TerminalAwareness comments on PSA: Learn to code - Less Wrong

34 Post author: John_Maxwell_IV 25 May 2012 06:50PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (77)

Comments (77)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: shokwave 27 May 2012 03:33:27PM 0 points [-]

Can you give me an example or two of a problem that is much too big?

Comment author: TerminalAwareness 27 May 2012 06:03:30PM 1 point [-]

Absolutely; I certainly do have things I'd love to code.

  • I rely heavily on a python notes taking program, Zim, which could use some help implementing more features like tables, or an android port.
  • Linux could use an extended nutrition, food, and exercise tracking program
  • I've toyed with the idea of trying to pull components together under KDE and link food purchases to a pantry tracking program to a nutrition tracking program to a health logging program
  • The BIOS on my laptop is broken under Linux in many ways; I've seen and attempted to decompile and repair it, but working with a >10000 line decompiled program exhausted me quickly.
  • Everyone needs their own window manager, right? I'd even started extending xfwm4 with wmctrl in bash scripts, but it was a bit silly and in the latest release the key feature was replicated officially, and far more elegantly.
  • qubes-os is (I hope) the future of secure but practical computing but my current hardware makes running it less than useful

I could probably work a good bit on any of the above projects, but I don't think I could succeed, since there is so little benefit to me and I'm at a #1-20 Project Euler level.

Comment author: shokwave 28 May 2012 01:04:19PM *  0 points [-]

1-20 Project Euler level.

All the projects you list are probably too challenging except the nutrition/exercise/food tracking program, I'd wager.

A suggestion on how to go from Project Euler to stronger things quickly: try some of the Google AI challenges. Planet Wars is a good spot to start. I found working on it outside of the competition to be very interesting; coding actual bots is not much more challenging than Project Euler, you can increase the difficultly level with "ooh, I'd really like to see my bot do x", and when you start thinking about how to exploit the game you end up digging through their code and learning a lot about bigger projects.

More generally, these kinds of competitions where you submit a simple piece of code to a more complex piece are a great way to step up in skill (as long as you don't try to actually compete just yet - I found that stress and time constraint to be counterproductive).

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit