recruiters: we pay the recruiter in addition to what we pay you. The recruiter's typical pay for a rookie hire is around $50,000.00, if you stay for a full year. Half up front, in case you don't stay.

A few things you should know about recruiters: they only need to make a few solid placements each year to earn a living. As a rookie, you're the hardest to place, and the lowest layout when placed. But, programmers that are easy to place don't move often, so recruiters may still have plenty of time for you.

The recruiter is probably mainly placing you the first time in hopes that you come back later when you're worth big money. The initial payent is nice, but the real payment will be if/when you have 5 years experience and still work exclusively with them.

Hiring managers like me have recruiters we trust and reuse. If you can get recommended to a great recruiter, they will get you interviews at better places to work.

In contrast, there's lots of mediocre recruiters out there. Don't be afraid to switch to a new recruiter, if you have the opportunity, and your current recruiter isn't getting you interviews.

What I think makes good programmers is having the ability to bash your head against your desk while debugging, but still walking away at the end of the day loving the job and problem solving.

Just quoting you for emphasis here, in case any of our newbies missed it. Well said!

Kindness can be learned. The difference between being genuinely kind and just constantly successfully mimicing what a kind person would do is - no difference at all, really.

Ultimately, I think people who started as natural assholes make the best kind people - beacuse we don't just do what feels kind, but we have to examine the results of our attempts at kindness, and adjust if needed.

I am, hopefully, exaggerating on the 11 count. I don't know the exact number, and likely no one does - but it genuinely is shockingly small, considering how critical usability and accessibility are to everyday use of code.

Anyone can study the principles of usability and accessibility, but the number of experts we have really is far too few, and I suspect it's is why we have so much reuse instead of innovation, right now.

Lots of other very pragmatic solutions also seem ridiculous.

Every problem is going to cost either clock cycles or highly skilled programmer time.

Currently, in the world, all eleven competent user interface element developers are occupied with more important tasks.

Until one of those eleven finds some extra free time, the rest of us get to slap electron into everything, and he thankful we can spread our atrocious CSS anti-talents to one more problem-space.

FYI, "Pokemon FireRed" is the same game, but with a ton of usability issues fixed.

While I get the longevity argument (Vim and Emacs have a great track record), I've found that it is FOSS vs proprietary that causes beloved tech to die.

VSCode is, by a wide margin, now the most popular IDE. If MS abandons it, there's a fleet of us ready to continue using VSCodium.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-most-popular-technologies-integrated-development-environment

Another consideration for you is that Vim is, by a huge margin, the most popular tool for doing difficult edits in an ultra light or restricted server environment. It's absolutely worth learning for that use case, which I keep being promised I won't need again, between each of the hundreds of times I've needed it.

Edit: The usual issue with plugins on VSCodium, out of the box, is that it defaults to a completely different plugin set, due to MS license rules about their plugin repository. It's trivial to switch it back with a config file edit, which is, admittedly, a little buried, in the project FAQ. The VSCodium plugin repository is growing better over time, but there's not good awareness of it yet by most plugin developers.

If you like VSCode, and want the longevity of FOSS, you can switch to https://vscodium.com/

It still leaves the option of using non-FOSS plugins, but makes it much more obvious which bits are FOSS or not. It is, otherwise, an identical experience with VSCode.

The Vim keybindings for VSCode/VSCodium are ridiculously good: https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim

As a diehard Vim user, VSCodium with VSCodeVim is a terrific no-nonsense combination.

Edit: Regarding Vim plugin packs, I honestly only ever had a bad time with curated plugin collections. I don't think the default settings in Vim are that bad anymore, and are trivial to change as you go when something annoys you.

So ratherb than picking a plugin pack, I recommend spending some time in :vimtutor to learn about various quality of life settings, and then set them as you prefer in your .vimrc.

Edit 2:

Regarding the 'split' in Vim options, Vim is growing up into a protocol, rather than just an editor. As a 'trapped in Vim' user, back in the day, I'm delighted that essentially every serious editor now supports Vim keybindings*.

*Disclaimer: I will 'no true scottsman' all day long if someone names me a 'serious editor' without Vim keybindings. Let's all not go there, I'm too childish for that conversation.

One important thing you should know about Vim is that, VimScript, the native way to extend the original Vim, is an unholy abomination that is best left to rot in it's forgotten grave. It's the only reason I moved on to VSCodium, which can be extended with TypeScript, an unholy abomination that looks like it's going places.

As the old saying goes, "There's only one winner in an IPO. His name is George. He makes bank on each one. Everyone else leaves the situation worse off, either immediately, or later, unless George tips them off when to sell."

When something that big barely turns a profit, I immediately suspect Hollywood accounting.

But if true, they made a game, covered their costs, left the company with an asset that can keep making sales, and probably developed their in-house talent and tooling along the way. That's a lot of points in the "win" column.

Wise leaders understand that, in business, victory means getting to try another project with the same team, next year. Failure means disolution of the business. Earn enough years and projects with the same team in a row, and maybe you take one of the big wins one of those years.

Thanks!

That's evil. I love it. I've used variants of:

"its-all-caps-AND.all.dash.separated"

Obviously I had to quit it beacuse, done well, it's completely insufferable.

Nice. That's a whole tale of joy, adorableness, frustration, and brilliance, all in a Wifi SSID.

I think we should bring back web rings, but nobody else seems to miss them.

Edit: I'm so old, I should probably link to what a web ring is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring