I was self taught for 10 years in the field and found a program that offers a Master's degree with work experience accounting for the undergrad. I didn't take calculus or stats in my undergrad and that has caused some headaches in completing the degree, but the amount of stuff I was exposed to in such a short period of time was incredible.
Very quickly into the program I was stuck by just how unethical it was for me, with no experience and certification to make guarantees and promises to an employer who didn't know better. In most fields the knowledge worker could be held liable for making this kind of "contract" (think lawyers, electricians, doctors, etc.).
You can be driven and motivated. You might have learned a ton on your own. You cannot know what you don't know. People in these comments will trip over each other to explain that education is subjective and you won't use any of that stuff in the real world. They have stories about wasted classes and dusty academics. The reality is much more boring.
* Lectures are very effective ways of provide a curated bit of information.
* Structured practice and verification (homework and grades) are quick ways to ensure that the start of learning has occurred.
* Working with your peers will likely expose strengths and weaknesses in your existing understanding of the subject matter. This often helps everyone involved.
* Reading academic publications and textbooks helps to standardize the shared understanding of the subject and ensures that future efforts to expand the field or solve hard problems are more effective.
You said in your post that you're not sure where to go with your career and your opportunities aren't evident to you --- go to school and give yourself some deeper knowledge. It'll help you figure out how to navigate the field.
In the UK there's this :) https://www.open.ac.uk/postgraduate/qualifications/f66. No entry reqs at all. I've a friend who for various reasons back in the day got no secondary school (high school) qualifications i:e no GCSEs or A levels, no undergrad either, but did an apprenticeship and ended up as a software dev , did an Open University MSc and ended up with a Comp Sci Phd ! Open University always seems fantastic to me but maybe US employers would expect Americans to have an American qualification? Regarding your original Q to do the degree at all, absolutely, worth it for the mental development, also there are some great jobs out there that do require a degree and a shame to miss out. Having taken part in a sift for junior developer positions, the applications we get have a lot of cr*p, many people with bootcamps plus half-arsed / plagiarised GitHub. Those with a Real comp Sci degree plus some experience really do stand out.
I agree with this. I have to learn a lot about a new tool before I can effectively use the docs (beyond the getting started). If it's area where I'm already familiar, then sometimes I can jump in pretty easily, but often fumbling is a key step.
I got a masters in cybersecurity recently and I have no intention in switching career paths from my system engineering focus to cybersecurity. I don't see why this can't just be a foundational study path for computer science beyond the 4 year degree. I didn't base this decision off anything more than just my personal interest. The program was a good fit for me.
With that said the points the author is making about recruiting and driving salaries down are endemic to other areas. In my undergrad, I had a law-related class and the professor took a class to talk through the issues with job placement in the legal system and encourage students fulfilling an undergrad before LSAT and future JD, etc. to consider things like public policy programs so they didn't end up with mountains of debt and a degree that was hard to actuate into a career.
I can't speak to LWN, but from what I've seen this is a bot that crawls the site, generates search terms and "deeper" crawling techniques using AI, and then makes another set of requests.
This would be generating topical queries to add search for, e.g.,
We have been suffering this. It's easy enough to weather high traffic loads for pages, but our issue is targeted applications. Things like website search bars are getting target with functional searches for sub pages and content by labels, etc.
It causes the web server to run out of handles for the pending database lookups.
A real mess. The problem is these searches are valid and the page will return a 200 result with "Nothing in that search found!" types of messages. Why would the crawler ever stop? It's going to work and work until we all die and there's still another epoch of search term combos left to try.
We solve problems like this all the time, but we're hitting another level and really exposing some issues. Ideally our WAF can start to kick the traffic. It's good to see other people having this issue. We first started addressing this last fall -- around November.
I've been through both aspects. I really wouldn't listen to any of the people in this thread. Advice in this arena is so specific to ___domain and environment. If you don't remember function parameters for every builtin or stdlib of your language(s), you should look it up in the docs or use the LSP provided feedback. I have to reference my own libraries for docs sometimes. I just find myself in too many different codebases in a week to remember everything.
I learned more Bash and Python from running Shellcheck and Ruff respectively. Frankly, if your code has squiggles that get on your nerves from the LSP/linter fix the settings ... or better yet, correct the syntax. gasp
Hey, nice work. I think dedicating time and effort to documentation pays off in years to come.
