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*Cries in wasted hours* You are correct. I was hoping my Angular experience and sheer willpower would be enough to carry me through. It is not.

As far as FE goes I've really only worked on one enterprise application built with Angular/NX. In the last couple months I took a SysDev job at Amazon where I'm doing essentially 50% ops and 50% Go/C#/Python, I'm trying to flex those FE muscles again to keep them sharp. I have a sneaky suspicion that they were never sharp to begin with and that I only knew how to develop for that specific application.

"not much a FE dev but why not" is the energy I'm trying to manifest. Thanks for the comment :)

we learn to code well and properly, but the truth is, like in all crafts, manufacturing quality doesn't matter anywhere near as much as how well it functions in the end and how it feels to use. you can ship the worst pile of spaghetti, what matters is that the customer pays. that's the sad truth of crafting and engineering, good craftsmanship is not what sells the product.

In my experience the dangers of the "easy to fix" bugs are when they are subtle, not noticed by customers/QA, and aren't blocking feature development. What ends up happening is that that someone intends to go back to it and fix it as part of their check in, but something comes up that pushes back the work or the developer just gets distracted. Leaving the bug in code, but also not tracked or escalated so the issue continues to be unsurfaced. Rinse and repeat. The best example I've seen of this was when a developer had noticed a problem with our navigation where essentially extra router events were being fired under certain conditions when they shouldn't have. Long story short, the above happened and as the product developed our SignalR connections became more coupled with our router events, and the issue causing the extra router events became a very large problem.

To make it worse, I paid for the service before downloading the video to upload. But I guess since I generated it during the trial it still had the watermark. Tech is hard!!!

Thanks for reaching out and sharing your story! To answer the simple question first, "what do you need to know/have to get in" - The ASU website will give you all the info you need, you'll be considered a "Non-traditional student". But I believe a GED, resume and funds are essentially all you need to get started! I would not let the lack of knowledge deter you from starting the college journey. As long as you are able to show up to class and feel comfortable with pre-calc/calculus you're at a solid point to begin. As for the "Is Computer Science Right?" question. I would think about what you want to do with your degree. You mention your interest in AI companions and robotics, my follow up would be "What do you want to do with your interest?" Do you want to just learn about how they work, do you want to break into the AI / robotics industry? If so, what would you want to do? Comp Sci makes sense if you eventually want to go into the software side of things, but if you wanted to be on the hardware side electrical engineering would make sense, mechanical, industrial, electrical engineering are other options. Heck, marketing/business would make sense if you were more interested in that side of things. If you are going for Comp Sci just because you want to learn about AI/Robotics, classes that are relevant to those topics are probably not going to be available until your senior year. You'll have to tackle the Math, CS theory and basic programming classes before getting to those subjects. Something to keep in mind. Best of luck in your journey!

@JohnWilliamTech Thank you for responding! I have decided to pay out of pocket for WGU and in the future I will transfer credits to ASU and possibly go live on their campus.

@@Dokelly_Dokelly best of luck! Work hard and enjoy the crap out of it :)

Oof! Sorry for the slow reply. The only class I ever took that I couldn't do on any OS of my choice was an iOS elective, where obviously I needed a Mac. I would not switch OS for concerns of compatibility

Oof -- sorry for the super late response. My starting salary was 80K-ish in the Phoenix area, which at the time was slightly higher than the average non-fang entry level. I got a 15K bump because I had a competitive offer to counter with, the original offer was 65K, which would have been slightly beneath the average. I'm currently at Amazon, so I think it is safe to say that my degree has not held me back

Apologies for the late response! I've been heads down with my career and life, so I had to take a pause on my YT hobby. 1) If you're able to skip Calc 1 & 2 I absolutely would. Typically I tell people to redo Calc because I've had plenty of friends fail and re-take Calc 1/2, because their knowledge of Calc 1 from high school was spotty. But if you can get credit for both, then wipe them out for sure! 2) As far as internships go, here is my advice: Create a resume right now, and every 3-6 months update it. It'll look pretty bare bones and silly to begin with, but as you go through classes you'll be able to put different projects, coursework, clubs, etc. Look for internship postings online and compare the requirements to your resume, opportunities for growth will become pretty evident when you notice what gaps you have. Try and fill those gaps in your spare time if your courses aren't doing it for you, and then apply come the time. If you get interviews but no offers, you know that you need to improve your interview skills. If you don't get interviews, then you need to continue to develop that resume. 3) I think it did as good as any other program would have done. At the end of the day a CS degree won't guarantee you'll walk away a good coder. But you'll have learned how to learn hard things and have a solid understanding of computer science, which I believe is required to thrive as a developer. I learned more in the first month of my first developer job than my entire degree, but that was only possible because of what I learned during my degree. Final words: The classes you're taking, research you're doing and thoughtful questions you are asking all indicate that you're a smart, and driven, individual. That is not as common as you may expect. Remember to enjoy college and the journey along the way, keep doing what you're doing and I have no doubt you'll find the success you're looking for. All the best!

Honest answer! I decided to not renew my Rugby contract in March of 2017, and the only schools that I'd get into for Comp Sci that were still in taking for the fall semester was Michigan and ASU. Looked at the weather, and it was a pretty easy choice to make!

For sure, I'd say you'd need to have at minimum a mild interest in either software or computers. Mainly because things get hard and if you aren't interested in it, It becomes harder to push through the difficult bits

I'm so sorry for the late response! The way I think of the online course is that it has the potential of being a part-time job, meaning it can require anywhere from 15-32 hours a week. Depending on what courses you're taking, and how quickly you learn the material. The nice thing about online courses is typically they are flexible, so you don't need to have constant effort every day, some days will be more and others less. If you're concerned about your time commitment, you can always look into doing it part-time, or taking reduced course loads

Sorry for the late reply! My advice is always: If you go to college for even a semi-technical degree, you do not need a bootcamp. Anyone can get hired for anything with any degree :) The way you should think about it is like this: If a recruiter looked at your resume with no relevant experience, and it was compared to a CS major with no relevant experience, the CS major has an advantage. But the second you get some sort of relevant experience, you're ahead of the CS grad with none. So if your goal is to be a SWE after graduation, definitely look for internships, volunteer, and club activities to make yourself look like an ideal candidate in comparison to SWE/CS Majors. Doing that, along with having technical projects on your resume should be enough to be able to compete in the entry-level labor force.

I appreciate the feedback! Got a new mic and testing out my workflow

Nothing wrong with a lil love and balls, no?

I think if you're looking at a tutorial to learn a specific concept, and are using it as an implementation guide then that's a good strategy. But if you are still in the "learn to code" stage of your developer journey, then I don't think coding alongside tutorials is an effective way to learn. There are certainly exceptions, but in general I think if someone is only using tutorials to try and learn to code, they will not succeed

My over-simplified answer, for beginners, would be to stick with one stack until you get to the point where you are able to build things from start to finish. I say that because when you're a beginner, you don't know what you don't know and it's easy to get lost and develop horizontally, when in reality we want vertical development. At some point you hit a threshold where the idea of learning an entire new framework or language becomes far less scary because you understand core concepts, and just need to figure out specific implementation details and language/framework specific concepts. The best stack is the one you're interested in, provided it will help you accomplish what you're seeking to achieve. Otherwise, I'm a big fan of recommending C#/.NET and Typescript & Angular. I think in the long run it is far more beneficial to start in strongly-typed, opinionated stack. And then branch off from there.

Thank you Fourk! You made my heart feel all warm and fuzzy, long live #535!

I appreciate it Misty!

100% - This job is about figuring things out, and the more problems you encounter and solve, the easier it'll be to solve larger problems in the future!

I pretty much agree on everything you wrote here. And the thing I'd specifically like to note is the "it is frustrating when someone treats you like an idiot". There is definitely a toxic culture within the Software industry, where people are "Holier than thou" when it comes to knowing something that others don't. My favorite tech leads, co-workers and peers have been the people who understand that this job is all about figuring things out. Not the people who think hoarding knowledge is what makes them a better developer

That is not to say that you must understand regex to be a professional, some people never had the need to use regex in the first place. But stuff like this are what make you stand out from the crowd, and believe me, there are a lot of people that lie about their skillset to land a job

I 100% agree on the pattern recognition. It helps for debugging, understanding new code bases, and once you understand different design patterns and recognize what patterns to apply to different problems, programming becomes far less chaotic and way more fun. Fun little anecdote: I was recently debugging a production issue at work and the root of the problem only revealed itself after looking at two different logs, and noticing that the error spikes were occurring seconds after a new instance of one of our function apps was spun up. Without noticing that pattern disruption, I'd still be scouring through Azure logs this morning

​@@JohnWilliamTech How did the function app cause the error spikes? As briefly as you can ofc

​@@skyhappy Long story short we were doing some stateful things that need to be broken up into a durable function. As brief as possible explanation :P A combination of factors from code written ages ago, but we just never had the scale for it to matter until recently. Many desktop devices connected via web socket would fail, close connection, re-connect, incredibly fast many times. That would cause service A to handle connection state, do tasks, including on occasion communicate with service B, something that is very stateful and very old. Service B would fail very silently, but eventually spin up new instances at a rate totally unexpected, but continue to fail silently.

