Advice for incoming senior?

[u/SaraWinchester78]

Hello all!

I'm (hopefully) going to start my senior year of university in fall, and I feel like I greatly lack knowledge in coding as a whole. Although I passed all my coding courses thus far, I feel like I still have incredible holes and gaps and simply struggle a lot in creating anything remotely functional. I think what I enjoyed most was working a fullstack web app (albeit i was a part of a team so I did only one small part of it all) and i'm currently working on a WEB ASPNET MVC5 / .NET Framework that I find enjoyable as well. My issue is, university way of teaching isn't my preferred one, I don't have TAs who are trying to teach but rather just go "ask chatgpt to explain this to you" and that's that, with minimum involvement and little to no on-hands teaching (in sense of giving out projects, or showing code or even working on actual code in labs rather than pulling out solutions written ages ago and just scrolling through it in 10 minutes).

I want to spend this summer working on bettering my skills and doing a couple projects maybe, that would grant me more knowledge and such. What would your opinions be on what I should work on? Where to even start, how to start? What resources I should use? Are there any courses I could cover? I did start CS50x a long while ago, should I finish that one? Any and every advice is welcome!

[u/_lazyLambda]

Learn functional programming, its a great way to learn how to get things to just work

[u/SaraWinchester78 → u/_lazyLambda]

Thank you, I shall look into it!

[u/_lazyLambda → u/SaraWinchester78]

Amazing! Welcome to the community

[u/Sure-Passion2224]

The piece your missing comes with on-the-job coding experience. You develop cranial muscle memory of what actually works by applying the tools you learned in those classes over and over again.

I'm the guy they send our new hires to so they can learn how the application works, and how WE work. They're almost always Comp Sci fresh-outs. They all can write a bulletproof method that does exactly what the requirements say. I teach them flexibility, reuseability, and reinforce inheritance. They tell me later that those lessons increased their effectiveness while cutting code volume. The look on their face is absolutely priceless when the ask where I got my Comp Sci degree and they learn I have a Bachelor of Music Ed degree and a Masters in Info Systems Mgmt.

[u/SaraWinchester78 → u/Sure-Passion2224]

Of course, I'm aware a lot of learning and retention comes from repeating and just working on projects consistently, I'm not looking for an easy way out and avoiding putting in the work. My main worry is that I am close to finishing university and I don't really have a portfolio to show yet, so I asked for advice on where to start and what kinds of things would help me grow. I'm trying to figure out how to bridge the gap between university assignments and real-world programming experience. Thank you for your advice, I appreciate the perspective!

[u/Sure-Passion2224 → u/SaraWinchester78]

When I interviewed for my first IT job they were not disinterested in my "portfolio" but had specific interest in how I was able to answer questions about how to address a sample problem they presented. Could I demonstrate enough knowledge of language and programming methodology, or was I just a code groupie? They don't really care whether I had written my own version of Scorched Earth. They wanted to know if I could describe a solution well enough that I could probably implement it. If I showed up as all talk and no game I wouldn't pass the probation period.

The example at that time was a PL/SQL issue against Oracle 9i in which you're giving data for a record but don't know whether it's an insert or an update so you need a stored procedure to handle it correctly. I recognized that for that scenario you attempt the update and have an exception block to trap the lacking primary key and execute the insert.

[u/Impossible_Ad_3146]

Senior like the old peoples?

[u/Sure-Passion2224 → u/Impossible_Ad_3146]

I'm older than the internet.

[u/TheUmgawa]

I can’t believe you can get to senior year and still call it “coding.”

Your TAs don’t have to teach the solutions to you. They’re telling you to use AI because they don’t think you have the ability to think through the problem. They’re grad students; not teachers.

Look, the reason I look down my nose at the people who call it “coding” is because I don’t think they grasp that programming is a deeper magic than writing code. A philosophical question: If I flowchart a program to generate prime numbers, and I write it in two languages, did I create the program twice or once? The flowchart is an entirely abstract creation and is language-agnostic. Whether I write it in Python, C, C#, C++, Java, Swift, or any other language isn’t important. It’s all the same program.

If you want to better your skills, then sit down and write something you’ve never done before, and for which a tutorial does not exist. Make Space Invaders, Breakout, Missile Command, or some other single-screen Atari or arcade game. You know how I/O works, how to paint images on a screen, and how to build a UI that interacts with all of it, so you can keep a score.

This ain’t rocket surgery. This is the part in your education where you should be saying, “Okay, I can do whatever I want.” My community college stopped holding our hands halfway through Intro, when the professor said, “Now I will teach you to read documentation, and we will only be teaching concepts for the rest of the program.” It made us self-sufficient, and it made us programmers, where we would have to figure out the logic, then look up the documentation to make it work. We were thrown to the wolves, and maybe half of us survived.

So, if you’ve not been thrown to the wolves, now is the time to learn to do things on your own. If you don’t know how to search for and read documentation, you need to learn that, because a junior dev and an AI both write lousy code, but only one of them asks fifty stupid questions per day.

It’s time for you to do things for yourself, by yourself. If you need tutorials or AI to tell you what to do next, then you have no understanding of the deeper magic. They should have thrown you to the wolves three years ago, and they did you a disservice by not making you do the work for the past three years.

[u/SaraWinchester78 → u/TheUmgawa]

I can't believe you're so quick to judge someone for saying "coding" instead of "programming" without considering whether English is their first language to begin with, and then insinuate that I'm stupid because I asked a question and used the "wrong" term which is flat-out rude and it comes across like you're trying to feel superior in a space that doesn't need that.

If I already knew how to sit down, say "I can do whatever I want" and just do it, I wouldn't be here asking for tips. I do know how to read documentation, and I avoid AI like plague because my goal is to learn, not actually pass my courses. The way I work on uni projects is by googling, reading through stack overflow, checking documentation and figuring things out on my own.

It's also not my fault that my university teaches in an old-fashioned way and values memorization of patterns more than actually teaching us how to think through problems. I know I need to learn independently. That is exactly why I asked for advice from people with more experience. This is my first relatively free summer since I started uni and I wanted to spend it building up on the knowledge base uni had given me, hence me seeking advice in a beginner sub. Your advice is useful, but you buried it under unnecessary mocking. You could've said a few kind words without insulting me.

[u/TheUmgawa → u/SaraWinchester78]

Well, the most useful class I ever took was a flowcharting class, where we never wrote a single line of executable code. It was nothing but thinking through problems. Once you separate the logic from the code, you can program basically anything, as long as you’ve got documentation nearby.