hath995

Generally, I find programs that are useful to me are good places to start. Is this something that you do regularly that could be automated or generalized? I've made programs that help with my classes and sometimes even published them for the rest of the class to use. Is there anything aggravating and repetitive in your major that you think you or others would enjoy no longer dealing with?

Going in a different direction is there some technology that you know of but aren't too familiar with but might be useful later? Learn it by implementing something basic using it.

Super clear youtube tutorials. I'm quite impressed. I feel like this makes category theory fairly approachable.

I'm not an expert on Node.js but my understanding is that Ryan Dahl wasn't happy with the performance that PHP and Apache provide. PHP is very feature complete but the way Apache handles web requests means that a web server has a relatively low max capacity. Apache handles requests by forking the process which is both slow and resource intensive.

The way Ryan explained it is that moving past that performance barrier is a solved by a single threaded application that can respond to event based input output. He liked Javascript because it is such a minimal language which already supports that paradigm and has advanced tools and community.

That's the main point that I recall from one of the talks of his that I watched. There are some tertiary reasons as well which make Javascript a good choice.

Javascript is pretty hot right now with the advent of NodeJS. Scala and Clojure are the up and comers. Python is a solid choice. Java, C/C++ are classic and have some new features on the horizon. Haskell, Erlang, and other lisp varieties are enjoying a resurgence.

Those languages cover many genres of programs: Scientific, parallel/concurrent, server-side, client-side, desktop, mobile, embedded, scripting, business, gaming, and so on.

The question is what are you most interested in? Are you trying to find a job or are you learning because you find it interesting? Do you have projects in mind? What would be the right tool for the job?

As someone who also was recently diagnosed I highly recommend seeking out a counselor and speaking with your doctor. After getting treatment for ADD I am much happier and productive at school and work. In general, I'm less stressed as well.

A therapist almost diagnosed me a couple years ago but I was biased against the idea of accepting that I had ADD. Of course, now I realize how much wasted time, money, and effort I might have saved if I had been willing to seek treatment the first time a psychologist suggested it to me. Counseling and medication have all been very helpful.

It's tough because it isn't well understood and the public has many wrong and negative impressions of ADD/ADHD. One of the toughest is of course that many people don't think it is real. However, personally, after a year of treatment looking at my life before and after being treated for ADD, it is clear that treatment worked for me. That really dispels that notion for me. If it walks like a duck and quacks like duck... My university also had a lot of great resources to help learn about ADD so check in with them as well.

Tarn Adams, the creator of dwarf fortress, is the canonical game programmer example.

I'd say do both. If you can get a job with just the developer boot camp then that is probably worth while. I haven't done a boot camp so I don't know what they cover but there is quite a lot to computer science. Yes you may be able to program and do some software jobs but you would probably be constraining yourself to a small set of jobs.

Take a look at these for an idea of depth of software development: http://www.indiangeek.net/wp-content/uploads/Programmer%20co... http://matt.might.net/articles/what-cs-majors-should-know/