Not every piece of knowledge is gained through school, or even through work experience

Over the years I’ve noticed, many great works of programming were born out of someone’s free time programming. Just look at open source stuff on GitHub, even video games. Linux for example, wasn’t made through a school project or as a work assignment, it was done in someone's free time. Some people on r/osdev literally make mini operating systems. No job or school project requires that

A lot of cybersecurity people also learned their stuff through self learning

Even like those super smart people who answer questions in forums - most of their jobs don’t require that sort of complexity. And that stuff definitely isn’t taught in school. They just know it, from some other source

So what’s something very complex / niche that you learned outside of school / work? How did you learn it?

Typescript and Java dev. Ive tried learning python several times but can get it to stick. Learnt Java this year and it was much more fun. If I wish to be relevant today with AI, every AI material say learn Python. Am I doomed?

This made me think of people who lost weight after claiming to be happy with their bodies for number of years until the weight loss drugs showed up. When this happened some said that these people were never actually happy and that they just pretended to be.

After seeing some colleagues and friends make fun of me for not giving into vibe coding and now using AI to code all the time themselves, I now think that they probably never liked programming in the first place either. It was probably the only way to get and/or keep their jobs.

Are there people here who have had similar experience and reached the same conclusion? Apologies if i offended anyone with the initial bit. I just used that as an example.

Lichess is open source and allows access to most of it's data. I want to make something that will alert me when certain tournaments are coming up in lichess have done programming but it's been a while so pretty rusty. Looking for where to begin

We all know that one thing everyone talks about like it’s obvious, but nobody really explains.

Could be Kubernetes, networking, microservices, or something completely different.

What’s yours? No judgment lol.

Hi,

I plan to develop peripheral software to change input mapping, assign some macros to keys on my keyboard for macOS for a learning purpose.

I do have working code for Windows written in C++. But I can't tell that I don't have a lot of experience with Objective-C.

The questions:
1) Should I go with Swift or with Objective-C? I know that Objective-C combines with C++ without any problems, but I wonder, if this is a good idea to pick outdated language to develop software that I hope I will constantly maintain and improve?
2) Can you recommend some books to developer such things for macOS?

Thanks

Hey everyone,

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to properly test and verify the work done by AI coding agents, especially when working on existing, complex projects rather than simple greenfield applications.

I’m curious how you guys approach this in your workflows, particularly when changes need to be deployed to some preview/staging environment before you can actually verify whether everything works as expected.
And I’m not talking just about running unit/integration tests or having an agent write a few Playwright tests.
In real-world projects, verifying a change can involve a lot more than that.

For example:
- External APIs: Sometimes you need to retrieve a secret, authenticate against an external service, make some API calls, and verify the responses or side effects and it can’t be done from UI (because user has to do that manually and we have to simulate that)
- Observability: Sometimes the only way to confirm that something works correctly is to inspect Loki logs, traces, or metrics and check whether the expected events actually happened.
- Databases: You might need to query PostgreSQL or another database to verify that the correct records were created, updated, or deleted.
- Messaging: In event-driven architectures, you may need to verify that Kafka/RabbitMQ messages were published, consumed, and processed correctly.
- UI: And, of course, sometimes you need Playwright or another browser automation tool to verify user-facing functionality.

All of these might be part of a single business scenario.
For example, imagine an agent implementing a payment when user has to take some IBAN from our UI and proceed with manual bank transfer from their account, which results in a webhook to our API.
Then we have some soft validations which are testable only by checking some logs in our logs collector.

Do you:

1. ⁠Let agents generate and execute E2E tests (e.g., Playwright) that also interact with APIs, databases, logs, and other systems?
   
2. ⁠Give agents access to tools/MCPs for Kubernetes, Loki, databases, etc., and let them dynamically investigate and verify their changes - there’s an issue because as in my previous post Claude Code has some issues with working like that. Probably we would have to create a lot of some dynamic MCPs.
   
3. ⁠Define deterministic verification scenarios/scripts that agents execute after deployment?
   
