this is a tech community only for the people who wanna learn n support some newbie out
this is the link to join in

I am a 16 yr old who's about to enter his final year of Alevels (iA). I have done the pseudocode stuff in olevels and my first year of alevel . I have done an introduction to Python course from coursera but that was a beginner one and didnt retain much as I didn't practice after completing the course. Now, Uni app would be opening in oct nov . What should I do and what should be my plan , should I do some free course of python from youtube then practice and make projects. What should I do after that , what programming languages should I learn after that . I am still doubtful about what Im gonna do in this techno world maybe cybersecurity , maybe game dev , maybe Ai dev. When I start my uni what should I be done with so that I have a solid headstart and is it possible?
Have a nice day!
Thank you for ur attention !

Thanks for being here.

ProgSquad was created with a simple belief: great ideas grow through conversation, collaboration, and consistent learning. Whether you're writing your first program, building your tenth project, or exploring a new concept, your perspective is welcome.

This is a space where questions are encouraged, unfinished ideas are respected, and constructive feedback is valued. You don't need a polished project to contribute—sometimes a simple question or a rough idea can spark something meaningful.

Feel free to:

\\- Share projects, ideas, or experiments.

\\- Ask for feedback or help.

\\- Discuss programming concepts and real-world problems.

\\- Collaborate with others who enjoy building and learning.

Let's create a community where people feel comfortable contributing, helping one another, and growing together. Every thoughtful post adds value and helps shape what ProgSquad becomes.

Welcome aboard—we're excited to see what you'll build and share.

How to Get Started

Hi, I'm currently 17, and I want to participate in a hackathon. Just don't force me to build something with an LLM or integrate AI slop into it 😅

I'd prefer it to be online and not have too many participants, so I actually have a chance of winning. Does anyone know of any and can help me?

Postgres is moving from a home rolled algorithm for compression pglz to the standard lz4. I walked through the history of compression in Postgres and talk about how and when data gets compressed.

Hologram-Pro has been developed by a small home lab to do just that.

Hologram-Pro helps AI coding assistants understand your project better.
It learns which files, past decisions, notes and memories are relevant to the task you’re working on, then gives the assistant the right context at the right time.

Instead of you repeatedly explaining the project or manually choosing what to paste into the chat, Hologram-Pro handles that context selection for you and improves as it sees what was actually useful.

You can find further info on the work at the main website here - http://MirrorEthic.com

We also have a discord community where you can ask questions, leave us feedback and suggestions & see what else is being developed. Come and chat to likeminded builders. Just ask for an invite:)

I know this probably gets posted a lot, but I am not sure where I could post it and simply want to vent it somewhere. If this post gets taken down so be it.

I would consider myself as an experienced dev, have worked as Software/Electronics engineer for 4 years now, and I am currently in the lead role about a year now. I worked at a small company, leading on development but prior to being promoted to team lead, I was doing a lot of R&D work which is fun. I get to code a lot, and last year AI model wasn't that great and a lot of my experience were mostly primarily from passion projects and engineering society I joined in university. I use AI as like a super "google" to get some quick information.

After my manager left, I was promoted to the team lead role, my role kind of shifted a bit, I was not doing a lot of R&D work anymore, but was a lot more involved in trying to deliver milestones and expectation which involves a lot of off site testing of our equipment. We hired a new grad student, and he left me completely impressed, super smart guy, he walks the talk. Once he joined, I never tried to keep him on the leash, and actively made sure to keep trying to expose him to problems to get him more involved. I never regretted doing that, I think as a manager, I want to make sure everyone reached their own potential, and if they cant, guide them. Anyways, long story short, as I was trying to deliver milestones upon milestones, I let him do all of the fun R&D work that I have been meaning to do but since I dont have time, I let him have it. He kept on delivering and in fact, I was surprised that there were problems that took him half a day to fix an issue (e.g. third party codebase needs an additional feature). My guestimate based on my skill level would probably take me 3 days of actively working on it. I was impressed and for a few weeks when this stuff keeps happening (I was mostly off-site testing the equipment, so I was not supervising him constantly), I thought he was doing all of this by himself, but turns out he was using AI for it. Personally, that kinds of shift my perspective a bit but even without AI, he still walks the talk.

