Hacker News Reader

Comment by ploika | Hacker News Reader

I think an under-served market is "intermediate to advanced programming for people who didn't study computer science but can already write half-decent Python and maybe some SQL, JavaScript or Matlab/Julia/R".

People who are fine with control flow, git, unit tests etc, but who would be lost if you start talking about things like state machines or depth-first search.

I'm largely talking about myself here, but I've worked with dozens of colleagues in several different jobs who would also match this description.

View on HN

“I think an under-served market is "intermediate to advanced programming for people who didn't study computer science…””

I find this too. I’m self taught and have made a lot of good projects with blog tutorials and SO. Python has let me do a lot quickly, but I get stuck on some odd things.

Last time it was data structures. For a project I was expanding, the data structure was insufficient. I imagined there must be more complex data structures to solve the challenges, and I asked people for this. Lack of response helped me realized my thinking was wrong. Then I realized I could do what I needed with SQLite. Haha.

Right now I’m stuck on an aspect of Django. Django is a Python module. When I want to add another module to modify how Django behaves I need to override in my code. It’s all too complicated to imagine for me. Example, adding wiki pages to django by adding django-wiki module, then adding tags to the wiki pages by adding danio-tagulous. I know this is some kind of class override, but I just can’t imagine it.

Also, How to think through adding API data to your project? Like swagger.

For me it’s about thinking or visualizing how to put my code together with other people’s code. And once in a while I ‘imagine’ what a solution should be, and I make everything more complicated than it need be.

>> Right now I’m stuck on an aspect of Django. Django is a Python module. When I want to add another module to modify how Django behaves I need to override in my code. It’s all too complicated to imagine for me. Example, adding wiki pages to django by adding django-wiki module, then adding tags to the wiki pages by adding danio-tagulous. I know this is some kind of class override, but I just can’t imagine it.

Can you expand on what you're trying to achieve? It sounds like it's a mixture of frontend and backend in Django?

>> Also, How to think through adding API data to your project? Like swagger.

Tell us more what you mean. What's your end goal?

> “What's your end goal?”

I’m not looking for problem solving, and I’m not going to discuss specifics here. I’m describing for the OP a difficulty I have in programming, which I assume is due to a gap in my education. You’ll have to use your imagination.

The best I can do to explain what I’m struggling with is confusion over levels of abstraction further from the code I’m writing—write some code, then expand it by importing someone else’s code and then import another piece of code to expand the first import—it’s turtles all the way down.

Dealing with APIs isn’t as terrible as that, but I could use some better language to describe these special cases. I’m also bad at reading other people’s code on GitHub and understanding what they’re doing—for example. But of course I understand my code.

This is something I plan to start writing about. There isn't enough intermediate and advanced material. I've also ran into too many "senior" programmers that not only lack some of the topics you mentioned, but also fail to grasp the importance of structural things that would improve overall code quality.

How's that saying go? Show me a programmer with 20 years experience, and I'll show you a programmer that did the same thing twenty years in a row.

I think you might find this page useful: https://teachyourselfcs.com/

This would be great, because I definitely match this description

Reply on news.ycombinator.com