Also -- from your original plug about your product I would have ignored it, but after reading through some of the docs, I actually see some use cases for this in a couple of upcoming projects!
I think Jaws of the Lion broke the rules down for Gloomhaven really well -- it introduced the complexities of the game slowly over scenarios. I would advise anyone who has a game that takes more than a couple of hours to play to have a way to start the game and then add complexity after initial barriers have been met.
Mechs vs. Minions is another one that does this iterative process of teaching.
This article looks great, I'll continue to read it.
I came to say the same about JotL. They got so much right in that game with the way they introduce the rules and the spiral-bound book game board being the most prominent.
I think people forget how new and dynamic these devices are. Maybe in a couple of decades we can have evergreen devices, but for now the changes of the devices and capabilities is still driven by new releases and proliferation. These types of changes still require a ton of human effort and hardware restrictions. In the 60s and 70s car lifespans were much shorter (around 100k miles), but today those are much longer, double that of 50 years ago. You can already see this shift happening in smartphones -- as evidenced by consumers not recognizing improvements between devices that are 5 years newer, although if I'm going to be honest, I find it really odd that you wouldn't notice some of the improvements between iPhone 8 to 16.
It's wasteful, but also not really all at the same time. We're combining a lot of devices and functionality into one unit which can reduce waste, and there's not a lot of things in your life you use as much as a smartphone -- even if you cycle it out every 5 years. There are components of these that are easily recycled as well. For many households the costs of smartphones are cut down as the devices are passed down based on seniority or priority, this makes for a really functional reuse system.
> I find it really odd that you wouldn't notice some of the improvements between iPhone 8 to 16.
I'm sure they notice some improvements, when I was out shopping for a new phone I could tell the then-flagship iPhone 13 having a slightly better display and a slightly better camera than 11 even by playing with it at the store.
But then, I've upgraded from an iPhone 6S+ to iPhone 11, and even 11 was unnecessary to me. I just had to because I bought the 16GB model back then, the lowest storage option, and with ever larger iOS updates my phone wasn't usable anymore.
With that a perfectly usable iPhone 6S became electronic waste, and I was out 600 euros, to do exactly what I've been doing on 6S: browsing, instant messaging, Uber and Uber-likes. Now the fonts look a little nicer, and camera is so much better, and that's.. about it for noticeable features for me. I wouldn't pay that much for either of those if I could.
My point is, I think smartphones hit a ceiling of useful features a long time ago. The big features, all the important stuff, the GPS, camera, browser, IM and a few other things have been figured out since a decade now. There are some smartphone "power users" who don't have a computer or maybe a TV and use it for watching movies, playing games or they are amateur photographers/influencers and such, for them maybe these new models still offer something. For everyone else an iPhone 16 does what an iPhone 6 does, just a little fancier.
I did a bunch of work with WinPE for Win 7,8, and 10. Customizing the environment for automated deployment was a ton of fun. I really came to appreciate the tooling available in WinPE (and it's eccentricities). It's probably what really paved the way for my transition to Linux.
Very quickly into the program I was stuck by just how unethical it was for me, with no experience and certification to make guarantees and promises to an employer who didn't know better. In most fields the knowledge worker could be held liable for making this kind of "contract" (think lawyers, electricians, doctors, etc.).
You can be driven and motivated. You might have learned a ton on your own. You cannot know what you don't know. People in these comments will trip over each other to explain that education is subjective and you won't use any of that stuff in the real world. They have stories about wasted classes and dusty academics. The reality is much more boring.
* Lectures are very effective ways of provide a curated bit of information.
* Structured practice and verification (homework and grades) are quick ways to ensure that the start of learning has occurred.
* Working with your peers will likely expose strengths and weaknesses in your existing understanding of the subject matter. This often helps everyone involved.
* Reading academic publications and textbooks helps to standardize the shared understanding of the subject and ensures that future efforts to expand the field or solve hard problems are more effective.
You said in your post that you're not sure where to go with your career and your opportunities aren't evident to you --- go to school and give yourself some deeper knowledge. It'll help you figure out how to navigate the field.
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