CNN says: Learn to code, get a jobFollow

I should teach myself how to code to pay for my MPhys!

yeah... more BS on jobs from the mainstream media. Almost everything I've ever read in the media about what will get you ahead in life is a total lie.

Besides, it's not like you can learn this stuff instantly. And while it can't hurt to gain a new skill (like coding) you can't depend on trends in employment to last - so you spend 2-4 years getting qualified but by the time you are, people don't need you anymore.

My view is follow a career that follows your natural inclinations. Even if you don't get rich, you at least might be happy at the end of the day

I mean, its a good skill to have, if you can get a legit education in it. Better than those subway ads claiming "get rich quick" network admin ones, I suppose.

Still seems kinds naive, though, yeah.

It's an opinion column from some tech writer. It's not as though the headline story is about coders getting jobs.

It doesn't seem all that crazy anyway -- more stuff is computer driven so more stuff needs coding. Even if things shift, that doesn't make your current knowledge useless. My good friend from way back is one of the head computer guys at Allstate based partially on his knowledge of legacy mainframe languages (Fortran, COBOL, etc). No, it's not a guarantee to print money but it seems a better skill to learn than a lot of other stuff.

Edited, Jan 13th 2012 8:54am by Jophiel

No, that's definitely true. I once considered a degree in accounting. As it turns out, a brief Google shows that the market is pretty flooded right now. But, more to the point, I personally realized that while I may be humanly capable of doing the math, I'd hate every moment of my tortured existence doing it and never be really "good" at it.

Edited, Jan 13th 2012 9:52am by Jophiel

I had some prerequisite coding courses in college (C++ and COBOL) which were neat once you got everything working but also incredibly frustrating. Debugging line after line of code only to find out that every error was caused by a single out of place semicolon makes you want to punch your screen



Pretty much sums it up.

I've found for me the codeing itself isn't the hard part, the hard part is thinking of a program that people would actually need to the point that a major player would want to buy the program for a large sum of cash. I mainly work with C# these days, which is really fun with my ability to misspell anything, because misspelling variable names gets old really quickly. Also, I ******* hate semicolons. Definitly preferred vb.net. Lots of web codeing too, which has its usesunless you work for a website that uses perl as its backend for everything. I've got probably 8 or 9 production programs floating around various areas of the other job, but its more of a tertiary job duty for me at the moment. The ones that are the most fun to build are the ones that involve maps and layers and coordinates. It's suprisingly difficult to convert a standard map accuratly to a .png and still be able to plot latitude and longitude coordinates on it. Then when you throw in different data layers and z axis stacking, transparancies, and tie it all to a data set of some sort things get really interesting. but fun too. They're a good mental exercise if nothing else, and once you have your initial modules built, they are easy enough to extend and integrate with other projects

One of these days when I get some time I'm going to look into porting code over to mobile devices. My million doller aplication plan is to code a simple utility that when launched, displays the word "That" on the screen, until the ap is closed...

Here, have some free code:

 
/// Set the DAC clock source for channel 2 (RT2WCLKSRC_DAC2_*) 
RT2WAPI SetDacClockSourceCh2RT2W (HRT2W hBrd, unsigned int val) 
{ 
	static const int dac_idx = 1; 
 
	CStateRT2W* statep; 
	int res; 
 
	if (val >= RT2WCLKSRC_DAC2__COUNT) 
		return SIG_RT2W_INVALID_ARG_2; 
 
	res = ValidateHandleChecked(hBrd, &statep); 
	RT2W_RETURN_ON_FAIL(res); 
 
	// Select clock source in device firmware 
	static const unsigned int dac_clk_msk =  
		RT2WREGMSK_18_SEL_DAC2VCO | RT2WREGMSK_18_SEL_DAC2_CLK; 
	RT2WU_REG_DEV_18 r18; 
	switch (val) 
	{ 
	default: 
	case RT2WCLKSRC_DAC2_INTERNAL_VCO: 
		r18.bits.sel_dac2vco  = 1; 
		r18.bits.sel_dac2_clk = 1; 
		break; 
	case RT2WCLKSRC_DAC2_DAC1: 
		r18.bits.sel_dac2vco  = 0;		// don't care 
		r18.bits.sel_dac2_clk = 0; 
		break; 
	} 
	RT2W_CT_ASSERT(RT2WCLKSRC_DAC2__COUNT == 2); 
	res = WriteDeviceRegRT2W(hBrd, 18, dac_clk_msk, r18.val); 
	RT2W_RETURN_ON_FAIL(res); 
 
	// Turn on/off clock outputs as needed 
	res = DacSetupClockPowerSettings(hBrd, 0); 
	RT2W_RETURN_ON_FAIL(res); 
	res = DacSetupClockPowerSettings(hBrd, 1); 
	RT2W_RETURN_ON_FAIL(res); 
	// Give clocks a chance to turn on and stabilize. MDTODO: Do we really need this? 
	SysSleep(150); 
 
	if (val == RT2WCLKSRC_DAC2_INTERNAL_VCO) 
	{ 
		// Using internal VCO 
		res = _dacSetupVcoPll(hBrd, dac_idx); 
		RT2W_RETURN_ON_FAIL(res); 
	} 
	else 
	{ 
		// Using DAC1 clock 
		res = _dacDisablePll(hBrd, dac_idx); 
		RT2W_RETURN_ON_FAIL(res); 
	} 
	RT2W_CT_ASSERT(2 == RT2WCLKSRC_DAC2__COUNT); 
 
	// Update firmware items dependent on clock rate 
	res = OnDacClockRateChange(hBrd, dac_idx); 
	RT2W_RETURN_ON_FAIL(res); 
 
	return SIG_SUCCESS; 
} 

I've wondered for a while now, how come you don't use a spellchecker?

What would That do?

Edited, Jan 13th 2012 10:13pm by Peimei

I used to code html, but haven't since Flash became such a big player in the html game. I ******* hate Flash for the most part.

It's mainly because of the browser I use. Basically, at the beginning of the browser era, I was an avid netscape user, until they pretty much screwed everyone with netscape 4. Then I switched to IE, which sucked out of the box, so I started using the Avant browser frontend for IE. (http://www.avantbrowser.com/) it essentially gave me all the good pieces of firefox, back before there was such a thing, and allowed me to customize the placement of tool bars and browser tabs where I wanted them. One thing it does lack is an in browser spell check capacity. Avant was for a long time much faster than standard IE or firefox too, which was useful. These days its about on par with both, and maybe a little slower than chrome, but i'm used to the interface and it works well for me. Besides, if I started spelling things correctly all of the sudden people would be suspicious that I had been replaced by a particularily well trained parakeet in a robotic exoskeliton anyways, so this is probably for the best.




Nothing, except display the word "that". But you know how all those frigging annoying apple ads are always saying "There's an ap for that?" and there ins't one? because no one was crazy enough to program something that useless, but I figure I can sell it as a gag ap to other crazy people, and as an added bonus it would be on android!

I did get it, I was trying to feed you another pun.
Heck I'd pay a buck for "That"