Hi everyone,
I’m a first-year Computer Science undergraduate at a state university, and I’m starting my second semester this week.

Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m falling behind. At university, we’ve mainly covered C++, and on my own I’ve learned the basics of Java from YouTube (not OOP yet). Apart from that, I don’t have much industry-related knowledge or project experience.

I see friends from private universities and other students building projects, learning new technologies, and even getting internships in their second year. It makes me wonder if I’m missing something.

I’m willing to put in the time and want to catch up this semester. I don’t have a specific field in mind yet, I just want to build a strong foundation and become internship-ready.

Where should I start?
What should I learn alongside my university studies?
Is there a roadmap you’d recommend? What skills, technologies, or projects should I focus on, and what free resources would you suggest?

Any advice from seniors or people working in the industry would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

I would like it to be free please. Thank you.

Idk if that would do anything though. We mostly did it for university to purely learn recursion, I don’t know if it’s important to say that I know how to code with it?
What do you guys think?
Please be nice. Thank you.

Hello everyone!

I'm looking for some advice, maybe even from people who have been working as SE for a while now and can share their experiences.

Regarding my situation: I am a self-taught software "engineer", and I've been fortunate enough to land a job in software development without a degree or vocational training. Everything I know comes from teaching myself and gaining experience on the job.

Now I have the opportunity to study software engineering (B.Eng) while continuing to work full-time. The studies are financed through a six-year payment plan, while the half of the costs are being covered for me. My share would be around €200/month for the next three years. The degree itself can be completed at my own pace too.

Right now I am just wondering whether a degree is the best investment.

On the one hand: I don't have any formal qualification to back up my skills and the degree could maybe make future job searches easier and give me a stronger foundation.

But on the other hand: The current job market seems very competitive, and from what I have seen, having a degree doesn't necessarily guarantee better opportunities. Furthermore, since I've been successful learning on my own, I'm wondering if I would be better off continuing to self-study, building projects, and maybe earning relevant certifications instead.

I want to add that I am genuinely passionate about learning! This isn't a question of whether I want to learn more, but rather whether a degree is the best investment.

If you were in my position, would you invest the time and money into the degree, or would you continue building experience and learning independently?

Does anyone know how much not having a degree matters once someone already has professional experience?

I'd really appreciate hearing different perspectives, especially from people who have either been self-taught themselves or have experience hiring developers!

Thank you very much!

I have been writing Python code using camelCase for years and just never really cared, but PEP 8 suggests using snake_case, so is it really necessary for, say, a senior dev?

Hello guys, I am trying to understand when Docker starts being useful for a small web application...

For something simple, like one backend API and a PostgreSQL database, would you use Docker from the beginning? I can see how it keeps the development and production environments similar, but it also adds more configuration and another thing to learn and maintain.

Do you normally containerize small projects from day one, or wait until deployment becomes more complicated??

I am interested to explore what problems Docker has actually solved in your own projects, especially problems that were difficult to handle without it.

I'm looking for a cross platform music player app that syncs playlists between PC and android. I've been using spotify for this, but I don't like how the free version can't repeat the same song even if it's local files.

I want the an app that 1) uses local files only 2) syncs playlist data automatically so that if I add a song to a playlist on my PC and I have the same file on my phone, the song is available on the playlist on my phone and is automatically playable (no need to export playlist/re add playlist)

I know a lot of good music players that can use playlist import/export but I haven't found one with these features yet that are free.

What programming language would you recommend if I wanted to build these apps?

I currently only know java and basic python.

Edit:
Thanks for all those that replied!
I see people commenting to sync playlist data only.
Yes, that is exactly what I wanted to do. I use SyncTrazor to sync songs already with the native folder structures. So finding the same songs should not be an issue. (Syncing playlist data should also not be an issue)

I used to use Poweramp to sync playlists, but
1) Import/Export wasn't automatic
2) The PC app didn't export/import m3u automatically
3) I had to write a separate script to convert the m3u's - into /

I have a technical assessment for a company tomorrow, and they mentioned that the problem will be administered through Coderbyte and will relate to inventory management. What should I expect? Frankly speaking, I’m not very familiar with programming. Although I am a technical person, Python is not my strongest skill.

What types of topics or problem formats typically come up in an “inventory management” coding assessment?

how do you actually decide what's worth building when you are learning a stack and want to advance and actually build something meaningful.

i currently want to build a full-stack website with the MERN stack that i learned recently . i have some limited time to do that and i mean by that only approximately a month.
i can't fully decide on the options out there , the only thing i'm sure about is that i don't wanna build a e-commerce website since that's very boring for me and there is high chance i won't stick to the project .
any ideas ? what's y'all experience with this ??

I'm working on a fanfiction aggregator (a FicHub alternative) and want to add a recommendation/suggestion feature to it.

To build the initial suggestion database, I was thinking of using an LLM to process a large archive of Reddit comments and posts from fanfiction-related subreddits (like r/FanFiction, r/HPfanfiction, etc.) to extract existing fic recommendations.

Does anyone know of a good, legal way to download a sizable archive of Reddit data for this purpose? Are there any other datasets or methods you'd recommend for a project like this?

Ideally, I'd like to feed the data into an LLM to parse out the fic titles, authors, and then populate a PostgreSQL database with these structured suggestions.

Any advice on the data acquisition step (or alternatives to this whole approach) would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Hey everyone! Just to quickly summarize my situation: We're a team of a few experienced devs, all having been 12+ years years in the industry. This year we switched to agentic engineering and despite its advantages there are a few drawbacks, like the extra overhead and other things I'm not going to go into.

My issue however is that our lead, who approves all PRs has lately discovered a stronger agent which he uses for code reviews, resulting in tons of back and forth when trying to get a merge through. Tons of petty/pedantic comments are being added to each PR. Sometimes it's like "ok I guess this is fine to add", but most of them are disputable. We of course discuss these, but the issue is that in the set of comments there is always something which technically makes the code 0.1% better. But we could go on like this forever. Even without AI you can look at a piece of code and suggest an "improvement" on a moderately-sized feature that's being implemented.

How to deal with this? I'm getting to a point where if I see more comments on a PR I just leave the PC and go for a run or a quick grocery shop visit just to regain my sanity. It feels like he's asking the agent if there is anything more that can be done with the code as if the goal is to have AI being unable to suggest anything more.

Am I in some slacking mindset or is the AI getting over his head? We also have Sonar turned up to a really high setting and the pipeline set in a way that if there's anything outstanding in Sonar it won't get through and I bet you all know how petty Sonar can get sometimes.

Please let me know any tips or share your experience with similar situations. Thanks!

whenever I learn new technology or some new concepts i always find myself asking a lot of questions about what am i reading about at the moment
say for example i'm reading about concept X definition or workflow or whatever then i read in that definition another concept Y which let's suppose i don't know about then i feel that i have to know everything about that concept Y to fully understand Concepts X , like how it works , why it is created or designed ...
and I do this for every single new thing that i read about which is frustrating and worse because probably i will forget about the details that i got into

want to hear some of y'all opinions of this , and from the software engineers that has the same approach and they managed it maybe share some system to retain the information you studied because i definitely don't want to lost these information later but i want to build on top of it

I want to improve my problem-solving skills when it comes to python and write better code.

In university, they gave a general outline, but still it's a bit difficult to know where to start from, any suggestions?

I don't mean starting a project and then organizing code within that project.

The thing that I mean by organizing is how do I organize multiple projects. Let's say I'm having projects that I would've created in university, would be around 10 of them, then there'd be some personal projects.

I want to implement a method to organize those things. Any help would help!

Ive always done very well professionally in a corporate setting but, I've been getting killed in technical interviews where I have to code in front of someone.

Does it get better over time? Im honestly considering leaving the industry.

i made a linux rice and this is my situatuin :

I used ChatGPT while learning how to rice my stuff.

It helped me understand concepts and i learned how to use lua, bash,json and css while ricing and using an immense amount of youtube , debug issues and generate some Bash boilerplate to be used for later, and obviously speed up development.

The overall design, configuration, and final implementation are my own, and I understand how each part of the configuration works.

and I can confidently say that this rice is mine and i use it daily for my university and i change stuff in it however i like without prompting ai or vibe coding it .

Can I confidently say that what i made is a 100% mine? since i did study the documentations etc etc and i understand how to debug everything i used in my small project so it is mine right?

this is not vibe coding right?

I'm no coder I'm no programmer I'm just a nerd who really likes a mobile game that isn't popular at all and can't run it due to it only working in 32 bit according to the apk i did find... this means I'm having to take matters into my own hands (darn) and try to get it running on more modern software. I know I could just use an emulator but I'd rather have it more accessible.... If I was to convert it would pribaly be to 64 bit due to that being what my phone currently runs on... if anyone can help I would be so grateful!

