Grind it out. Use it as a challenge to see if you are capable of grinding out tough situations.
I personally challenge you to do it! (10$ on paypal if you send me a scan of your degree)

Well now that's unfair. There's any number of reasons someone can swap majors, doesn't have to mean he failed, can simply mean he found something that interests him more or fits him better.

On another topic, in Java, if I do this in an IDE:

And hit enter, I get the '}' for free because I have to have it. Makes sense to me.

In sublime, coding ruby, when I do:

And hit enter, I do not get the 'end' that's required at the bottom of my if statement.

That makes me feel angry!

If you want a real IDE for ruby, use RubyMine. It will complete the ends of your ifs as well as just about anything else you can imagine.

Also, you should almost never have a reason to write an if block that contains an end like that if you're writing idiomatic ruby.

Now now, there's no reason for name-calling

I'm like two hours into studying ruby, so my ruby code is probably never going to get more idiotmatic

Thanks for the pointer.

How'd you approach the travelling salesman problem on Day 9?

brute force, search space is tiny. so far none of the problems have required any fancy algorithms and I don't think any future ones will

You are asking an 18 year old what he wants to do with the rest of his like, then asking him to commit $60k to learn about that thing. Who wouldn't get skittish after a year?

I think it is funny how many articles are out claiming higher education is a waste of money. Of course this is all written by people who actually have a degree. Tell a person without any college, who is blowing black slime out of his nose or missing an arm, has no employer-paid health insurance despite all of his health problems coming from working in dirty and dangerous jobs, that a degree is a waste of time.

It's like when rich and famous celebrities say you should just do what you love. Easy for you to say when you've got millions to back yourself up with.

There always is a point where the money spent on higher education is not worth the benefit.

I'm also starting to believe that having a degree leading to higher pay is a correlation, not pure causation effect.
If you've got the grit and determination to progress well in a profession, you're more likely to have the focus necessary to complete a degree as well as value what the knowledge obtained can do to improve your value in the market place.

Studying just for the sake of obtaining a degree is a terrible goal. Doing it to get the knowledge to then go out there to apply that and hopefully succeed, now that's a good way to look at it.

Way too many people paying ridiculous amounts of money they don't have for a degree they won't be using or won't be able to capitalize on in the real world.

E.g.
If your goal is to have a bunch of kids and be the best home maker in the world, paying 200k for a degree is a terrible choice.
If your goal is to be an artist, where chances of earning a substantial income are very slim, again, spending those 150k for a degree is a bad choice.

In those cases, there's nothing wrong with the goals, or the desire to obtain knowledge. But for the love of it, don't go to the most expensive school just because you passed an entry test.

I think so much of comes from the fact that, in today's world, most people end up in jobs that have nothing to do with their degree and many people change degrees all the time. Of course, this includes so many degrees that, let's be honest, have no future income potential.

The biggest point that many of those writers miss is is that, during the 2008 economic crises, the unemployment didn't hit people with degrees very hard. Granted, they weren't switching jobs, but the unemployment rate among people with degrees wasn't too far off from average. The total unemployment hit a high of 18% or so. While the college educated was well below 10%, the non-college educated as over 30%.

Even today, the story is pretty ugly for those without college.

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=561

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cbc.pdf

Even if there is correlation and not causation (I think there definitely is), there's strong correlation to steady lifetime employment for college grads, which even if college grads are getting paid $15 / hour while non-grads are getting the same, the missing years of income + taking on debt adds up pretty fast.

I wasn't going to bother commenting, but I think its important to point out that the degree discussion is significantly different for an American vs. Non-American.

Outside of the US degrees are typically much cheaper. And getting into the US to work is a lot easier with a degree. A Canadian not finishing a tech degree with only one semester left and who is at least vaguely interested in living in the States at some point is completely moronic.

Here's a few questions for you GitHubers out there (I obviously am not one.)

What is the point of having a GitHub profile other than having a showcase portfolio where you are probably reinventing the wheel with regards to methodologies used for web based applications?

In other words, for someone like me who develops backend systems and non-web software, should I consider getting a profile up there? And if so, why?

How is that better than, say, going to dev meetups locally?

Is your location a consideration (I'm based in Australia) in the decision whether to have a profile or not?

