No I am not a showoff. Starting since yesterday I have decided to blog about stuff that occurs in my life .And since I havent received any recommendations I chose to write about that I am familiar with .
The start of every May means one thing . Heat and boredom . A complete disorientation with day and time. Spent lurking in my bedroom , sleeping till noon and having coffee at 12 . Nights stretch into the wee hours of the morning , dozing off only when I am too sleepy to realize that I am lying on the keyboard face down. And I thought to myself one fine day ( yesterday doesn't sound dramatic)
"I am sitting here wasting my life , and the hard-earned money of my parents . Who gives a fuck if the cat can do somersaults or the dog knows to sing a song ? . I must get on with something useful and stop slacking off. "
I decided to do 2 useful things over the summer and the next 6 months (intern sem ! yipee !) . Learn to write better programs .
Draw dragons .
Seriously. I am not kidding when I mention that I want to draw dragons . It started with the Harry Potter mania when I first saw the Hungarian Horntail on the cover of the Goblet of fire and was all the more encouraged when I read the Inheritance series (remember the series starting with Eragon ? ) . Big bad-ass creatures breathing mouthful of fire and growing as big as an entire village inspired pure awesomeness . The only thing I could breathe out is the stinking vapor of onion from last night's chutney . Govind therefore resolved to learn how to paint your dragon over the next semester.Its what people call extra-curricular activities.
Point 1 is my primary target . I do code. But not as much as I like . And certainly not as good as I want to . Knowing C , C++ , Java, Guava , R,S,X,D is like learning French,German, Watusi, Inuit .
It certainly helps to know languages . But there IS a difference between literature and advertisement (read Shakespeare vs Arindham Chaudhari).Mere knowledge of programming lang. wont help. The ones that actually worth learning are techniques and principles.
To enhance my insubstantial skills in programming I have decided to do an online course with 2 constraints .
1. Take only one course at a time
2. Any course as long as it doesn't involve Java
Point 1 is the wisdom resulting from years of experience trying to multi-task and failing in all of them miserably. I have taken 10 courses so far and have left all of them in the middle without completion . Either I cant finish the exercises on time , or get wrong answers or dont understand the questions or all of them . Single tasking is like playing test cricket . Takes time and is boring but in the end is the best way to do something .
Multi-tasking is like IPL . Full of glitz , glam , energy and stupidity . Our mind isnt designed to handle parallel tasks by nature .
Point 2 is a very important one from a personal perspective. Java is like learning Hindi or Tamil at school . You dont like it . You dont want it . You would do away with it . Yet you have no choice but to learn .
Imagine that you are doing something. You are a mature person capable or reasoning and taking your own decisions . But your nanny doesn't think so .She thinks you are mischievous like you were as a child (read C and buffer overflow). She automatically assumes that anything you do has an unstated intent to it . So she decides to discipline you. You cant just go to pee. You'd have to say (throw clause): "Dear Ms.McNanny. It is my intention to pee.Can I go to pee and come back in exactly 2 mins ?"
To that Nanny would reply : "Certainly my dear. Take 5 minutes and not more else I will have to whoop your ass" (try catch)
Then you would go into the bathroom , take your wiener out and take a pee. And if you take an extra second to make sure that you do the deed without messing yourself, the nanny would come right in bursting into the toilet with a stick to whoop your ass(Exception e)
Sounds boring ? Imagine this 10 times over everyday. Welcome to Java 101.
Unfortunately this nanny behavior is so much enamored by the Academic world in India that everyone insists that you use Java . Its type-safe , garbage collected , platform-independent , safe, generic blah blah blah .....
Kill me please.
Anyway apologies if you my dear non-programmer couldn't understand half the shit I posted above. Don't worry. I didnt either .I do hope you get the gist of what I said though.
Anyway coming back to the point , my search for an online course is still on. 5 years ago , there was just Khan academy (I think) . Today you have tonnes of sites with thousands of courses to take and work on . Going through all of them is a course in itself.Let me see if I can get my hands on a good one .
