Programmer Mentor List

[YOLOisonlyprinciple]

I just thought this site could use a list of people who are programmers and are willing to mentor people who want to learn a bit of coding



As for me, im learning a proper programming language for the first time (my past experience is just a bit of VBA editing for work before).
Im spending time after my dayjob to learn a bit, and also because i want something to substitute my gaming addiction problem, and i have tons of projects ive listed out over the years which i had procrastinated over..

Im trying out Python, its pretty fun.

I just feel like i would love to have a mentor, someone i could just discuss general stuff and advice. Also, watching youtube videos is kinda getting boring, i want to start writing small stuff in the future but i dont really know what kinds of knowledge i would require to start some basic projects.
For example, i dont really know what challenges i would face if i say wanted to write something to download all the pictures on a tumblr blog.
Or say, i want to write code to download data of intpforum.com so i can make predictions on how many replies a post receives based on what time and day of the week it is posted, what are the topics which are favourites, study the history of successful posters and patterns in topics they post etc


So, anyone who is willing to help out can reply, and can also mention what is the area/language they are good at too... And people could possibly use this post for help in the future too.

 

[Seteleechete]

[Silina: Google-senpai is the best mentor!]

 

[YOLOisonlyprinciple]

Of course people arent going to ask how to use an if function,

literally anything can be learnt from books and the web, but that doesnt mean a mentor/teacher isnt needed.

Any trade/profession imo needs a mentor/guide

 

[Ex-User (14663)]

YOLO, I think you have made an excellent start. If there were two essential ingredients to an extremely effective method of learning programming it would indeed be 1) deciding on some project and then learn from trial and error, and 2) finding a mentor.

I would be glad to be your mentor, but I haven't really touched Python in several years. My specialties currently are R and C++, and I mostly deal with data analysis (e.g. making prediction models like the one you described).

 

[Haim]

i want to start writing small stuff in the future but i dont really know what kinds of knowledge i would require to start some basic projects.

If you are creating anything new(for you) this wont change .
You have it backwards the all point of making small projects is to slowly know what you need learn and learn it in a progressive way, you separate the project to steps(because there is no other way) and learn each one when you come to it(with google help or whatever).

 

[NothingReallyBlue]

Just started this forum but I program for a living so you can ask me about most things. Looks like you want to look up a "Machine Learning" algorithm for your intp forum post predictor.

 

[Haim]

Just started this forum but I program for a living so you can ask me about most things. Looks like you want to look up a "Machine Learning" algorithm for your intp forum post predictor.

More like simple statistic, which you don't need to write code for, collecting the data would need programming, but he does not have intpf server permissions, so it is not really practical.

 

[Ex-User (14663)]

More like simple statistic, which you don't need to write code for, collecting the data would need programming, but he does not have intpf server permissions, so it is not really practical.

Server permissions? You don't need that to download the threads.

 

[NothingReallyBlue]

More like simple statistic, which you don't need to write code for, collecting the data would need programming, but he does not have intpf server permissions, so it is not really practical.

Much of Machine Learning is derived from simple statistics. I believe there exist tools for downloading the contents of entire sites and he could create some form of parsing tool for the webpages.

This would fall directly in line with simple Machine Learning applications: taking a set of data that has multiple fields and predicting an outcome based on a new data point. I would recommend MATLAB either way.

 

[Ex-User (14663)]

Much of Machine Learning is derived from simple statistics. I believe there exist tools for downloading the contents of entire sites and he could create some form of parsing tool for the webpages.

This would fall directly in line with simple Machine Learning applications: taking a set of data that has multiple fields and predicting an outcome based on a new data point. I would recommend MATLAB either way.

Y'all engineers sure love your Matlab. Never understood what's so good about it.

I agree with everything else though. It's a classic machine learning problem.

 

[NothingReallyBlue]

Y'all engineers sure love your Matlab. Never understood what's so good about it.

I agree with everything else though. It's a classic machine learning problem.

It just has good libraries for statistical analysis. Plus everyone uses it so more job opportunities.

 

[Ex-User (14663)]

It just has good libraries for statistical analysis. Plus everyone uses it so more job opportunities.

I work in data science, have never seen Matlab being used in that field. It's either R or Python. I personally prefer R – its library repository dwarfs everything else (and its free, which Matlab is not).

 

[NothingReallyBlue]

I work in data science, have never seen Matlab being used in that field. It's either R or Python. I personally prefer R – its library repository dwarfs everything else (and its free, which Matlab is not).