My main concern is that it does not seem worth the time to keep a profile in such a state that it stands out. It would take considerable time and effort to keep it updated. As an outsider, it sounds like keeping a blog, just with code being the center piece.
And, to be honest, I cannot see myself contributing anything that has not been done before. I am also fairly allergic to reinventing the wheel. That may or may not be a character flaw of mine.

Tthere are a lot of ways people use github, but I use it to host my projects and demonstrate my coding ability, or lack thereof. The projects I have aren't web-based and while reinventing a wheel here and there, not strictly reinventing so much as using libs and stuff.

I think dev meetups are a two-edged sword. They are great for meeting other developers, but not so great for finding a job. Plus so many flat line withing a few months. Just about every meetup I have attended has a strict no recruiting policy, which is either taken seriously or sort of tossed to the wind as long as recruitment is done between developers. It really depends. The exception to this rule is for the companies that are funding the meetup, but you figure that, if they have 100 devs to choose from...

Most of the meetups here in Austin are advertisements more than educational and useful, plus so many have 100+ people, and that isn't a good thing for people like me, so a silent github profile attached to an application is a better option.

Speaking of which, I'm going to attend some founder's meetup tomorrow. This is supposedly for people to pitch their ideas and find people to work for them. There is going to be 135 people, which probably means I'll beeline to the bar and wonder why I attended.

I feel that Github has become the dumping ground for personal projects. So many people put down there class homework assignments, or some <100 liner project. Unless you are a major contributor or have some 100+ star project, it's not worth it.

On the other hand, if you are looking to sharpen your programming skills, I think it's an awesome opportunity. You can find some projects where you can get to work with some real smart people.

You can do both.

I get contacted every 6-8 weeks out of the blue from GitHub because I set my e-mail to public. People asking for advice, small jobs, work availability, etc..

I'm hardly a superstar either. Have about 40 followers, and half a dozen projects with 50-300 stars. Most projects came from scratching an itch that I couldn't find elsewhere.

I would say goto meetups, open source your projects if it makes sense and blog about things that interest you. You never know when one of your articles will go viral. A lot of opportunities can come from getting 20,000 uniques on your page in a few hours because it's trending on HN.

I just use github to follow projects I'm interested in or need to track down later. I think you're making github out to be something it isn't. You can show your github profile to potential employers but I don't think anyone sifts through them looking for talent like they do linkedin profiles, at least to the same extent.

Github isn't very social media-ish or gamified, thankfully.

You're being modest, having 40 followers and a bunch of projects with a 50+ stars is rare.

Re: github

Easy backup and version control? Are either of those true?

Just doing a small end term project this semester left me wishing I'd done a better job of keeping track of revisions and separated out the new feature ideas

Initially I brushed off doing something like this because I didn't think it would be worth the effort, but then I realized I don't really know how much effort it would take. So, question:

There's a website with a store. Say that I wanted to set up a process (not sure if locally or on a server somewhere) that would, on a given time interval, load up the webpage (requires logging in first so it would have to maintain session state), parse what items are for sale (this part is probably easy), and send me a text message any time it detects a new item (probably easy using a web service somewhere?).

What's the best toolset to develop something like this and how hard would it be?

phantomjs & twilio, it'd take like 20 lines of code and an afternoon

Use this:
https://www.kimonolabs.com/pricing

You can do all the scraping in about 5 minutes, and turn it into an API on their free plan. Looks like they support email alerts and webhooks. So either you could do everything with just kimono, or throw up a simple heroku endpoint to make use of the API you create, using twilio for texts.

If the scraping is really simple, you could just write a script in your language of choice (i'd use ruby and mechanize), and again twilio for the text. you can run the script every 10m for free on heroku's scheduler.

I've definitely gotten more and better solid leads from my github than LinkedIn. LinkedIn is basically a recruiter's number games, analogous to going to a bar and drunkedly asking as many girls you can find to have sex. Github actually requires a little bit of getting know people before you make initial contact.

Yeah dude you're a superstar. I thought I was proud of my 21 star jquery plugin.

I use github the way it was intended - a place to store and backup code that I don't mind being public. It also effectively serves as a proof of "hey I know x technology, here's a working app" but that's not its primary purpose for me.

woah pimp