4. ⁠Have a completely different approach?

I’m also curious about how you handle credentials, permissions, test data, and cleanup when agents need access to real infrastructure and external systems, even these secrets are only for sandbox.

And perhaps the biggest question: How do you make this repeatable and reliable instead of letting an LLM decide on the fly whether its own implementation is correct?

Would love to hear how you’re solving this in practice, what tools you’re using, and how much of your verification process is deterministic versus agent-driven.

I started a new job recently, and honestly, the beginning was pretty overwhelming. I felt lost because there was so much to learn, but I’m slowly understanding things better, and I can see that I’m learning something new almost every day.

The problem is that I constantly compare myself to my coworkers. They seem so much more knowledgeable than me, and they’re working on projects that look much more complex. Meanwhile, I sometimes struggle with things that seem easy for them. Even when I have questions, I feel like they’re stupid and that I should have figured things out on my own.

I know I’m new, and logically, I understand that I can’t know everything immediately. But emotionally, it’s a different story. I keep thinking that maybe I’m learning too slowly or that my coworkers will eventually realize I’m not as competent as they expected me to be.

The worst part is that I can’t seem to switch off after work. I go to work early, leave at the end of the day, and then spend the evening thinking about all the problems I still need to solve. I keep telling myself that I should work late into the night, sacrifice my sleep, and fix everything so that when someone asks me about my progress the next day, I’ll have something impressive to report.

I’m constantly afraid that someone will ask me what I’ve accomplished and I won’t have enough to say. I worry that they’ll think I’m extremely slow, especially when I see how much other people seem to get done.

I realize that working all night and sacrificing my sleep probably isn’t sustainable, but I feel guilty when I’m not working. Even when I’m resting, I feel like I should be doing something productive to catch up.

I think I’m putting an enormous amount of pressure on myself to prove that I deserve this job, and I don’t know how to stop.

For those of you who have been through something similar:

-How long did it take you to feel comfortable in a new job?

-How do you deal with feeling less competent than your coworkers, especially when they seem to be working on much more complex things?

-How do you stop feeling guilty when you’re not working and resist the urge to sacrifice your sleep just to catch up?

And how do you know whether you’re genuinely learning too slowly or simply being too hard on yourself?

I’d really appreciate hearing about other people's experiences, especially from people who struggled at the beginning of their careers but eventually found their footing.

Hello guys, quick question, should I start learning Rust?

I wanted to learn it to use Tauri (mainly used to connect the frontend to the backend written in rust), but idrk if I should go for it or just use Electron or other frameworks.

Thanks in advance!

Most UI libraries cover the basics pretty well: buttons, dialogs, dropdowns, tabs, and forms.

But what about more complex components, such as:

• Advanced data tables: virtualization, column pinning, resizing, reordering, and complex filtering.
• Workflow builders: visual nodes, connections, drag-and-drop, and interactive editing.
• Command palettes: fuzzy search, nested commands, keyboard navigation, and customizable actions.
• Drag-and-drop interfaces: sortable nested layouts, multiple containers, and complex interactions.
• Rich interactive components: complex state management, animations, keyboard accessibility, and extensive customization.

I'm curious about libraries that provide these kinds of components as reusable building blocks, rather than requiring developers to implement all the underlying behavior themselves.

Which libraries handle these use cases particularly well? And are there areas where existing solutions still fall short?

I'd appreciate specific recommendations and examples.

I'm an intern at a tech company and I had a thought that ChatGPT couldn't give a good answer for.

I've been working on a feature for a month, it's basically ready to merge, but because I edited a file that I don't own, I had to let a coworker know that when they merge their next changes they will have conflicts. This is because I turned their class, for example my_group.coworker_feature.v1_0.CoworkerFeatureApiHandler into an abstract class my_group.coworker_feature.CoworkerFeatureApiHandler and now the former inherits from the latter and just overrides a method with an API annotation.

When she will try to merge her changes to the file onto main, the lines she's changing will no longer exist, since they were moved to the version-agnostic abstract class. She'll have to fix the conflict by hand by literally just reapplying the refactor I made, into her own code.