MATLAB has libraries for everything, which is why we engineers use it, but it is true that it is not free (unless you are a student). The reason to go into MATLAB is if you're going into engineering and you want to use the MATLAB GUIs because most engineers across all fields know MATLAB where as R (which I'll admit I've never used) is more well known across heavily software based fields.

Since you are beginning, I would agree with Serac that Python is probably your best bet since you can go either direction of engineering or computer science.

 

[YOLOisonlyprinciple]

i just need to know how to download the whole dump into a spreadsheet type output. If i can do that, i can use the tools necessary to clean the data and get the necessary info probably

 

[YOLOisonlyprinciple]

@Haim, also how much should i cheat while learning projects?
i could either google "how to download all data from a vBulleting forum" and just try to tweak it to get my result.
Or, i could try to google "how to crawl a website", then understand the list of tools are available, then understand how forums are different from a normal website in terms of coding, then understand what tools are needed to download from a vBulletin forum because its permissions are different, and so on...

With no CS theoretical knowledge, im not really sure whether option 1 or 2 is better. If i go with option1, and i do solve the problem, i will gain confidence because i solved it kinda fast but without understanding all my options available
With option 2, it will probably take a long time to see any tangible output, but ill probably understand stuff in detail.

But tbh, i feel option 1 is better because i get irritated easily and im used to having immediate rewards (due to gaming addiction), so if i dont get tangible outputs quickly i would get too bored..

 

[Haim]

It depends what you want to learn and what is your project goal.
You would have these kind of decisions for every new project, a decision about quality,source code control and reusability(being able to use it on different forums) vs speed

 

[Intolerable]

Not the advice you're looking for but if you are a new student in the industry I would suggest picking a different major.

I've been in IT / Software development for the better part of a decade. I'm on the cusp of switching professions (as were people I knew years ago who were in same boat I am now).

Employers are fighting tooth and nail for their H1B imports to suppress wages. It's not the kind of job that pays long term anymore. The more you are paid the more at-risk your continued employment is. With the VC specter looming over most startups the landscape is too loose for a career in it. They will go around and see who is paid the most, see if they can replace them with entry level guys and if they can you're gone. Worse, software unlike hard trades can be done anywhere in the world. So many are moving their development work outside of the US to Eastern Europe and India where they can suppress wages.

On top of all that development has become a trendy profession where the industry makes little forward progress. It's not about what you knew 10 years ago. It's about what's hot now. If you're a C developer for 10 years too bad. It's all about C# now. It's all about making the job easier to dilute the labor pool so wages can be suppressed.

Needless to say I do not see a good future for software dev like I used to. If anything it will be good to know software if you plan on pushing your own work onto the market. There is a place for that still.

What's better for stable work is anything trade related that cannot be outsourced. That which cannot ever be substituted for entry level copy-paste drones. Mechanical labor, electrical engineering, welding, etc.

 

[pjoa09]

You probably gotta crawl to find all users
then all their posts
and then search all the @ shit and quote in each html:
but its gotta know when to crawl to the next page as well

so ud have a database where a user has many posts,an integer for how many replies to that post, and the time/date of that post.
not including threads here because people dont even @ for those sometimes

u can use linear regression to predict. features are time date. might not be accurate tho. It'd be better to ask if a post gets 3 or more replies or smth.

the real bitch would be crawling tho. the server might stop responding to your requests too and ban you. i think. not sure.

 

[Ex-User (14663)]

All the threads are indexed by an integer, apparently by their chronological order. For example the oldest one that exists seems to be 7:
https://intpforum.com/showthread.php?t=7

Then it's just a matter of going through each integer up to the newest thread. The real pain in the ass is extracting stuff from the html code.

 

[Puffy]

All the threads are indexed by an integer, apparently by their chronological order. For example the oldest one that exists seems to be 7:
https://intpforum.com/showthread.php?t=7

Then it's just a matter of going through each integer up to the newest thread. The real pain in the ass is extracting stuff from the html code.

Huh, oldest thread was posted on 19th July 2007. I guess that makes today INTPf's 10th birthday.

Spoiler

happy birthday - I'll be honest, I thought you'd have copped it by now

 

[Ex-User (14663)]

Huh, oldest thread was posted on 19th July 2007. I guess that makes today INTPf's 10th birthday.

Spoiler

happy birthday - I'll be honest, I thought you'd have copped it by now

didn't notice that

yeah, happy birthday!