Is most of the time spent learning or working as a programmer mostly reading code, docs and books?
I heard that as learning I should type everything to put it into muscle memory but that on the job I can use ai to work faster. I don't disagree with the advice of not using AI while learning, but I somewhat disagree with the "typing by hands every code snippet" part.

It feels like a waste of time while sufficing with reading actually makes more sense as I can spend absorb more information faster and go through more pages of docs.

I'm referring to modern CPUs. To make the question more specific, arm64 vs x86

And if so, how do you fix it?

I asked chatGPT and it gave me this example but I'd like to ask it here (since AI can make mistakes). Can you let me know? Thanks

It says this can give different results due to rounding errors. If so, how to you write code so that you don't have this issue?

#include <iostream>

int main() {
    double a = 1.0 + 0x1p-27;
    double b = 1.0 - 0x1p-27;
    double c = -1.0;

    std::cout << (a * b + c) << '\n';
}

the idea of program synthesis (like Rosetta) is to reduce a function into its constraints in a spec sheet, and generate the program from those constraints. for example, in order to write something like x = x squared, you would need to write a spec sheet along the lines of ∀x∈Z,f(x)=x2. i am considering building a program synthesizer, but I still haven’t figured out why exactly this representation is supposed to be easier than writing the code directly (they look equally complex)

Does anyone know the technical reasons behind this, if there are? I'd like answers from people who actually know about it, not speculative answers please. If you don't know the exact reason for the game at least provide an example where code from mac and windows is not cross compatible, e.g. provide the C++ code and show it won't be cross compatible for an application between windows and mac?

I posted this in macgaming and so far what makes most sense is that there isn't any technical reason, just that you'd need to keep to codebases in sync and developers are not interested in that.

Here they say it's because of different path calculations, so can anyone provide a minimal code example that gives different mathematical answers in apple silicon vs x86 and that it cannot be fixed e.g. using compiler flags, etc? https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/1u5tluy/the_why_on_why_mac_crossplay_is_so_hard_to_get/

Just curious as I am 34 YO, and have been considering a career shift into the Tech sector (I have “Basic” knowledge at best). Specifically AI/Machine Learning or Programming.
I’ve heard good and bad about both, but am just curious how old people are (or how diverse the age pool is) when they “get into” Programming. How long (on average) does it take to get your first Certification in Programming?
Apologies about the broadness of the question.

Whenever I try to learn through documentations to learn about a new library / sdk for example I couldn't help but ask myself how I could be more efficient when it comes to learning new things through using them. I'm asking this because I prefer reading and doing things on my own rather than having to rely on YouTube videos or courses. Is it just through constant experimentation and implementation or is there any learning technique that you guys use to maximize the use of documentations?

Obviously there's no universal one, but has anyone here found theirs? Want to share your experiences? A few incomplete examples come to mind:

- Watching YouTube videos

- Finishing video courses on other platforms

- Coding platforms like LeetCode or Codewars

- Building your own ideas with AI, asking step by step how it's done and why

- Reading books

I say incomplete because I feel like something is missing from all of them. The only thing that worked for me was university (and there it's a combination of methods -> videos with a detailed explanation from someone who actually knows + forced practice) and paid work (do, do, do — over time you learn and you improve, but it's always on the specific platform you happen to be working on).

I'm interested in learning and building up general knowledge (or specific knowledge about something that interests me), but first I'd like to read whether you all found a method of your own that works for you.

Where is it more convenient or necessary to use python instead of for example C# / C++ / Rust? I really can’t understand it, for me it’s easier to write in C++ than in python and I know that for other people it’s the other way around. But ignoring human factor, when program is better / faster in python than in cpp or are they things that python can do that cpp cant?

Edit: I don’t talk about one time use scripts or prototypes (which python is good for), I mean full on apps

Hi, I have to choose between 2 positions:

• FullStack dev (Spring Boot + React) at a smaller company
• SDET at Keysight Network Visibility Test & Security

Which of these brings me closer to a DevOps role ?

Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time

Does anyone have a solid guide outside of the intro Win32 docs for Direct3D implementation. Specifically trying to dig into shader and pixel buffers

Note: I am NOT complaining about AI

Something like 5 years ago or so I was deeply obsessed with programming, I used to stay up at night messing with shit I didn't understand

I genuinely spent so many hours in vs while knowing nothing beyond variables and functions

I remember once that I was following a c# tutorial on YouTube and I kept having the same error and I had no way of knowing how to fix it so I had to join the creator's discord server and spam ping him that I need help because I can't sleep without knowing what this weird error means, just for it to be a capital letter that had to be lowercase or something like that.

A while ago I got my Interest back and all the posts I could find were "AI will take our jobs" "CS students soon in McDonald's"...etc and this didn't even upset me.

What really killed my mood was the aesthetic change.

It stopped being the cool aesthetic that made me love programming where someone wakes up at 5 am and fights the computer for 30 hours because there is no other possible way to be successful for him then he chugs caffeine and stumbles on the answer

Because even when I tried to make a project I was like, well I can re-learn python...oorrrrrrn I could just ask ai

Most of the videos that I found were like "I AM TOTALLY NOT USING AI SLOP COME WATCH ME RECREATE THE HARDCORE FEELING BECAUSE I AM 100% HARDCOOL AND I WILL STRUGGLE INSTEAD OF USING AI!!"

which doesn't even feel better

The struggle was the fun but also struggling on purpose just to not take the easy route and ask AI for what you don't know is still silly

Both ways are killing the vibe and as a casual who is doing it for fun and not for the job I can't find a middleground

It feels like a rant with no actual question someone can help me with but I guess there is probably someone out there who found a way to be efficient and still have fun

Hello.I have a problem because i want to learn socket for example and i always forget what to type.I don't understand the docs easily.Do programmers write code and at the same time watch videos explaining a library?.I don't want to always use AI.I have poor memory too.Or maybe I'm just too stupid.

Are things like std430 or std140 unnecessarily strict?

I mean can we use tools and metrics on a codebase that is pure AI vs. Something some Sr. dev did ? Maybe static tool analysis ?

It seems to me there is the constant debate about this and how AI just makes terrible/unmaintainable code but I would like to finally get the answer to this.

My opinion doing this 25 is with AI + AI factoring as needed the code is fine.

So I am begginer developer I've been whole life on Windows and I've started with frontend but last months i've been digging into some backend (go) but i think as a solo developer I'll need to do fullstack probably react or something is it good idea to separate my coding workspace to linux, so having both windows and Linux as a dual boot i don't want to give away the windows environment i have there, thanks for answering

Hello,

Can you guys please recommend some really good website to consume good technical deep dives ? I used to rread medium blogs but good articles are getting rare day by day. I can see Ai Slop content. Same is the case with SubStack.

I like the content that helps understand the deep deep internals of a system.

I like "Hussein Nasser's" content on YT, but I am more into reading than watching.

I am not against using AI as a coding helper. Quite the opposite. Even before this Gen AI shenanigans, I used quite a few AI based tools helping me coding faster. By the way, something bothers me a lot nowadays and it is this: everyone is advertising a website which is quite identical to its benchmark and pretty much all investors or people with the funds, are looking for that speed.

I strongly believe a good product, even as simple as a todo list app, takes more time than "30 minutes" which is advertised by those vibe coding gurus and people like that. So in my side, this atmosphere caused a sense of emptiness. And I can't even collect my thoughts on a certain point and do something.

How did you overcome these feelings?

Hi, as a non programmer with basically zero knowledge on programming or coding.

Im wondering how hard is like programming a language translation tool into different things?

I ask because i play a shitty phone game called Kingshot, and it has an inchat Translator where next to every message some one sends, there is a little button that will translate what ever message into the language you have the game set to.

And like? While it’s not perfect, it’s REALLY good, and makes the game way more fun to be playing with people from different countries and not having to go back and forth with google translate to have a conversation.

And I’m now wondering why more apps and games don’t have translators built in?
Is it hard?
Are translators like difficult to configure and implement?
Whats the go?
(Feel free to explain anything super technical like I’m 5)

I'm working on a program which involves creating project files which store project data in a specific structure, as well as the project manifest. Currently, I have the project file set up as a ".dcproj" to keep with a specific naming scheme. However, upon doing some searching, it turns out that .dcproj is already used in a couple of places, although they're pretty esoteric.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/containers/docker-compose-properties?view=visualstudio
https://fileinfo.com/extension/dcproj

I know I can just ignore the other uses and go with what I have, but is it bad practice? Intuitively, file extensions would have to be reused all the time with the limited number of characters we have to create them. For example, the .M file extension is used in at least four places.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_filename_extensions_(M%E2%80%93R)ss)

TL;DR: I want to learn how to take an idea, turn it into a realistic project plan, and build it. I'll use AI heavily for implementation, but I don't want it doing the planning I'm trying to learn.