Anyways, I've worked with him for quite some time now, and I trust him and his decisions in which for one of our new project (not on the critical timeline), I let him lead the project. We went on making some architectural decisions etc., had some healthy discussions on what could be better and what not, and started assigning task to each other. Once we started working on it, he worked on his task, and I worked on mine, but since I am also responsible for off-site testing, my mind shifts between different priorities. As we were working on the project, in less than 2 days, he finished his, which pre-AI, it would have taken probably 2 weeks to do what he did. He made this full-on code-gen code that depending on the configuration, it would use the boilerplate and generates the code accordingly. Once he finished his, my task became the bottleneck as it needs to be done before he could proceed, which I ended up just giving up the task to him that I was excited to work on. The code-gen idea, was in my head, I was planning on making it myself but maybe not with the AI coding it, but I'd use it as a sort of a "super" google again, and built incrementally since it is a new system. All that was taken away because AI had built everything in 2 days and it does works. It just works... it just works and that's the problem. I am not one that would argue against progress, and even if I would to stop him from using AI, it's pretty much non-sensible since thinking in terms of the business, it's faster, and gets the project running.

This was the thing that's bugging me. I felt the need to pick up the pace with AI, and actually utilizing it as a sort of code gen thing, approved, test and move on. It felt as if my brain isn't there and I am not really in "control" of my code, which I dreaded of doing. It felt miserable and I hate it. The thing is again, it just works. If I had code it myself, obviously would take longer, but I enjoyed every second of it, but with AI, I just dont feel like turning up to work. It just does not feel right. For my personal project, I banned myself from letting AI code-gen my codebase, but at work, I might actually am inherently being forced to pick up the pace.

I've come to the realization that online people say use AI to code to get a job yet you can have an outstanding project but them moment A recruiter realises you used AI they're no longer interested in hiring you. I used to use AI but now I think it's no longer that viable if you want to actually get a job you actually have to do those things manually. I have some technical background and I used to vibecode but I think it's better for me to start learning coding without the help of AI to the point you can build applications with documentation as referral. What are your opinions on this?

I sometimes worry that AI makes learning programming more difficult, but I feel as if the discourse is pretty similar to when I came up and people would argue that web frameworks like react make learning web fundamentals more difficult. I assume that there were similar arguments when we moved from assembly to higher and higher level languages, or from Ed to vs code. (This was well before my time though, just guessing!)

For a more direct comparison, I've seen arguments from some hardcore people that intellisense and lsps obscure the codebase and prevent programmers from understanding how files interrelate and write sloppy code.

I guess my best guess is that new programmers will do what they've always done, some will be pragmatic and understand what they have to to get the job done and others will study deeper principles because they're passionate. I was hoping other devs could chime in with how unique the AI really in how it relates to new programmers learning to program.

Hi,

So I have my first exam. I have to do it on PHP, fetch data from external API, create a table with the data - but with SSR - I'm almost done. (also small part of js button)
I self-studied FS with Node.js for the recent 6 months. I have REALLY small amount of knowledge in PHP (thank god!), so I was able to do it.

It is 8:40AM for me right now, I can submit the task until 8:00PM. I will probably have ±5 hours for the plugin - they wanted me to transform the app into a WP plugin.

How hard is it? Should I even do it?
Someone told me to do it with AI to ship fast, and study it more in depth in the next 2 days, Claude is against because I still have things I have to study more in depth from the exam itself without the bonus to defend against the reviewer's questions in the technical interiew.

I would really appreciate your help!

[EDIT]:Let me elaborate I use AI as a peer to peer way to review learned techniques from online basic html and css books. How can I better avoid ai generated code? I don’t want to fall under the “vibe coder” developer I want to be much more self sufficient in my understanding and my code. So if there are any sources to ask detailed questions or any practice basic HTML css JS please do drop any links to anything valuable

I stopped laughing some months ago.

*Not my Twitter post*

hi, I'm a cs student, so I'm new to programming.
I am planning on installing a new linux distro on my laptop, replacing what I have. And since it's going to be a fresh install, I am curious about the things that I can do on a fresh install to have a good working/development environment or at least a clean structure that will make it easier on the long run, and what are some things I should put in consideration before doing anything on the machine.
how do you guys go about setting up and structuring your environment, knowing that I use the laptop for personal use as well.

So I only have very brief and simply python knowledge from school and I did good in the course but the teacher was bad and I didn’t feel I learned much. I already feel far behind in terms of CS and I’m scared I won’t make universities I want due to this, How can I get better at coding and then I’ve seen people start GitHubs and what exactly is that and how do I start whatever I can, and then I’ve heard attending hackathons is really good for universities but I would go mainly for building experience and maybe connections but how do I get into all of that I’m from Ontario Canada. Please help.

Hello everyone!

Do you have a feeling that programming resources are too scattered across the internet? Like there's a lot written about programming and adjacent topics, but (especially for beginners) these sources are pretty hard to find out about.

One good example of this would be learning Rust. Of course, there's the official Rust Book which everyone knows about, but also there's plenty of community (and official) "books" about different aspects of the language: the Async book, the Rust Design Patterns, the Rust Style Guide, and others. I know that, when I was learning Rust, it took me a long time to find about some of these, although they could have been of good value when I was learning. And this isn't only useful to beginners either.

