You gotta find places farther away

I think spending your time by yourself trying to polish yourself into a "level 2" or whatever programmer is going to be something of a waste of time. It's going to be hard to explain to an employer what you were doing unless you have something to show for it, possibly not even then.

The best way to get experience writing code is to write code. And the best way to get experience writing professional code is to do it for a living.

I have a lot more experience with this problem from the perspective of an artist - a lot of people are trying to build their artistic skills to a high level so they can start doing art, when they should just start doing it, and accept that their first efforts will eventually be an embarassment to them, and that this is a good thing.

Most days I don't even eat lunch, I just drink a protein shake then go back to work. Even an hour lunch every day would drive me bananas. Also I would weigh 400 lbs if I went with the coworkers to the typical stuff-your-face Mexican places they like to go.

Typical lunch for them:

• 10:30-11 - time when most people arrive at work
• 11:15-11:30 - one bored guy starts milling around, gathering forces as he goes
• 11:45 - most of the lunch crew is hanging around the one person's desk who is actually on a meeting or trying to get something done
• 11:55 - crew slowly shuffles towards the elevator, inevitably someone has to rush back to their desk while the crew waits
• 12:00 - crew gets on elevator, gets down to bottom floor, goes outside, now has to decide who's going to drive
• 12:10 - after sorting out who has a baby seat, who has boxes in their car, who drove the last 3 times, etc. - a decision is reached on drivers(s)
• 12:11 - crew realizes they haven't picked a place to eat yet
• 12:15 - the choice between the standards: 1 of 3 gutbomb Mexican places, and Indian place, a sushi place and Whole Foods buffet takes surprisingly long - new places might be discussed but rarely chosen
• 12:20 - start driving around the endless merry-go-round of the 12-story parking garage
• 12:25 - on the open road
• 12:35ish - arrive at lunch place, eat
• 1:15 - head back to work
• 1:25 - get to parking garage
• 1:35 - finish parking garage and elevator merry-go-round, shuffle back to desks

Yeah I would definitely be the weirdo in France.

1:40 - time to start thinking about getting ready to head home

1:45 - stare blankly at computer screen for 30 minutes or so while food digestion takes up all available blood flow and deprives the brain of oxygen

Buzzer I really like your descriptions of work life.

has anyone used pluralsight for learning/training? any recommendations for paths or training videos?

you say this like it's a bad thing.

Which is exactly why he doesn't want to necessarily take the first job he's offered as a developer.

I think this is somewhat misleading except for a student - it’s a good list of things for maybe a CS student to aspire to learn, but most experienced practitioners need to get better at a few things they are already good at and shouldn’t worry about most of what’s on this list. Beyond their expertise, what’s important are communication skills, flexible disposition, self-awareness and social and organizational skills that allow them to work well with those who complement their skills.

Same here - I generally don't eat lunch at work unless I'm really hungry for some reason or it's a social thing.

I completely agree with your assessment. I just thought it would help Noodle with his side project of accumulating "next level" ideas and resources.

I also agree with Rusty that getting a job as soon as possible should be the priority, not trying to be an log (n) level programmer in that matrix. In fact those developers that are log (n) in every category of that matrix are probably unicorns.

I agree with adios that your skills will not necessarily improve at just any shop because you're writing code for a living.

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sadly, i've yet to find myself in a position where I could choose between job offers.

wife finally had that option recently. seemed pretty sweet. tho, the job offers were miles apart in terms of compensation so it was really a non-starter

https://developers.slashdot.org/stor...ls-50-released

web sockets and APIs in rails 5.0

now if only i knew what web sockets were

Same here. I do straight 8 and never bothered with lunch except when the coworkers went out to eat on Friday. We took a good hour, but it was nice to connect and chat with all of them. Isn't hard to kill an hour with interesting conversation.

In case that was not in jest (sarcasm meter broken here), a super simplified explanation:
Program on computer A talks to program on computer B, the link between them is a socket. If that link goes over the web, its called a web socket.

Sad day at work today as we learned our project has been cancelled.

Redeployed I hope.

Sounds like that is the plan. Just sad that I won't be "the man" on a major part of this new project, it was a real treat to be able to do that so early in my career.

When you ask your mom for a popsicle and wait while she gets you one, that's a regular web request.

When you ask your mom for a popsicle then go back to playing video games, and she brings you one some time later, that's an ajax request.

When your mom presents you with a popsicle unannounced, that's a websocket.

replace popsicle with chicken nuggets and you've got yourself a meme, sir

I don't understand your analogy so let me ask something in non-tech babble.

I have 2 users logged in viewing the same resource.
User 1 updates the resource. Server says "this resource has changed"
Server tells User 2 resource has updated
[optional?] Server sends User 2 the updated resource

Real world example might be...
User 1 adds comment to a article.
Server sees the list of comments has updated
Server tells all users currently viewing (whether active or afk) that the resource has updated
[optional?] Server updates the view for all users currently viewing the article

I think it's funny when people talk about websockets. They're just sockets. The difference is, they're not typically limited the way web connections used to be.

In a typical web connection, the client says "Here's some data" and the server says "here's my response" and that's the end of it

With websockets the client says "heres some data" and the server says "here's a response" and then the client says "here's some more data" and the server says "here's another response"

The data sent by the client tends to be smaller, little messages. The responses sent by the server also tend to be smaller, json or xml data that gives status updates. Think "messages" instead of "pages"

But there's no magic, the internet was built on sockets long before the web got involved.

I live pluralsight, it's well worth the cost imo.

The Spring/Java ones were probably the best ones I did (Spring Core/MVC/Security), but I don't think I was unhappy with any of the courses I took.

So am I way off base? I swear I remember reading about something resembling what i was describing not too long ago. Not exactly production ready but in the works.