Lol i just crashed my machine with one of the assembly inputs. Didnt go full bluescreen but it froze and i had to power off.

I stumbled across a John Conway video on Youtube, and I had a flashback to my high school Qbasic programming class (so yeah, high school was a while ago for me). It was probably the coolest class I took in high school, because although we had a textbook, our assignments were basically to write what we felt were cool/interesting/useful programs and show them to the teacher. Sometimes we had some general guidance, but mostly it was up to us.

And I remembered that one of the programs I had written was a Conway's Game of Life simulator. And I remembered that it ran like crap, and I'm pretty sure I had some of the rules wrong also.

So today I spent a couple hours writing a working version from scratch in Qbasic. Which probably sounds like a painful chore. But it felt really good to complete something like that after all these years.

Get to work.

My first programming language was basic, I learned it from a book - I didn't have access to a computer except for 30-60 minutes/day. I mostly couldn't save programs. I had acces to an apple clone where you could start up a program, then "break" out of it and get dropped to a basic prompt. I would type in programs, mess around with them, and then restart the computer and they'd be gone. You have no idea what a PITA it was to edit code either...

I got Qbasic when I was 12 or so, a friend of mine's dad gave it to me, and I used it a lot. I actually think it was a pretty good programming system, fwiw. After that I moved on to Turbo Pascal and by college, C/C++.

I still kinda miss Qbasic.

Well, technically, those videos show off complex board states within the existing game framework. My goal was to simply build the game framework in QBasic, not to discover/create board states such as those.

Not that those video's aren't incredibly impressive, that's just not what my goal was at all.

It was(is) a much more powerful programming language than it was perceived to be, especially by those who never programmed in it. The downside of it was, most people didn't own the QB4.5 compiler, but everyone had the QB1.1 interpreter that came with DOS/Windows, so a lot of code was distributed uncompiled. But the performance hit from interpreted QB1.1 code vs. compiled code from C/C++ was quite significant.

I had a C-64 and a BBS in high school, could dial long distance free, traded pirated video games with other BBSes all over the country. I tried teaching myself BASIC - beat my head against the wall for a week trying to debug useful errors like "Syntax Error".

It soured me on programming for decade. I got back into it when I was 29. But on the plus side I have a decade less burnout.

Saw a really simple but cool application of web technology yesterday - my sister and her husband have a game called Fibbage on their Apple TV, which is kind of a mix of trivia and Cards Against Humanity. The game runs on the TV, but you play on your phone just by opening a web browser, going to their website, and entering the code shown on the TV to join your other players in the game room. When it's your turn to do something, the browser gets whatever input the game needs and feeds it back to the server for the game to progress.

I imagine the underlying code is pretty easy to write, but that "web browser is your gamepad" idea probably opens a lot of avenues for games.

Lol sounds like me. I tried teaching myself C when I was 16-17. Took one of my mom's Intro to C programming book and tried to read through it. None of it made sense and I gave up after 10 mins. Didn't touch programming for close to a decade as well.

I hope that translate to less burnout like you think.

I love that your mom had an Intro to C book. <3

I started learning C at 14 I think and it will always be my first love. But I'm glad I don't have to write everything in it :P

Funny thing is that mom tried to convince me to do Computer Engineering when I was first accepted in college. Good thing I didn't since I wasn't really mature enough at the time to do what I do now.

Same, started learning it in high school and was the first language I got really good at. Used it a lot in my six years of video game programming too, kinda miss it sometimes now that I'm mostly C++ with some C#/Java.

If I could tell 18-year-old me one thing it's move to Silicon Valley, take programming classes and look for jobs.

Or just spend 5 years of the prime of your youth in Kirksville, Mo instead.

Didn't you have a great time working at Applebee's and doing blow though?

No blow or Applebee's in Kirksville. Just Taco Bell, ****ty weed and Milwaukee's Best.

Red blue or gold?

Blue. Not sure what gold is or if it existed back then.

Care to recommend some good fundamental C/C++ books?

Gold is my inability to remember the correct kinds.

It appears it is aptly called black.

With C K and R is usually the defacto that everyone recommends. The authors developed the C language to create the Unix operating system.

Sorry don't have any referrals for C++ or a combined text.

Stroustrup was the go to recommendation when I went to university. Not sure what's changed in the C++ world since then.

This (well, an older edition of it) was the first C book I ever owned, and while it's been ~15 years I liked it at the time, and it successfully taught me wtf a pointer is which is probably the hardest concept to grasp when learning C: https://www.amazon.com/Primer-Plus-6...SSAE860P0P6EWV

C++ is harder, there are a few non-fundamental books I'd recommend but being a good C++ programmer is a mix of general object-oriented programming knowledge (which is shared by many languages and isn't necessarily just something you learn for C++) as well as language knowledge. I didn't really learn C++ from books so I don't have any good recommendations for getting started, sorry. (I noticed the author of the above book has a similar one for C++ here, maybe that's good? though I wouldn't recommend loading up on one author until you read some of his stuff and decide you like him)

I have Stroustrup's book, and while it's a comprehensive language reference I don't know if I'd recommend it as an introductory teaching tool.

This was similar to my experience.

In the 3rd grade we had one of these computers in the classroom and one of my friend's parents were both computer programmers. He showed me how to drop into the prompt and we started writing programs, mostly choose-your-own-adventure games.

Except, I had no book, he would go home at night and get tips and ideas from his parents and then he would come in the next day and we would re-write the whole thing with the new things we learned. I think eventually we figured out how to save programs to floppy disks (iirc this involved a piece of tape over a security feature so we could write over disks that the class didn't use).

I remember we spent weeks building a part of the game where you shot a bow and arrow at animals as they moved around the screen. The animations for the animal and the traveling arrow and detecting if it hit took so much work. When we had gotten a lot done we took the work to his house, it was the first time I ever went over someone's house I think. His parents were super nerdy and quite odd (put a "please no smoking in our house" sign on a post-it next to their door prior to my arrival) and we had to hide the fact we were building anything resembling a weapon.

Then I decided I wanted to stop getting picked on and made fun of at school and stopped being a nerd. But now I'm coming back!

Going to have a phone call with the director of engineering soon to talk about team placement. I mentioned to him before when I accepted the offer that my interests were more in the backend development rather than front end stuff.

I don't have any web development experience and most of my experience has been in iOS development. I want to be put on the team working with Akka and Scala even though I have no experience working with those technologies, though to be fair most other new grads don't have that experience with it either.

Any advice? I wouldn't mind being put on the mobile team but also at the same time I would rather work on the back-end stuff. Maybe I'm overthinking things. Worst case scenario they put me on the front-end team, which I would suck at, get put on PIP and fired in 4 months.

Another question, is it common to be placed on a team with no prior experience with tech stack that the team is using? I'll have no problem picking up new things.