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Were you the host to this pandemonium, of did it take place in another house? I hope the former...! Glad to know you came out of this pretty OK.

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Thanks!

 

Goodness, thankfully nowhere near my place. He lived & died in Southern France. Would have been an opportunity for a nice trip in other circumstances.

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9 hours ago, osmosisch said:

Thanks!

 

Goodness, thankfully nowhere near my place. He lived & died in Southern France. Would have been an opportunity for a nice trip in other circumstances.

 

I think it's Nice, but it's an understandable mistake.

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My company announced today that they're going to close down the plant I work at.  It'll still run for a couple of years and decommissioning will take time after that (I'm sure a lot of you already know this but I work at a nuclear power plant) but we're essentially done.  I'm not entirely sure how to feel about this.  I've been wanting to get out of this job for a long time now and this is probably the push I need to actually do it.  I'm not exactly eager to start the job seeking process though.  I don't want to work at another plant, or even in a related field, but I'm not really sure what else I'm qualified to do.  It's entirely possible that some other company will come and buy the plant and if that happened odds are I'd end up working for them since you need qualified people who know the plant and you can't bring in a completely new staff to do that.

 

I feel like I should be nervous or scared or anxious or something but mostly I'm just unsure.

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After everything I've heard about your job, hearing this I was relieved and excited for you! Seems like you've got a bunch of transferable skills, a ton of experience and a cool resume (having NUCLEAR POWER PLANT on your CV will always turn heads). So take this opportunity to find a job that challenges and excites you and doesn't treat you like shit. They're out there, so aim your sights high, stride in there and take one!

 

#YOLO

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Yeah, I'm in camp 'most likely good for you' - find something that's gonna give you more family time man :)

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I appreciate the support.  I just wish I had an idea of where to go from here.  Heck, I don't even know where I WANT to go much less where I can.

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I'm trying to teach myself to code in an effort to move away from teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL for short). I'm not even sure if I like coding so far. I'm using Python at the moment as I've heard it's one of the easier and applicable languages, but other than that I have no idea about it. Is that even a good idea? I've been trying out a load of new stuff recently in an effort to make myself feel more productive, but I just get this crippling anxiety when I start something new. Am I wasting my time? Am I wasting my money? I started German as I wanted to start learning another language. I don't get as anxious from that because I've already had language learning experience and I feel like I know how I learn in that field. But programming is so alien to me. There's sooo many terms being thrown around and I have no idea what it is going on. 

 

My girlfriend and I have moved to Vietnam recently and so far we've made 0-1 friends. It's been way harder than we expected, but it seems the people of the TEFL world here are much more transient and immigrants tend to move on from Vietnam, much quicker than those I came across in Europe. I'm very much a believer that if you're not happy you should do something about it, and to that end I tried to set up a couple of board game nights but the majority fell through. Turns out depending on strangers from the internet isn't the way you should structure your social life.

 

There's also very, very few people I've clicked with recently. I've made 2 big moves in my life before this one and they were both very similar. After the 4 month mark in both the last places I moved to I had at least a small circle of friends I'd be happy to hang out with, but at the moment I just see people so I can have more of a social life beyond my house and my girlfriend. We've talked about that and she feels exactly the same way so I don't feel guilty typing that out! 

 

I don't know why I'm even writing this. To vent maybe. Has anyone else had similar experiences with any of this? What did you do? How did it turn out? 

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As far as programming goes, for me the most productive way to think about it when learning was that I was learning wizardry. Arcane incantations that need to be performed just right, or they won't produce the desired results - but when you do get it right, you have just used words to effect real change. Viewing things through this lens made me keep at it, and is honestly still kind of correct in my view.

 

I'm currently trying to gear up to teach my eldest daughter programming, or at least see if she's interested. It's been an interesting experience. If you're stuck or confused you should just ask here, I think. there's tons of helpful people around, and learning by oneself can be a lonely and inefficient experience.

 

I'm sorry to hear it's hard to make friends in your current situation. I've only really done one big move in my life, and moved back closer to home after a year but definitely recognise the feeling. Having worked in academia, the transience of  otherwise often really good connections was really sad. We've still got some friends we see maybe once a year out of it but it needs a ton of organising.

 

Anyway, I hope things improve for you.

