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I picked up coding during quarantine and haven't gone a day without learning since. I've managed to learn the basics of Ruby in little under two weeks and run a few programs/started creating a basic app. Now I have to get a hang of Ruby on Rails. Furthermore, I have started learning Data Structures & Algorithms as a separate topic to complement the programming followed by Logic & Discrete Mathematics. I'm a very fast and curious learner and simply cannot just let a question be without knowing the solution to it (which led me to making my StackOverflow account).
Learning is always easier and more engaging when you have an enthusiastic and passionate person to guide you through a subject.
I was wondering if anyone knows where I can find a good one-to-one mentor that caters to an enthusiastic beginner programmer?
Alternatively, is there a recommended online forum, group or organisation that does the same thing?
Answers would be very much appreciated.
Ultimately there isn't really a great place for this yet, perhaps because there's a point at which developers no longer wish to be mentored rather than rely upon a mutual network. StackOverflow being an obvious example.
Coding Coach tries to tie mentors and mentees together, for free. In my experience it can be quite difficult to find active mentors on the platform though.
CodeMentor isn't free but also has a large number of active mentors.
RailsLink has a channel called beginners-and-mentors for small bits of advice.
It can be quite difficult to find someone willing to engage one-to-one when you're learning because, unfortunately, it's often quite boring for the mentor. For that reason, networking with peers is a great way to learn when starting out. It also means that one 'mentor' can help a collective with greater ease.
Try reaching out to people on Twitter or other social media and try to be helpful where you can too. Even if you're only one week in you're a week ahead of someone who's not tried at all.
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Is it even worth it to learn all of this Bootstrapping and stuff that just feels like I'm not really doing any work?
I feel like it's a bit cheat-y, y'know?
I showed someone a site I had built and they said it was good, but it didn't work well at all across multiple platforms.
So, I Googled for some tips on how I can make the site adjust to different screen sizes, and every link I went to just listed different Bootstrapping things and plug-ins that'll do it for me.
I want to learn this stuff for myself so I have better control over it, I suppose.
Is that really a good idea, or would it be more worth it to look into Bootstrapping and junk?
I would advocate to learn how things work first, and then use libraries/frameworks to accelerate your workflow.
The idea behind this is that if those tools have bugs, or issues, you'll have a much better capacity to dig in and debug.
Trying to build all of these tools yourself, however, is NOT recommended (unless its for exploratory reasons). These libraries and frameworks exist for a reason, they have many contributors (something you can't compete against as a solo dev) and they solve real-world problems.
That being said, learning how to properly select a given lib/framework for a given use-case is a skill really worth building. And that comes from understanding what problems the libs/frameworks solve, which is the result of having explored "the inner workings" by digging in.
In the end, these tools will greatly accelerate your development speed, which is great, especially when it's business related (your job).
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Disclaimer: although I know some things about big data and am currently learning some other things about machine learning, the specific area that I wish to study is vague, or at least appears vague to me now. I'll do my best to describe it, but this question could still be categorised as too vague or not really a question. Hopefully, I'll be able to reword it more precisely once I get a reaction.
So,
I have some experience with Hadoop and the Hadoop stack (gained via using CDH), and I'm reading a book about Mahout, which is a collection of machine learning libraries. I also think I know enough statistics to be able to comprehend the math behind the machine learning algorithms, and I have some experience with R.
My ultimate goal is making a setup that would make trading predictions and deal with financial data in real time.
I wonder if there're any materials that I can further read to help me understand ways of managing that problem; books, video tutorials and exercises with example datasets are all welcome.
Take ML course on coursera. It is a good introductery into ML algorithms which will tell you what ML could do\some general approaches:
https://www.coursera.org/course/ml
Also to get a broader picture I suggest coursera's DataSciense course:
https://www.coursera.org/course/datasci
Finally a good book is Mahout in action - it is more about solving practical matters with mahout and has lots of examples and case-studies.
