Ask HN: Late-bloomer engineers, when and how did you discover programming?

Re:Ask HN: Late-bloomer engineers, when and how did you disc... by kyle_morris_ on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @04:36PM (#22949920)

I was a couple of years out of college, having been an sdr at a tech company > managed sdr’s > moved into business and sales ops.

I was hitting snags trying to do analysis with excel and couldn’t vlookup or pivot on a table with a million rows. A friend mentioned in passing that python would make this pretty simple.

I started there and tried to solve problems I was facing with code instead of excel.

Fast forward a year or two having built a few projects on the side, quit my job and started selling software I built from scratch.

I found having a project to work on that solved problems I faced made the learning effort so much easier. I struggled early on trying to solve fizz buzz-type problems because I couldn’t see them solving problems I faced day to day.

I don’t code much anymore but having that arrow in my quiver changed my career trajectory significantly. I recommend learning as soon as possible!

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Re:Ask HN: Late-bloomer engineers, when and how did you disc... by lamchob on Friday April 24, 2020 @02:59AM (#22965382)

I can second the experience that learning things in order to solve a problem works great. I struggle when I just have to sit down and lear something from scratch, without any direct application to the knowledge. But as soon I can project concepts and theories onto a problem I want to solve, I have no issue learning new things.

Currently I learn a lot about relational algebra and algebraic semirings, because they are part of the theory behind constraint programming, which I use in a current project.

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Re:Ask HN: Late-bloomer engineers, when and how did you disc... by mzl on Friday April 24, 2020 @03:15AM (#22965456)

Out of curiosity, how would you say that relational algebra and algebraic semirings help you with constraint programming? While that can indeed be useful in some cases when doing research in constraint programming, I am curious how it helps you?

Background: I'm a researcher in constraint programming and sometimes user of it in work-related projects.

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Re:Ask HN: Late-bloomer engineers, when and how did you disc... by lamchob on Friday April 24, 2020 @06:07AM (#22966400)

Not directly with constraint programming itself. And also, I'm not doing a deep dive on these topics. But having an ideal of what is happening under the hood makes gives me more confidence in working with a tool and reasoning about choices.

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Re:Ask HN: Late-bloomer engineers, when and how did you disc... by mzl on Friday April 24, 2020 @06:42AM (#22966591)

Interesting. I don't think that would be my first choices of study.

If you want to know more about how constraint programming works under the hood, I can recommend the coursera course Solving algorithms for Discrete Optimization, in particular weeks 1 and 2 for constraint programming. https://www.coursera.org/learn/solving-algorithms-discrete-o...

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