Beginning to start to prepare

[serenissima]

Things at work took a turn for the better yesterday. I think I will be able to finish the reports needed by Friday. I'm not sure about the information requested by another department, though, and I'm very glad I worked last weekend.

The weather's been mild since Sunday. I went walking by the pond yesterday and the day before. There is a pair of swans visiting, and some of the mallards have paired off, too: I saw a few duck couples swimming together. The diving waterfowl are also there. I might be tempted to try looking up what species they are, but I didn't get a good view of them. They're smaller than mallards. Today is rainy, so I'm not going out.

Regarding career paths -- I still haven't taken time to make definite plans. I never seem to find an appropriate moment, there is always something else to catch my attention, so I guess I'll have to use inappropriate moments. Like now.

1. Make a list of all the things I might want to do.


2. Identify some people who can give me details about what it's like to do those things.


3. Contact those people and make appointments to talk.


4. After gathering detailed information, re-evaluate what paths are most appealing.


5. Identify the steps necessary to be able to follow those more appealing paths: school, extra-curricular practice, whatever.


6. Choose at least one of those steps and make arrangements to take it.

One roadblock to my doing anything programming-related is that I have not programmed at all since I finished school, going on four years ago. At school, I did all my projects on the school UNIX computers, using the programming environments they had. Getting the computer to run something in C was easy: name your plaintext file with a .c extension, run "compile" on it (to be precise, I think we used "gcompile", but my memory is hazy), voila, you get something the computer can run, right there. Programming in Java was a little more complicated, we had to have stuff installed in our accounts. But basically, all the infrastructure was provided. Once I left school and that was no longer available to me, I didn't know what to do. I had only my own PC, which ran Windows. I had Linux installed on it, dual-boot, but I am next to clueless about using that, too. And that was enough to stop me tinkering.

I remember spending a significant amount of time making my personal website, and enjoying it. (It no longer exists.) I used Windows Notepad to write the HTML myself by hand. After I reached a certain number of pages, it got cumbersome. I could probably have benefitted from a webpage editing program. But my point is, at a certain level, programming is fun for me. I just don't know if it's fun enough. Web pages are one thing, but I never wrote interactive programs just for the heck of it.

And that's the end of my lunch hour. Any more on this topic will have to wait.

Comments

[zeeth_kyrah]

Yeah, once I got a computer that didn't have BASIC installed, I didn't know where to look for a free, usable programming language. Then one fateful day, I found Python.

I'd suggest Python as a good language to just pick up, especially if you like programming. I wrote a handful of games and toys just for the heck of it; Tic-tac-toe is usually one of the first I try in a new programming language, and it was pretty easy, since I don't do real AI - but I was willing to try based on how quickly things came together.

Python was also my first introduction to an object-oriented language, and once I finally understood what a class is and how it works, I was off and running with that. Java seems so much uglier and harder to me than it should be, but that's what you get when a committee is trying to make an object-oriented language that looks like C and has extremely static types.

[copperwolf.livejournal.com]

I looked at Python briefly, just a few weeks before I graduated. I wrote a Jotto game in it. I'll take another look. Can it do GUIs?

My school was big on Java, and it is basically what I was "raised on." Even the graphics class used Java 3D, which was probably not the best choice.

[zeeth_kyrah]

Python doesn't do GUI natively, but the default installation comes with Tcl/Tk and a very well-designed interface module called Tkinter.

There are also bindings available for Windows 98 and up, Qt, wxWindows, and the SDL.

[rhynyx.livejournal.com]

If your problem with webpages was when they got larger, you might wanna look into php. I use it to create separate header, navigation, and footer files that I can call from each page, server-side. I can't manage to get into more of it than that (I have trouble wrapping my brain around programming ideas, and I always forget that computers can't assume), but I know it's managed to help me a lot, and if you actually can program, it could do you even more good.