Career

I will occasionally come across a post like this on Reddit or other social platforms. This post is an attempt to encourage people to try and get their careers in IT started. This is how it all started for me… Initial apprehension of programming After finishing high school, I ended up studying informatics at Vilnius University. The choice was not easy, I was drifting heavily towards economics and physics, as well as considering the more humanitarian part of with focus on business and business management. I basically ended up making a random choice - I ended up in informatics. While I was decent at maths and computers, I would by no means consider myself a competent developer on my uni days. It was really hard and terrifying. Lots of maths on top of maths with only a few lectures focusing on coding. I did like coding but the constant mathematics in day to day uni life was a real killer. By the end of first semester I was highly unmotivated by the lack of coding we were doing. I was a tad lazy, so I did not have any side projects to focus on. At this point in time I started thinking about quitting but peer pressure and my own reluctance to give up came through. I struggled to the sixth semester with little to no will left in studying. I was doing OK at this point. I needed to put little effort into studies themselves to just manage to not get kicked out. I thought I’d finish the degree and definitely not touch anything related to programming. My main concern with programming was that it probably consists of lots and lots of maths that I definitely did not enjoy at that point. I found it boring therefore programming looked boring to me as well. I had no side projects and would describe my skill in programming little more than basic. I should note that by this point I was still living off my parents and had no job. Then one of my classmates who had been working as a developer for a few years offered an opportunity to try and get past an intense course in the company he was working with. I did not know if I was ready for it and certainly felt apprehension for not doing there well either. Nonetheless I gathered my courage and got to the interview. The interview did not go well especially the technical part. I probably answered less than 30% of the questions correctly. One thing I did do and am still proud of is never lied - when confronted with a question I had no clue about I stated that I had no knowledge in the area. Despite my worries, I got accepted. ...

I’ve been using Go as my main programming language at work for the last 6 months. Here’s why I absolutely adore the language. It’s simple Go is remarkably simple. It’s an object oriented programming language but instead of the more typical classes you find in C# or Java it only has structs. Structs cannot inherit, meaning you can’t end up in inheritance hell. I won’t go into detail why inheritance is bad, but if you want an explanation Inheritance is Inherently Evil is a good read on that. All you want to achieve with inheritance can instead be done through composition and the use of interfaces. It also gets rid of generics. This means that the code you read will be clear and simple. It might be more verbose than many other languages but you also carry more control. ...