Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "code till you drop"
-
'Sup mates.
First rant...
So Here's a story of how I severely messed up my mental health trying to fit in university.
But the bonus: Found my passion.
Her we go,
Went to university thinking it'll be awesome to learn new stuff.
1st sem was pure shock - Programming was taught at the speed of V2 rockets.
Everything was centred around marks.
Wanted to get a good run in 2nd sem, started to learn Vector design, but RIP- Hospitalized for Staph infection, missed the whole sem and was in recovery for 3 months.
So asked uni for financial assistance as I had to re-register the courses the next semester. They flat out refused, not even in this serious of a case.
So, time to register courses for third semester, turns out most of the 2nd year courses are full, I had to take 3rd year courses like:
Social and Informational Networks
Human Computer Interaction
Image processing
And
Parallel and Distributed Computing (They had no prerequisites listed, for the cucks they are: BIG MISTAKE)
Turns out the first day of classes that I attend, the Image proc. teacher tells me that it's gonna be difficult for 2nd years so I drop it, as the PDC prof. also seconds that advice.
Time travel 2 months in: The PDC prof is a bitch, doesn't upload any notes at all and teaches like she's on Velocity-9 while treating this subject like a competition on who learns the most rather than helping everyone understand.
Doesn't let students talk to each other in lab even if one wants to clear their friend's doubt, "Do it on your own!" What the actual fuck?
Time for term end exams and project submission: Me and 3 seniors implement a Distributed File System in python and show it to her, she looks satisfied.
Project Results: Everyone else got 95/100
I got 76.
She's so prejudiced that she thinks that 2nd years must have been freeloaders while I put my ass on turbo for the whole sem, learning to code while tackling advanced concepts to the point that I hated to code.
I passed the course with a D grade.
People with zero consideration for others get absolutely zero respect from me.
Well it's safe to say that I went Nuclear(heh.. pun..) at this point, Mentally I was in such a bad place that I broke down.... Went into depression but didn't realise it.
But,
I met a senior in my HCI class that I did a project with, after which I discovered we had lots of similar interests.
We became good friends and started collaborating on design projects and video game prototyping.
Enter the 4th sem and holy mother of God did I got some bad bad profs....
Then it hit me
I have been here for two years, put myself through the meat grinder and tore my soul into shreds.
This Is Not Me
This Wont Be The End Of Me
I called up my sister in London and just vented all my emotions in front of her.
Relief.
Been a long time since I felt that.
I decided to go for what I truly feel passionate about: Game Design
So I am now trying to apply for Universities which have specialised courses for game design.
I've got my groove again, learnt to live again.
Learning C# now.
:)
It's been a long hello, and If you've reached till here somehow, then damn, you the MVP.
Peace.9 -
Haha kids, you're all dead wrong. Here's my story.
There is a thing called “emergence”. This is a fundamental property of our universe. It works 100% of the time. It can't be stopped, it can't be mitigated. Everything you see around you is an emergent phenomenon.
Emergence is triggered when a lot of similar things come together and interact. One water molecule cannot be dry or wet, but if you have many, after a certain number the new property emerges — wetness. The system becomes _wet_.
Professionalism is an emergent phenomenon too, and its water molecules are abstract knowledge. Learn tech things you're interested in, complete random tutorials, code, and after a certain amount of knowledge molecules is gained, something clicks inside your head, and you become a professional.
Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts here. Uni education can make you a professional seemingly quicker, but it's not because uni knowledge is special, it's because uni is a perfect environment to absorb a lot of knowledge in a short period of time.
It happened to me too. I started coding in Pascal in fifth grade of high school, and I did it till sixth. Then, seventh to ninth were spent on my uni's after-school program. After ninth grade, I drop out of high school to get to this uni's experimental program. First grade of uni, and we're making a CPU. Second grade, and we're doing hard math, C and assembly.
And finally, in the third grade, it happens. I was sitting there in the classroom, it was late, and I was writing a recursive sudoku solver in Python. And I _felt_ the click. You cannot mistake it for anything else. It clicks, and you're a changed person. Immediately, I realized I can write everything. Needless to say, I was passing everything related to code afterwards with flying colours.
From that point, everything I did was just gaining more and more experience. Nothing changed fundamentally.
Emergence is forever. If you learn constantly, even without a concrete defined path, I can guarantee you that you _will_ become a professional. This is backed by the universe itself. You cannot avoid becoming one if you're actively accumulating emergence points.
Here's the list of projects I made in the past 11 years: https://notion.so/uyouthe/...
I'm 24.7 -
I don't know what to chose.
The fact that for three months, I had to design a 16-page catalog, when I have no experience and my job is web development;
The fact that I have to do SEO for the site, but that means for my boss that for a one-page long text, we have to find at least 60 (sixty! ) times the occurrences of the keywords;
The fact that when I finally have something interesting to do, the boss finds that it doesn't go fast enough and decide to drop the project even if making a whole new dynamic stock system with the db we have is something hard and long to do;
The fact that when I come to work five minutes late, my boss is at the verge on screaming on me, even if I come ten minutes early every other day;
The fact that when I'm coding, I need concentration, I don't need the boss to give me the phone to answer customers, stop everything I am doing and explain them what products we are selling;
The fact that I am paid the minimum wage for a trainee, and when there's no coffee anymore, we have to buy some ourselves because "you drink way too much coffee, you understand" (three a day, sorry for wanting to stay awake);
The fact that I have asked for one year how many days of vacation I still had, and the only answer they gave to me yet was: "Oh, we have to ask the accountant". I still don't know how many days I have left;
The fact that the site is made only by trainees since the beginning, so circa 2008, and the code is horrible but "it works, so don't touch it". The admin part is in CodeIgniter, the front in laravel 4.2, there are a lot of useless code but we can't touch it because the boss doesn't think it is worth the time.
I almost made a burn-out last year, my doc saw my state right before and made me stop for a week. I still have to work there 'till end of august, then I will have my diploma and find another company to work with. Now, I check everyday on my calendar.6