 

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I'd just like access to some clear cut definitions and ideas for things to learn about. I'm trying a beginner's course on Coursera and it literally just looks like nonsense to me at the moment. I don't know the difference between any of the terminology. Would you agree that Python is a good beginner's language? Or should I try something else? Do you program for pleasure or is it part of your job @osmosisch

 

It's interesting learning a language in my own language. With German I've been lacking direction, but recently found some good materials online for free. I wonder if there's any other language learners out there? It seems like there's quite a few bilingual people here! I really should be learning Vietnamese as well, and I think I actually will end up taking a class next month. Does any one have any experience with learning Asian languages? 

 

Yeah, it's the organising that stresses me out. I feel like I need to it myself otherwise it doesn't happen. But then I think maybe people don't really want to do it because otherwise they'd make it happen. But then I know I've flaked on various social events for the tiniest most pathetic reasons. It's difficult making friends as an adult! 

 

What does everyone's week look like so far? 

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I program for work these days, yes. It's been a bit of a winding road. I've not done much python myself, so I can't really speak to that. I started in BASIC on the Commodore 64, but these days like 75% of what I do is either straight-up JavaScript or compiles to it. If you like a lot of immediate visual feedback for your actions, I recommend NetLogo as a learning environment. I don't think it matters all that much, as long as, as you said, you get the core concepts right.

 

Those are (as I see it):
 - variables: the places where you store data. In some languages you can modify such data after storing it, others don't allow that. Examples: 'x', 'boardgamesList'

 - instructions: what you tell the computer to do. Examples: 'x = boardgameList.length', 'boardgameList.add('Scrabble')

 - flow control: systems that let you execute instructions conditionally, or repeatedly. Examples: 'if x < 3 then x = x +1', 'forEach(boardgame in boardgameList) print(boardgame)'

 - functions: (usually named) sets of instructions that you can supply with some data, and which can output some data as well. Examples: 'function addOne(x) { return x + 1 }' , 'function   Some languages let you actually treat functions as variables, so that you can 'store' actions and pass them around your program.

 

Fundamentally, there is information, and there are various ways to act upon, and transform, that information. Everything else is window dressing.

 

I've had to learn a lot of languages over the years, Dutch school is pretty heavy on that (more so when I went to school, English wasn't quite as ubiquitous then) and I'll say that learning each next one is easier than the previous one because you at some point start to see the similarities and differences and those make it easier to 'attach' concepts. On the other hand, you do get a lot of cross-contamination which can be annoying. Like I'll find myself retrieving Polish words when trying to speak French and vice versa.

 

I absolutely suck at self-directed anything so I applaud people who are able to learn by themselves.

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Oh that's pretty cool! I just want to try it out and see if I can have some sort of career change. I was thinking about doing some sort of higher education again, but I can't really see myself being able to afford it. Initially I was thinking about Germany as they have lots of cheap higher education available, but Brexit is round the corner and I don't know what that'll do. I'm not sure it'll do anything so we'll see. What's your job then? 

 

That's actually helped me a lot in terms of thinking about how things work. I'm gonna do some more stuff with Python tomorrow, but for now I'm just doing some reading/watching so I can get my head around it. 

 

Yeah, I'm getting a lot of interference from Spanish whenever I speak to Vietnamese people in the market. My brain just grabs for any foreign word in my head which would make sense in that situation. They normally don't know I'm accidentally speaking Spanish instead of English so it's not too embarrassing. My girlfriend and I just had dinner with our Vietnamese landlords and another tenant in the building. It was such a nice night. My girlfriend can speak very basic Vietnamese, and the landlords' English is just that, Landlord English. Stuff they need to know to say in the most basic way in the context of renting a place out. It then turns out that one of our landlords speaks German. So now I can actually communicate with him. 

 

I was always very jealous of Dutch people when I was younger. I spent a lot of time in Delft on holiday as a kid and used to get very envious that you all just seemed to naturally speak English. How often do you use your other languages? What have you learned? 

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I'm lead developer on the http://drugis.org software. It's pretty exciting times, we're seeing some uptake begin among companies.

 

I'm happy that helped. I love trying to explain this crazy magic so please ask more if you want :)

 

How cool to have a German speaker in Vietnam. I'd expect the majority foreign language there would stil lbe French from colonial times.

 

In general I'd agree it's correct to be envious of the Dutch, haha. If only the people here were more willing to share some of the goodness. Oh well.