The start of every May means one thing . Heat and boredom . A complete disorientation with day and time. Spent lurking in my bedroom , sleeping till noon and having coffee at 12 . Nights stretch into the wee hours of the morning , dozing off only when I am too sleepy to realize that I am lying on the keyboard face down. And I thought to myself one fine day ( yesterday doesn't sound dramatic)
"I am sitting here wasting my life , and the hard-earned money of my parents . Who gives a fuck if the cat can do somersaults or the dog knows to sing a song ? . I must get on with something useful and stop slacking off. "
I decided to do 2 useful things over the summer and the next 6 months (intern sem ! yipee !) . Learn to write better programs .
Draw dragons .
Seriously. I am not kidding when I mention that I want to draw dragons . It started with the Harry Potter mania when I first saw the Hungarian Horntail on the cover of the Goblet of fire and was all the more encouraged when I read the Inheritance series (remember the series starting with Eragon ? ) . Big bad-ass creatures breathing mouthful of fire and growing as big as an entire village inspired pure awesomeness . The only thing I could breathe out is the stinking vapor of onion from last night's chutney . Govind therefore resolved to learn how to paint your dragon over the next semester.Its what people call extra-curricular activities.
Point 1 is my primary target . I do code. But not as much as I like . And certainly not as good as I want to . Knowing C , C++ , Java, Guava , R,S,X,D is like learning French,German, Watusi, Inuit .
It certainly helps to know languages . But there IS a difference between literature and advertisement (read Shakespeare vs Arindham Chaudhari).Mere knowledge of programming lang. wont help. The ones that actually worth learning are techniques and principles.
To enhance my insubstantial skills in programming I have decided to do an online course with 2 constraints .
1. Take only one course at a time
2. Any course as long as it doesn't involve Java
Point 1 is the wisdom resulting from years of experience trying to multi-task and failing in all of them miserably. I have taken 10 courses so far and have left all of them in the middle without completion . Either I cant finish the exercises on time , or get wrong answers or dont understand the questions or all of them . Single tasking is like playing test cricket . Takes time and is boring but in the end is the best way to do something .
Multi-tasking is like IPL . Full of glitz , glam , energy and stupidity . Our mind isnt designed to handle parallel tasks by nature .
Point 2 is a very important one from a personal perspective. Java is like learning Hindi or Tamil at school . You dont like it . You dont want it . You would do away with it . Yet you have no choice but to learn .
Imagine that you are doing something. You are a mature person capable or reasoning and taking your own decisions . But your nanny doesn't think so .She thinks you are mischievous like you were as a child (read C and buffer overflow). She automatically assumes that anything you do has an unstated intent to it . So she decides to discipline you. You cant just go to pee. You'd have to say (throw clause): "Dear Ms.McNanny. It is my intention to pee.Can I go to pee and come back in exactly 2 mins ?"
To that Nanny would reply : "Certainly my dear. Take 5 minutes and not more else I will have to whoop your ass" (try catch)
Then you would go into the bathroom , take your wiener out and take a pee. And if you take an extra second to make sure that you do the deed without messing yourself, the nanny would come right in bursting into the toilet with a stick to whoop your ass(Exception e)
Sounds boring ? Imagine this 10 times over everyday. Welcome to Java 101.
Unfortunately this nanny behavior is so much enamored by the Academic world in India that everyone insists that you use Java . Its type-safe , garbage collected , platform-independent , safe, generic blah blah blah .....
Kill me please.
Anyway apologies if you my dear non-programmer couldn't understand half the shit I posted above. Don't worry. I didnt either .I do hope you get the gist of what I said though.
Anyway coming back to the point , my search for an online course is still on. 5 years ago , there was just Khan academy (I think) . Today you have tonnes of sites with thousands of courses to take and work on . Going through all of them is a course in itself.Let me see if I can get my hands on a good one .
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