So this made me think, why isn't there just a version control that understands basic java semantics, where instead of saving a line diff it'll know that I just moved a function to a parent class, and that any changes to those functions from another branch should just be applied to the function that lives inside the parent branch?

Has anyone ever tried making this? And if so, why did it not work well?

Hello,

I'm organizing a chess bot tournament for a club event for later November. Teams build bots that play each other through a central Chess API. I'd like advice on the design and what tools I should look into before I build it.

Setup
- Two bots alternate and each submits one move per turn
- Right now, the bots must be written in python (for simplicity)
- At the start of each turn, the API sends the bot the current position and if the bot submits an illegal move, the API sends a response to the bot that move was illegal and must submit a legal move. I don't want to give the bot a list of legal moves as that is on the bot.
- The API tracks the board and detects checkmate, stalemate, and draws. It also enforces one move per turn and declares the winner
- Each move takes at least one second so spectators can follow along, with a hard limit of 30 seconds.
- During the tournament, the live board is shown on a screen.

My main questions are what tools or resources I should look into to actually build this API?

Thank you.

Hey everyone!

I'm almost 16 years old, and I'm wondering if I'm starting to learn programming at the right time if my goal is to become a professional software developer.

I've been learning C++ and working on my own projects, mainly game development.

Here's a link to my best project: https://kc-games-studio.itch.io/avoid-b

My long-term goal is to become a professional programmer and eventually start my own software development company. I'm particularly interested in web development and applications, but I also enjoy game development.

I'd like to get an internship as soon as I finish school, so I want to use the time I have now as effectively as possible. I'm planning to learn more about programming fundamentals, algorithms and data structures, databases, testing, Git, web development, and software engineering best practices.

My questions are:

• Am I starting early enough to realistically aim for an internship right after school?
• What skills and projects should I focus on to improve my chances of getting accepted?
• Is it better to focus on one area, such as web development, or continue exploring different areas of programming?
• What would you recommend doing at my age to prepare for a professional programming career?

I'd really appreciate honest advice, especially from people who have experience hiring developers or who started learning programming at a similar age.

Thanks for reading!

I dont know much about Ruby on Rails but it seems Javascript/Node.js is more popular here for web development unlike Ruby on Rails so how come DHH is still popular here?

Is there something I don't know and miss here? I dont get a full picture.

I'm trying to figure out if I'm solving something that anyone else cares about.

Git mostly punts on binary files "it changed". There's no way to reconcile two non-overlapping edits to a PNG asset. Naively merging non-conflicting edits (two appends to the end of a series of items) in JSON can break the file because of comma strictness. Etc, etc for donzens of formats that SHOULD be relatively straighforward to diff and merge. Then you get into files that have internal size counts or error-detection chechsums/CRC/hash embed, or a compressed stream component that causes a one-byte change near the beginning to ripple down into the entire file after that point being different.

Does anyone care or am I solving a problem that isn't really a problem? Maybe that's why it has gone unsolved, because it doesn't bother anyone? I'm genuinely curious because it was something that annoyed ME, and then I was shocked that it didn't already seem to be solved. So is this just an itch I needed to scratch but nobody else did? I always assume someone smarter than me should be way ahead of me.

Happy Friday everyone.

I am building a basic browser extension that counts the Legends (for those who don't know these are the highest rated players) for each character in Street Fighter 6. The problem that I am facing is that the request needs some kind of a session that expires after some time and I have to manually change my fetch url each time that happens.

The request looks like this where the PR7tyRkahYcC8npLaZ89a is the session that changes.

https://www.streetfighter.com/6/buckler/_next/data/PR7tyRkahYcC8npLaZ89a/en/ranking/master.json?character_filter=1&character_id=luke&platform=1&home_filter=1&home_category_id=0&home_id=0&page=1&season_type=1

I don't have very vast knowledge in web programming, but I think it should be stored somewhere in the cookies or sessions of my browser, so that I can use it until the session expires. The problem is that I can't find it.