 

None of our TV besides children's stuff is dubbed, which is generally given as a major reason behind people's uptake of especially English. In secondary school we had to take English, French and German for at least several years. I dropped French and German after year 4, but later got a very francophile girlfriend who took me on trips to France and the french-speaking parts of Canada which made me pick that back up. Besides that I also learned Latin and old Greek due to my school type. I've lost most of the Greek but the Latin really helped when trying to pick up more French, Italian and Spanish.

 

Then I went and married a Polish woman and got kids so now I also speak Polish through osmosis, which is convenient because my in-laws don't speak anything else.

 

Life's so interesting when you just kind of stay open to opportunities.

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Oh that's really cool. What exactly was your path to getting there? Did you have some sort of form training and end up getting a certificate or did you just learn on your own and do projects to build a portfolio? 

 

I mean my spoken German is barely better than very basic holiday German, but it's cool that we've got at least 3 options to work in now. Yeah, I think some of the older generation do speak French, but I think it's a very low percentage. A lot of people seem to know numbers and very very basic English, but there's a lot of kids learning English now so I suspect it'll be a very different place in 10 years in terms of English speakers. 

 

Yeah, I found the biggest improvement to my Spanish was when I started watching TV with no intention of understanding 100% of it. I just wanted to listen and see what I could pick out. That's kind of what listening to a foreign language is like. It helped having the visuals for context. In the UK there's definitely an aversion to learning foreign languages to the point where it's almost embarrassing. I remember being told by my dad, half-jokingly half-not, that I was wasting my time with my French homework.

 

What's Polish like? Does it use cases too? I like the sound of it and in an ideal world I'd love to learn it. Do you have cases in Dutch? I just remember learning all the swear words in Dutch as a kid. 

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I did an artificial intelligence MSc (7 years) then did a theoretical biology Phd (5 years) then got a programming job on the side working on the desktop prototype of our current system, because the PhD stipend had run out but I wasn't quite finished yet. Then I bounced around a bit in the organisation until we got EU grant money to build our systems out into something much more ambitious, and then I basically stuck around while people moved on and now I'm in 'charge'. Nothing really goal-directed I'm afraid, I've always just kind of gone with the flow.

 

Polish is absolutely bugnut weird and complicated, especially coming from a language like Dutch or English that has only vestigial cases and gendered nouns left. Not only is the vocabulary based on a completely different root (Slavic has little to do with Germanic or Latin), they also have a shit-ton of cases both for nouns and verbs, and they even go to the point that the verbs are gendered too, ie. when a woman speaks she changes her verb endings.

 

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I would agree that Python is a good early language because it hides a lot of programming cruft that other languages require you to specify. With Python you can focus on understanding what variables, functions and loops are and how to use them. It was my first proper programming language, and I've since learned about the more crunchy bits of other languages. I'd have found it much harder to learn it all in one go.

 

I use Python in work all day, so feel free to hit me up if you need help with anything specific. Judging by my LinkedIn inbox, there is a demand for Python out there.

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Oh wow. That is just crazy. I didn't know Polish was that complicated. Holy moly. The cases terrified me in German when I first started, but after a couple months of learning I'm trying not to let it stress me out. My big worry is speaking as I'm just learning to read and write at the moment, but I suppose it's a start. I had a teacher here in Vietnam, but it was just too expensive for what I was getting. I was also very happy to think that the subjunctive doesn't exist in German whereas it actually does. I'm not sure how/how often it's used. I think it's one of those things native speakers won't even notice that they use it. That was the case in Spain. People would tell me that they barely use the subjunctive in Spanish when in fact it's the European language with the most common use of the subjunctive. 

 

That was like the big deal for Spanish students; mastering the subjunctive. But now that I have some pretty decent proficiency in Spanish I feel like it's not that hard to learn. It's probably just my brain trying to forget all those hours poring over verb conjugation tables and trying to order a sandwich without insulting anyone. 

 

In terms of programming: I dropped around 350 quid on a new laptop yesterday. Got it home only to realise it's not got Windows on it. It's a Linux OS called Endless. I know this isn't a huge deal, but I'm too old to be learning a new OS and I just like how the majority of programs/games etc are built for Windows. I'm going to try and exchange it for a Windows machine this morning through Google Translate so that should be fun. I don't know if I'll get anywhere and if not i"ll just have to buy a Windows license.   (fixed!)

 

So did you guys get work programming with any official certificates or did you just self-teach and then apply for stuff? How long did it take you to feel like you were actually able to comprehend what was going on? SuperBiasedMan what resources did you use to learn when you first started?

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11 hours ago, Dosed said:

So did you guys get work programming with any official certificates or did you just self-teach and then apply for stuff? How long did it take you to feel like you were actually able to comprehend what was going on? SuperBiasedMan what resources did you use to learn when you first started?

 

When I was a kid, I actually learned some programming in summer courses held in colleges. Mostly we learned the basic principles of how programming stuff worked and made very simple stuff. I've self taught a lot more since using code academy to brush up on some other languages, but a lot of my learning was really using tutorials to male games and then googling around to find solutions to problems. The way to make this work best is to actually try to understand the why behind the how, so that you can reapply the knowledge elsewhere rather than just having a solution to a single problem. 

 

I've had multiple different points where it felt like I 'got it'. Getting text to appear on a screen was great, having a functional little script was a new one. But there's always a new thing to figure out. It took me a while to understand what a class was and what it was for. Right now I don't think I fully grasp multithreading for example. But I think when I first got a computer to do a thing I told it, I felt like I got the basic idea, and it's just building onto it from there. 

 

In terms of work, I had a weird route. I studied animation in college and now work at an animation studio, writing scripts and tools for them. In this specific case they preferred me having an animation degree rather than a programming one, because it meant I'd understand the jargon and how the industry worked. No one else there did programming at the time, so they basically wanted me to come on and try streamline things by myself as best I could. I can't say for sure what it's like in other industries or software development itself.

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Yeah, I'm just having trouble even understanding the most basic concepts tbh. I'm using Coursera at the moment and I'm not sure if anyone has used it yet, but I'm learning about reusing functions. The course then asked me to write one line of code which would call on two functions. It was at this point I had no idea what I was doing and it suddenly felt like I've been wasting my time. I'm still plugging away at it every day, but at the moment it really feels like I'm reading a language where I know about 5 words in total. 

 

I've been trying to watch YouTube tutorials too, but I haven't found anything I particularly like at the moment. They're all either too complicated or I can't stand the host. Petty I know, but it is important if I plan on watching these people for a sum total of hours. 

 

I tried to do Unity stuff a long time ago, but I always only get so far with it and then just give up on it. I should probably give it another go. It would at least give me something practical to practice on. A bit more of immediate feedback would be nice. 

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If you want to PM me that code you didn't understand, I could look through and break down exactly what's happening to try help clarify it. 

 

And yeah, something I did that was helpful was that I started making one game every week. I rarely actually finished any of these, but I had to stop working after a week. The time limit was good for not making me get too deep into anything, and I also could just do whatever idea I had without being concerned about whether it was good enough to take up my time. A week might be a rough schedule for you, but I endorse setting deadlines with projects where you have to stop regardless. Then you can look over what you did/didn't learn, and bear that in mind for the next thing you do. 

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The tricky thing about programming, and it's going to be tricky no matter how you learn it, is that it requires you to develop a unique mindset that doesn't really have much of an analogue in other fields. The code on the screen is a representation of an entire universe underneath it that doesn't necessarily behave how you expect. It takes practice!

 

One thing that seems to be really valuable is having a course where you can see immediately what your code is doing, which helps you develop that sense of understanding. The Codecademy courses, for instance, have a split code/output view where the output updates in real time to what you put in. Python has a console mode where every line of Python you type in tells you what it evaluated to, which is also really helpful when trying to learn the language.

 

Don't be afraid to try a different course if the one you're using isn't doing it for you. We have not yet learned how best to teach coding and some courses are simply rough going.

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Yeah, I've been doing a bit with Codeacademy this morning and it was a lot more enjoyable. I also changed my course on Coursera to one which makes you actually write little bits and pieces in every video. The first one I tried was way too confusing. It was also using IDLE which AFAIK doesn't use cells and just runs everything as soon as I moved to the next line of code. I'm sure there's a way around that. The other courses are using much more user friendly stuff thankfully. 

 

EDIT: it seems the Code Academy projects are locked behind a paywall which is pretty frustrating. Anyone know any sites which let me work on beginner projects? 

 

I think the first two courses applied a lot of the stuff to mathematical concepts (which probably target the kinds of people who are likely to take the course), but it just turned me off instantly. Codeacademy seems to be teaching it more like a language. Yes, I know I'll have to grow up and do some maths eventually! 

 

I figure everything is tricky before you start learning it. I mean I had no idea about teaching before I became a teacher and that was pretty daunting to begin with. I'm gonna try out some Unity stuff on my laptop tomorrow too. Hopefully I'm not biting off more than I can chew. 

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