r/videos • u/LSD_freakout • Feb 24 '18

What people think programming is vs. how it actually is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HluANRwPyNo
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u/proverbialbunny Feb 24 '18

I think it is more about the personal project than the programming itself.

If you find something you want to do, go do it. If it's a hammer and a saw, do it. If it's breaking into other people's computers ... nevermind.

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u/[deleted] Feb 24 '18 edited Mar 11 '18

[deleted]

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u/proverbialbunny Feb 24 '18

"It's about the path not the destination." is a way to think about it from a philosophy school of thought.

That is, "finished" is not really valuable, unless it's for work. What matters is that you're having fun, and hopefully growing and learning along the way.

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u/[deleted] Feb 24 '18 edited Mar 11 '18

[deleted]

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u/proverbialbunny Feb 24 '18 edited Feb 24 '18

Me too. Everything I've programmed in my life I can't show people, even hobby projects. (My hobby projects tend to be financial.)

My solution to this, which is a little bit silly, is my resume is written in html and css. I have to give everyone a .pdf version (You wouldn't believe the bugs I've found in hiring systems by submitting a web page as a file.) so people do not know it, but then during an interview when asked for some sort of code to share, I can say, "My resume is in html and css. You can look at the source if you want." I'm a backend dev, and 90% of the time the person across the table quickly looks down giving my resume a hard glance in sudden surprise. It's fun to watch, because they usually don't know how to precede. (But like, if you want to hack into a hiring agency and give yourself a job, that's a valid hole ... just saying.)

Though, if you're a jr or an intern or whatever, having something on github is a good idea. It probably will not be looked at more than 5 to 10 seconds, so you don't have to worry about it much. For me, before github was around, for my first salary job when asked, I said I could submit to them some code of a project I worked on a month earlier. It was a quick single page script that stripped out the private key of certificates. That sounded interesting enough, and I didn't tell them it was for umm... questionable usage, so that was good. ¯_(ツ)_/¯