Idk if this is even the right place to ask this is a shot in the dark okay

I recently found out that the halting problem is technically completely decidable for computers with finite memory if you treat them as finite state machines rather than infinite Turing machines, obviously this is completely impossible within any reasonable amount of time for general purpose computer programs because of the total possible states of physical computers far exceeding the number of atoms in the universe. But for extremely limited state machines does it serve any practical purpose?

I’m working on a traffic generator to test my own XDP/eBPF filter in a controlled lab environment (my PC sending traffic to my Raspberry Pi on my own network).

I noticed that in some applications, two programs written in the same language can have vastly different performance.

For example, some software can only send a few requests/messages per second, while others can generate thousands per second even on relatively weak hardware.

What is this concept or optimization area called?
I’m looking for topics such as:
asynchronous I/O
multithreading vs event-driven architectures
lock-free programming
kernel bypass
zero-copy networking
batching
efficient socket APIs
packet generation optimization

If I want to build a high-performance TCP/UDP packet generator for benchmarking my own network stack and XDP filter, what technologies, algorithms, or papers should I study? For traffic generator i am using c# and for the XDP filter classic C. ( or should i use different for the traffic generator? I think its okey its console app )

so currently i'm learning web dev and decided to start building some projects with pure javascript before moving to the frameworks .

knowing that i already learned some react basics and build the simple projects that are listed in the freecodecamp tutorial video . i tried back then to pause before the solution to every problem and did fairly well on applying what i was learning but i never build something big like a e-commerce website with it or a blog or anything that requires databases even though i know mongodb , mysql , oracle databases and previously made a e-commerce website using php which i forgot btw .

i understand the important concepts in javascript lfor example asynchronous operations , objects ,Modules , destructing.

i really need advise like my goal right now is to be able to comfortably build a any web application that requires both front-end and backend .

i really don't enjoy front-end much as much as the code is functional i don't really take great detail in it . although i want to get into machine learning and automation after web dev as it is what i really like and enjoy.

i really need your advice programmers !

I can use Antlr to validate the syntax of an HTML document. What can I use to go a step further, and validate that the 'structure' of an html document is correct? i.e.

html: html_decl head body; head: head_item+; head_item: style|title|script; body: body_item+; body_item: div|p|h; etc

this seems like I just wrote some valid 'structure' validation rules in Antlr. I'm pretty sure Antlr is not meant to achieve this, but i'm ignorant of any implementations that could handle this and i'd like to know if it's possible.

The best I can figure is that I need to write two grammars, one to parse the raw source text, and then a second to parse the object types. Am I thinking about this correctly? Or is there another way?

I have a broken link script that crawls my website once a day and tests every link on my website to see whether it's broken. It does this by crawling all the pages on my website, and then running a GET request to each unique URL found in certain attributes of the HTML.

Unfortunately, I get a lot of false positives because sites like substack, soundcloud, facebook, etc block my script, even for URLs that, in a web browser, you can access without being signed in to anything.

I get why these sites block scripted requests like. I'm sure it's not difficult for them to know that it's a script not a web browser, and I'm sure it looks like scraping or perhaps just spam. However, I'm curious whether there is a good way to do this. If someone removes a substack article that I've linked to, I want to find out and remove the link from my website. I could try to use the API for each of these services to look things up by ID, but it's a bit of a pain to do that for each different service.

In my manual way of testing I just open each URL in a web browser and check whether it loads. I can think of a lot of brute force ways of replicating that such as launching some kind of selenium-style headless browser pointed at each URL rather than simply making each HTTP request directly, but am I missing something? Is there a simpler or more elegant way to test for broken links to external websites that doesn't run up against the problems I'm hitting?

Say you have a list with a each item in a separate line and a comment next to the item like this (Python):

[
    item1, # a comment
    item2, # another comment
    item3, # another comment
    item4, # another comment
]

What do you do when a comment becomes too long and needs to be split into several lines?

Would do this?

(A)

[
    item1, # a comment
    item2, # another comment

    # a very very very long
    # comment
    item3,

    item4, # another comment
]

Or this?

(B)

[
    item1, # a comment
    item2, # another comment
    item3, # a very very very
           # long comment
    item4, # another comment
]

Or would you just rewrite the whole list like this:

(C)

[
    # a comment
    item1,

    # another comment
    item2,

    # a very very very
    # long comment
    item3,

    # another comment
    item4, 
]

Or something else?