Does anyone has any idea if it stored in the browser or the server and if it is in the browser where I can find it?

Hi everyone! I'm from a humanities background and a noob at coding and want to build a Telegram bot for my UPSC/State PCS study group. (We used to post daily CA quiz, ncert quiz, test series for free)

The bot should:

Generate up to 100 MCQs in one go from PDFs or study material.

Post questions as native Telegram quiz polls.

Calculate scores using UPSC marking: +2 correct, −⅔ incorrect, 0 skipped.

Publish a leaderboard with ranks, marks, correct, incorrect and skipped answers.

Run for free, including hosting, if possible.

If you're interested in helping build or improve it, you're also welcome to join our UPSC study group and collaborate with us.

We had a bot earlier but we removed the member who created the bot for behaving in a weird way.

I can share the bot link and screenshots of it for reference.

Thank you!

Is there a particular reason why specifically Rust is used? Is it the new C++?

edit; thank you all for the comments, I've learnt alot!

When I was in high school, I was a C student, I'm a slow learner

Anyway I managed to learn how to build To Do List in C# and Java with e.g. API, SQL and also learn to understand what recursive is.

But when I check trendly github repo right now like OpenClaw or REA, the reverse engineer.

I don't understand shit, it is like I know plus and minus, and those github repo is like Calculus.

Maybe someone here who started from Hello World and now you are coding Wizard, maybe you can help me out here...

So we have to build a project on distributed systems, but we cant use kubernetes . So we were thinking of going on the task schedular road and chose that filed in distributed systems. And e thought of building a media processing based task shcedular. Can i know your thoughts on this what is best , and any industrial current needs or holes you see? This is a middleware project by the way and we are trying to build it as a good project to put in our CV's.

I freelanced for a while and reviewed a lot of other people’s code before taking projects. Some of the AI-built stuff was fine. Some of it I couldn’t make sense of without a few hours of digging.

My take after that: the AI part isn’t the problem. A prototype in one evening is a real win. The debt shows up when nobody reads what was generated, nobody writes down why things are where they are, and the project gets handed to someone else.

At that point the original author saved a weekend and the next person pays it back in weeks.

So for me it’s both. Speedup for the person who builds it, debt for the person who inherits it.

Where do you land? Have you inherited a vibe-coded project that was actually decent?

With all the Reverse Engineered stuff and bsically the entire Ps5 games being played on PC. Here’s my question, “Would it be possible to have all these games be transferred to your NAS and be “played” there? I’ve heard that the PS5 recently has been jailbreaked, so what if the games you play both on PC and PS5 gets the SAVE DATA seamlessly transferred on both devices?

Would this be viable? practical even? or would technology be limited?

Im starting to learn how to code becuase its genuinely interesting, and i have still no idea how or where to start

sorry for the format im on mobile*

My classmates and I we made the game Yatzy and calculator in C without AI helping.

but if u ask us to build Linux, idk where to begin lmfao

but it seems CS people back then they knew some secret CS knowleadge or something that we Gen Z cs kids dont.

Otherwise we would easily know how to build OS like Linux in C already on 1st semester

I'm a junior developer at my firm, about 1–2 years in. My code works, but when I compare it to what our seniors write, theirs is cleaner, easier to follow, and holds up better when requirements change. I want to close that gap deliberately instead of hoping it happens over time.

For context, I'm comfortable with functions, loops, classes/OOP, and basic testing. I mostly work on automation and scripts, and I've noticed my scripts tend to start small and turn messy as they grow.

I'd love advice on:

What actually separates senior-level Python from junior-level? Is it mostly design, naming, testing, or something else?

How do you structure automation code so a quick script doesn't turn into an unmaintainable mess?

Books, codebases, or resources that changed how you write code. Are there open-source projects worth reading?

Habits that helped you most, like code reviews, refactoring old code, or writing tests first.

Common junior mistakes you'd tell your younger self to stop making.

Thanks in advance, I really appreciate any pointers.