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A comment on Battle for Wesnoth: open-source, turn-based strategy game. Parent comment

Re:Battle for Wesnoth: open-source, turn-based strategy game by setgree on Monday April 06, 2026 @04:24PM (#47666540)
St. John’s college is a great place that draws a special type of young person, but its graduates are not very STEM-legible. As far as I know they still offer no choice of major & no hands-on classes — just the great books.

Of course that makes this person’s skill all the more impressive.

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Re:Battle for Wesnoth: open-source, turn-based strategy game by gowld on Monday April 06, 2026 @09:27PM (#47669658)
For software development, degree is irrelevant. Employer-managed competency exams and public experience dominate.
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Re:Battle for Wesnoth: open-source, turn-based strategy game by Discordian93 on Wednesday April 08, 2026 @08:04AM (#47689061)
You aren't getting to the exam stage without that degree though
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Re:Battle for Wesnoth: open-source, turn-based strategy game by bandrami on Monday April 06, 2026 @11:49PM (#47670547)
Huh. I graduated from there and about a third of my class (including me) works in tech in some form. Though being a sysadmin seems to be more common than being a programmer. But I had no idea the Wesnoth dev went there too!
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Re:Battle for Wesnoth: open-source, turn-based strategy game by setgree on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @06:58PM (#47682416)
Did you do a coding bootcamp or such?
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Re:Battle for Wesnoth: open-source, turn-based strategy game by bandrami on Wednesday April 08, 2026 @01:45AM (#47685824)
No, the email system was a Unix server you telneted to from the Mac SEs in the computer lab so I just kind of picked up Unix usage. Then once I graduated I got a job tending a BIND and sendmail cluster for a local ISP (the "training" was handing me the Cricket book and the Bat book on the first day). The jaw-dropping salary for that was $22K at the time (this was the 90s; about $46K in today's money). That led to learning Perl (via the Camel book) to automate some of the tasks, which led to some CGI work, but I've never really been a "programmer" per se, always a sysadmin.
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