I beleive after that you will have a better understanding of what you want to do next.
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I do not mean English. Just communication. I have this problem in my team that we are often discussing complicated topics, be it face to face, in emails, during meetings or in our issue tracker, and people often find it difficult to stay focused and understand each other.
What are the best resources (books, presentations) on that topic? Is there any way one can learn this quickly?
For your personal growth:
-take the intiative to be in situations that require this. Join the army! :D But on a more practical note: join a theatre group, start writing/casting a blog, TA some students (officially or not). Simply practicing this often (and getting the immediate feedback through the reaction of other people), you'll start noticing what is more effective and get in the habit of doing it.
-I recommend the book "On writing well.", William Zinnser. Well written and concise, and short enough that you have the time for it, and most concepts can be applied to communication in general, not just writing.
Note that even though it is quite easy to understand the concepts, this is very much a matter of charachter, so it'll take a while for your effort to become habit. Worth it though.
Are you also looking for ideas for your current situation, or just resources?
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I was wondering whether there're recommendable sites, that host collections of good and useful code-snippets.
Searching stackoverflow, to be honest, sometimes is priceless.
- But if you know sites like commandlinefu (just for Shell stuff), you may also want something like that for Ruby, Java, Python or C#. There're some small collections, of course. Very often these are specific sites dedicated to be just funny or "wicked cool" (the book series).
I'm just looking for practical stuff to learn from other people's experiences. The standard stuff. Not funny, not wicked. Just pragmatic and workflow-oriented. It seems no one wants to share that.
If you're simply googeling the web and put everything into a growing list of files, there's no overview. So that's not the workflow either, isn't it?
Not really snippets. But quite useful, http://github.com
With many languages, there is http://snippets.dzone.com/
Still with many languages, there is http://codesnippets.joyent.com/
For Django, there is http://www.djangosnippets.org/
After, there's a lot of blogs all other the web giving advices and snippets.
Some others:
Snipplr
RefactorMyCode
Codeproject and codeguru have lots of code snippets which are useful
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Once a week we have a half hour session where we talk about a few features in our application or explain a customer question to our employees(sales, support, technical services, and development). This session is to teach our employees the application we sell and to help them improve the service to our customers. Once every two weeks, this session is mandatory. Unfortunately, some of our employees do not take this too seriously.
How can we, as developers, gain more involvement from the rest of the company? And make them understand the application we're building, selling and supporting more?
Ask them to present the topic in front of you after some days from the session day.
Another good way is to make them suggest new features and modifications in the project.
If you have any hidden "tricks" or "easter eggs" in your application then start showing them one every week.
Make it interesting and tell them how a trick can help a customer.
Couple of points:
Make them feel important. Give them direct input using proper questions, even if you need to resort to analogies.
Speak with them, not at them. When people are being lectured there's a natural instinct to not take any notice.
Use analogies for things they do not understand, and again, give them direct input.
The main goal is giving the person a stake in the project. If they do not have anything valuable in the project (even an opinion that led to a feature classes in here), they will not care.
You can't get any more involvement from your employees because subconsciously they know they will not get any more benefits through exercise of extra involvement.
Reasons?
They may not agree with your development strategy or with your customer relationship model. So they feel as they don't really belong here.
Their work will not profit from any extra insight, so for them it's a waste of time
They don't get paid enough so they are at a minimum accepted performance
They have other personal problems in mind and don't want to take extra mental burden during their working hours
They long since learned the company does not care about their opinion and improvement ideas, so they shut down their involvement service
They're that kind of people that are not interested in being involved (hire strategy issue)
Recognized anything? Then you know what to fix.
The important thing to understand that you should not just cure the disease but the reasons of its emergence. You may threaten people with some punishment actions if they don't get involved. You may play to emulate the need for their involvement. It will work for a brief time then fade out. Until you get to the origin of the problem, nothing will help.