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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 5th, 2023

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  • I managed to get into web-dev without a CS degree, but I definitely consider myself one of the lucky ones.

    I got a bachelor’s in Chemistry, but realized very quickly after graduating that there are precisely zero decent paying jobs for a bachelor’s in general chemistry. Literally the only place that even called me back was offering $14/hr to do urinalysis… working the graveyard shift.

    I ended up getting a job doing content review as a contractor for the largest video sharing platform (you know the one). A lot of the work was really monotonous, mostly just copying and pasting stuff. We had a quota that once we hit, we could stop working (and still be paid a full day). I could already hit the quota in around 3-4 hours, but I realized if I didn’t have to copy/paste, I could cut that down to only 1-2 hours.

    So, in my spare time at work I ended up learning JavaScript and making a chrome extension to do just that. I showed my bosses and they ended up putting me in a full time programming position.

    I don’t use my chemistry degree at all, but my math minor definitely comes in handy.






  • Thanks for the very thorough response! I will absolutely check this out. I would say I have a fair bit of experience in OO programming. A decent amount from JS and also a good bit from C#, which I dabbled in for a good while during my “I’m going to make a game in unity” phase haha.

    I know enough C++ to get myself in trouble, but it seems every time I have to use it I get super frustrated that things aren’t as simple as they are in other languages I’m familiar with. That, and I never seem to know the exact terminology to look up my particular issue (which is half the battle anyways).

    I actually needed to write a UDF in C for my mariadb instance just the other day. It ended up taking me several hours for something that would have taken me just minutes in JS or C#. It ended up being a pointer + memory allocation issue. Basically I wasn’t clearing the allocated memory and resetting the index between function calls. It also frustrates me to no end that I can’t just array.push() to add a new char to the end of a char array lol.

    I also wrote a VST with Juce in C++ a few years back. I got it working eventually, but God I remember it being an absolute nightmare.

    I guess really I have a hard time understanding when and why it’s even necessary to use pointers etc since that stuff has been abstracted away in the higher level languages I know. It seems like you could essentially get the same functionality by just knowing when things are passed by value vs passed by reference.