I appreciate it Nicolas! If you don't mind me asking, do you work as a developer and/or how many years have you been coding/interested in coding? I'm trying to get a better sense of who my audience is, and what videos I can make that would add value to that group. (Or tell me to buzz off ;) )

I appreciate it Elodie!

I did it in person, but I got a summer of ASU online (different than just taking online classes), because I was unable to get core requirements after withdrawing due to my dad passing. And then finished up in person, but then my final year I was back to online, but through the in-person university

@@JohnWilliamTech is online school worth it in your opinion? Im looking as schools like ASU online and western governors university. Do you have any thoughts?

@@thegeth4293 There are two main things I would consider if I were in your shoes: 1) The school: Is it reputable? ASU Online certainly is, in fact, the diploma you receive is the same as the diploma an in-person student gets. How are the network and support opportunities? If you fall behind, are there resources available to help you? Does the school promote connections among online students? I didn't have too much experience with ASU online but, in the CS program, there was a giant discord that pretty much every professor and student was in, with channels for every single class. 2) Are you a person who'll thrive online? The most important thing is that you're able to finish your degree. So set yourself up for success. If you haven't taken an online class before, maybe see if you can take a cheap one at a community college to try it out. There were some classes where I thrived in the online setting, and somewhere I'm not sure I would have passed if I wasn't in person. If you don't think you can maybe attend school part-time, or find schools that have strong hybrid programs. If you think you can, then I'd recommend ASU Online as long as the finances and courses match your expectations and what you want to get out of it.

I use it the same amount, but how I'm using it has changed drastically. Early career, I was googling for implemtation details. How do I specifically do something. Where now for the most part it's to figure out trade offs, look up relevant documentation, find more high level information because I need additional information to make an informed decision about implementation. And then of course I'm always googling error messages and language syntax that I don't use often.

I appreciate it Timo! The goal is to stink a little less with every upload, so hopefully, it's trending it the right direction!

100% - As these AI models continue to improve, all it is going to do is increase the productivity of the humans using them. That is, until the uprising...

@@JohnWilliamTech Oh man I hope the uprising wont happen till our next generations, let my children worry about it instead lmao

Chat GPT does my job

@@Fahodinho You tell Chat-GPT to do your job, don't sell yourself short

@JayDubs This is unrelated; I just wanted to tell you I’m an ASU student, and you inspire me to keep doing my degree. If you can do it I can too. Thank you.

@@FezzyDays225 Thank you so much for the comment! Just a reminder: the motivation and ability to succeed were within you all along, but I'm honored to play a small role in encouraging you along the way!

Thank you! I think it's a super common trap that people fall into, and it isn't until they are on the other side of it until they realize what went wrong

Thank you for the kind words! And that's an excellent point that I didn't really consider in this video!

I don't actually disagree but I have to say that I love tutorials and it's not that straightforward. I wouldn't be able to learn all those things by myself so I'm grateful for all the great teachers that have helped me. I wouldn't recommend tutorials for anyone who is trying to learn simply by copying, because following them doesn't teach problemsolving. But I like tutorials, and I want to get the basics with tutorials. Also when I follow a good tutorial I can get hints of how programmers think. Once I Iearn the basics, I always apply them in my own projects. That's the best and most efficient way to learn for me. There are many bad tutorials so you should pick ones that really flame your passion for coding. I followed some tutorials from The Net Ninja and he actually had the most interesting exercises of the bunch in my opinion, so I learned a lot following those and I took a lot of ideas for my own projects. Also my advice is not to do too many easy exercises. Aim higher. Once you know something, you need to pick a project that uses all of your knowledge and then some. But if you don't know the basics yet, it's not that bad to take it slow and practice repeatedly until you really learn it.

I like my dried fruit and nuts in a bowl on my desk, but you do you!

How about you mind your own business, pal....

I was waiting to see if someone realized the microphone I was holding was unplugged :P The actual mic was a shotgun mic on my camera, but I didn't like how the audio turned out. Will definitely work on that for future videos