I'm learning software development by building real projects. I know the basics of Python but I'm inexperienced — I haven't built much that's substantial, I'm not good at reading unfamiliar code yet, and debugging is still hard.

The thing I'm stuck on isn't coding. It's that I don't know how to plan a project.

I have a list of 10–15 web/local apps I want to build. But when I have an idea, I don't know what comes next. Say I think "I want an app that scans images and extracts information from them." I know what the end result should do. I have no idea how an experienced developer turns that into an actual project — what gets decided first, how you figure out requirements, how you decide what's in version one, how you break it into tasks small enough to actually implement.

AI made this more obvious. When I don't know what to do next, I ask an LLM, and it immediately gives me a folder structure, an architecture, a schema, several files, tests. The code might even work. But I've skipped the part I'm trying to learn — I'm following a plan without knowing how I'd have arrived at it myself.

What I want instead is something like: idea → requirements → scope → design → tasks → implement → test → review. Handle the planning myself, then use AI on implementation, explaining unfamiliar code, catching mistakes, writing tests.

So, for experienced and self-taught devs:

• How do you go from an idea to a plan? What does that actually look like for a small app?
• What do you write down before you start coding, and how do you know when you've planned enough?
• How do you break a feature into implementation-sized tasks?
• How do you decide what not to build?
• What parts of development should I deliberately practice without AI?

I'm not looking for better prompts or tool recommendations. I'd especially like concrete workflows or examples from people who learned this themselves, rather than general advice.
(Edited with AI)

I use AI to develop, and because it works quite well, I extended it to run multiple agents in parallel. This way, I can develop 2 or 3 features at the same time. To avoid data collision, I ended up building a dev tool, which I have been using for a couple of months.

Now, I asked around in other subs how people handle this, and the most common solutions involved git worktrees that resolve the code collision, but the runtime isolation is still an issue. People engineered solutions around env files and Docker Compose that fit their own codebase, mostly involving one service and one database. It works, at least for simple apps, but it's manual and gets harder to keep up as more services are added. And it looks like something that only an experienced dev can do.

What I built goes further than that (I needed it for a multi-service app with Redis and workers) and is simpler to use. I created a way to fully isolate an environment (all services included) with no ongoing upkeep, able to spin up multiple instances of the same app in parallel on the same machine. It's more architecturally involved than the scripting approach, but doesn't require manual maintenance.

So I'm asking you whether you got this problem and if what I built is worth sharing. Is "heavier but zero-maintenance" actually appealing to people, or does anything that sounds like more infrastructure get dismissed on sight in favor of the simpler script-it-yourself approach, even with its edge cases?

Hi everyone,

We are working on a capstone project which aims to forecast flood and give early advices to the residents. However, we need to have a sms alert system. We used httpsms during our preoral defense but the panel requires that the recepients should not be able to reply to the sms sent to them by the system which is get the point. Another option is twilio but as much as possible, we would like to have free alternative since we dont really have the means or the budget to pay for subscription. Can i ask for your recommendations if you know platforms that offers sms gateway for free? It would be great if it supports Philippine mobile numbers. Thank you and have a nice day

Hi everyone!

I need some help with a gift for my husband, who is a programmer. He sometimes mentions that to make an app for my phone, he needs a computer running macos. We have never had one, and it might be an interesting experience for him from programming point of view (I assume?).

So, that is my idea for a gift. Of course, I would prefer to go with the cheaper option, since the only purpose would be what I described. We don’t really need another pc or laptop.

So my question is: can I just buy the MacBook Neo, and it will serve this purpose just fine, or should I go for a more expensive model for some reason? If so, please advise!

So I'm a college fresher with no prior experience of coding. I had started learning python before the starting of college (1 week before college started). I still feel like I am not good at coding at all. There are some weird citations in c such as i++ and all which is getting mixed up with my python. There was one question on obtaining the expression sinx=x-x^3/3!.... Using loops btw

I felt I won't be able to do it in both c and python. I took a course on Udemy for c(vlad budnitski)and python(100 days) but I was not able to find examples like this. Everyone in my class learnt languages like java in their schooling and said the sinx problem is a standard problem. What should I do in this situation?

I feel like the teaching in my college (they are teaching c now) is not good.

Experienced coders please help me.