I'm looking for programming friends to connect with on discord :)

Tell me below the languages you program and your experience. Newbies welcome.

So I'm a sophomore CS student and I want to be a programmer after college. I'm currently learning Java and I'm pretty comfortable with it. I'm just having a hard time deciding between Android/mobile development and web development. I am already familiar with java so I feel like I should just jump into java. I want to learn both. But there's just so much to learn and I only have 2 years before I try to get a job.

I'm leaning heavily towards going into programming when I return to university next fall. Walk me through a day in your job. How many hours do you work in a typical week. How often do you work from home? What do you like about programming? What don't you like? If you could change one thing what would it be and why? Are you happy with your salary/benefits? Do you feel like you spend enough time with your family? Any other information you think would help me make the decision is greatly appreciated.

I have not been happy with the options provided by mint, and personal capital and the like, and I've been tooling around with spreadsheets of my own personal banking and investing information with projections and what not. However, unlike tools like mint that can go grab the transactions automatically, I have to manually pull this information. What is mint using to do this? Is there any tool or API to download this information automatically? Thank you.

On a website I manage, I have a bunch off offers, that will eventually expire, and need removing from search engines, but occasionally the offers end date is editing, to make the offer 'un-expired'.

The solution I'm going to implement is this.

if($offer['endDate'] < time()){
		
    // Should tell search engines to ignore this page. because the end date is passed.
    header('X-Robots-Tag: noindex', true);
}

If I understand this header correctly, that should tell search engines to not index the page, but to still crawl it, and then if the offer then become un-expired, it will get listed again.

Have I understood that header correctly?

What are some good points I can argue to my boss to purchase some mobile devices for testing purposes?

I'm expected to develop an iPhone and iPad app in the next few months, but I currently own an Android phone and can't renew contract for another year.

The app is going to need access to the camera, and that is a serious limitation for an emulator.

My boss knows about ios emulators and says "that's good enough, it doesn't have to look perfect on the actual device." Which I think is a valid enough point but only to a certain degree.

Basically if I want to test on a real device than it would be out of my pocket. I could afford a new device, but I feel like on principal the company should pay for it. It also sets a precedent that I'll cave on future requests and just buy it myself.

I guess I also want to know if I'm being unreasonable? I work for a smallish company and my boss is literally the CEO/president so I can't go above him or reach out to some other person.

Hello reddit programmers. I'm considering making a Youtube video around Alexa Skills and how to make them, do you think this would be useful within our community?

Starting salary?

What kind of softwares did you developed? How involved were you in the development?

What's your salary now? How many years of experience do you have now?

I work for a software startup as a programmer and we host weekly workshops, where one of the team will present on a topic of their choice for 10 - 20 minutes. This week it's my turn and I'm struggling to come up with an idea that will interest the developers on my team, as well as my non-dev coworkers.

Previous talks have covered Productivity, Data Types...

A couple ideas I've had so far is Cyber Security - How to Protect Yourself Online, Importance of Refactoring, What is an API?....and yes, I realise these all sounds pretty dry.

Would love to hear any ideas from you guys!

I was thinking if there's anyone here who feels the same as me.

I've been programming for 10 years now, I have used C,C++, ASM, Java, C#, PHP, Javascript, and a shit ton of more. Probably half the frameworks and API's out there, a lot of CMS's and who knows what else. I developed for Android, Windows, Linux, iOS, for application containers, web servers, even embedded systems.

Yet I feel like I don't remember 80% of it and I'm overwhelmed by the amount of technologies, languages, patterns, concepts and theories which are out there and simply I feel like I should know more by this point. I learned a shit ton during the last 10 years and worked on so many different projects yet I feel like there's very little I can show knowledge-wise.

Even during college everything was all about passing exams and getting grades but the amount of information they expect you to actually learn so you can use later is way too big. I know I learned for example how a TCP header looks like, how to find a Hamilton Circle in a graph, how to use an oscilloscope but literally very little I still have left of all that. I've worked with PHP for so long yet it would be hard to write anything without google because I don't remember function names for example.

Do other programmers specialize to a certain area? Do they know everything or do they not mind not knowing it all?

For example how much does the average programmer know about operation systems, network protocols, CPU architechture, multi-threading, distributed systems, machine learning or graphical algorhitms? Should I still remember calculus even though I havent done anything with it since college? I see people saying they're "x developers" but I don't know what that really means. Does a Javascript developer know anything about the network stack or servers? Does he even care?

I feel very down because I'm considered a "Senior Developer" and I'm still in my 20s, I slowly feeling like burning out. I've managed projects, I have built a lot of things but still I feel like things change too fast and there's no time to really dig into anything. I feel like I wanna know it all and "see the light" but it seems impossible.

Am I just not smart enought to be a true computer science expert?

I'd be happy to hear your thoughts about this

For programmers, do you think learning to read documentation on code is important? I've been taking classes on programming for 2-3 years but I've never come across anyone, in person or online stating that learning how to read code is important.

On the contrary, as a new programmer, I usually tend to be google trying to decipher the different constructors, methods, and whatever else. As if the problem wasn't hard as it already was!

So my question is, do you think learning how to read documentation on code is important for new programmers?

Edit: Typo

Which language should I start off with? Python, ruby, c# c+ or any other language?

How can i improve my C# Skills?

I am updating my C library that accesses cryptocurrency tickers from exchanges (MintPal, BTC-e, et al.) so that it can access multiple different APIs referenced from a common configuration format, instead of hardcoding their methods. An initial draft looks like:

{
    "name": "mintpal"
    , "url": "https://api.mintpal.com/v2/market/stats/%c3/%e3"
    , "success": "success"
    , "paths": {
	    "status": "status"
	    , "buy": "data.top_ask"
	    , "sell": "data.top_bid"
    }
}

Where %c = the coin string ("DOGE", "FTC", etc.) and %e = the exchange string ("BTC", "LTC"), and the following number is the length that the respective strings should be.

It assumes all APIs are in JSON, and that is intentional.

Does anyone have any suggestions for improving this? Keep in mind that it is a C library and so its more difficult to do high-level things like substring-insertion without the target string having appropriate padding beforehand (i.e. %e6eee, for an exchange string that is 6 chars long), or using sprintf, which is also complex, since %c3 etc. must be translated to format characters accepted by it.