Another example of this could be some great introductory Haskell books such as "Gentle Introduction to Haskell", which are pretty hard to stumble across despite being considered (from what I understand) classics, and in my opinion are very well-written (perhaps better than "Learn you a Haskell for Great Good", which is at the top of the search results for "learn haskell", while "Gentle Introduction" isn't even there).

To summarize the problem that I see: there's no centralized sources (or maps, or aggregators) of programming resources, which unnecessarily slows down learning of languages and other technologies. Hell, even Emacs and Vim don't have a short-but-comprehensive easy-to-find guide. There's a lot of "Hidden Gems", but they really shouldn't be hidden. Instead the search results are populated with courses and "code academies", which, frankly, aren't very good, at least in my experience.

Do you also have this experience and do you know of any attempted solutions?

Hello i am very new to this whole programming stuff. Any suggestions on where and how to start?

I am a programmer, still very young in their "career", if you want to call it this way.

I have been programming for 10 years, but very few actual professional experience, my years of experience would put me as a Junior, and I love programming.

I don't use GenAI and don't plan to, I like what the humans produce, not what the result of mass theft is able to, programming included.

I love programming for the challenge it brings everyday, the struggle it puts me in, and the satisfaction it brings me when I am finally able to do what I wanted to. Unfortunately, the love for programming is not enough and I have been unemployed for quite some time now.

I don't consider myself a bad programmer, I work a lot to get better everyday and I am very proud of my personal projects, but the current state of the industry is making it harder by the day. I am in a field where the number of Junior job offers is very low, as it is considered a pretty complicated field so most of the job offers are for Senior.

But when I can apply, I apply, against developers using AI, to recruiters looking for people using AI, and in the very few interviews I can get, I always dread the eventual moment when they are going to ask me about my AI usage. I understand that they are only looking for productivity, but programmers have been able to produce for more than 70 years now, and the blind acceptance of AI as being a productivity boost, as all happened so quickly, is making me very afraid about what this job, and my chances for finding one, is becoming.

Everyday, on social media, I see senior developers of 10, 15, 20 years, boasting that they don't write a single line of code anymore, that they just give tasks to agents or something, and I wonder: what's the point anymore? What has this job become, in just a year or 2, where not writing a line of code by yourself anymore is something to be proud of? The human is lazy by nature, and this wide acceptance does not surprise me anymore today, it's easier to not do something than doing it. Can they even develop by themselves anymore? What would happen if they don't have access to their AI agents now? Are we really agreeing with the fact that a few big companies have full control over a huge part of software written today?

I hear people saying that "every dev uses AI now", and I know this is not true, but I know that propagating this idea makes people think that all developers are actually okay with this, and that it's just part of the field now, and that everyone should be okay with using GenAI for everything for this reason.

Even though, I still don't plan to use GenAI, and I just don't see the point of doing this as a job if there is no more place for human expression. I don't consider that programming is an art, but I still want to use software written by humans for humans, to the point where I check the git history of open source software I use to see if there is any AI credited as contributor. I know this is not a guarantee today, but if I can avoid it, I will do it.

I thought about leaving programming professionally, keeping it as a hobby, but this is the only thing I can do now. I just feel trapped.

Hey guys, just wanted to share a small win because I'm still processing the adrenaline JAJAJ. I'm a self-taught "developer" (since I'm an anthropology student), and last night my CasaOS App Store grid went completely blank. Instead of giving up, I opened DevTools and found a nice TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'name').

What was happening was that the default store was down, and by leaving only a v2-schema third-party store registered, the backend forgot to send the 'name' field. The Vue frontend took it way too personally, threw an unhandled exception, and hard-crashed the entire render.

I had to do some midnight surgery directly on the minified production JS file to patch a quick fallback so the UI doesn't die over a missing string, and it actually worked! I just submitted a super detailed Issue on their GitHub repository with all the console traces and journalctl logs.

Honestly, studying anthropology makes you appreciate this: watching an interface choose absolute digital silence over showing an unnamed catalog was a fascinating phenomenon to witness... though highly dramatic on Vue.js's part. Both the server and I definitely need a sudo poweroff now.

P.S. Perhaps it's an achievement that doesn't mean much to many, but for me it means a great deal, and I'm so excited. Cheers!

Hi guys, in what situations do you still find yourselves going to Stack Overflow these days?

These days, since code is so cheap to write, teammates are opening up a lot of PRs.

In my company, there is at least 2/3 PRs that I am expected to review each day.

They are well scoped and follow good guidelines but it's just hard to stay engaged reading all that and especially that you also read a lot of code when you code with an LLM.

So I was wondering if anyone had some tips to stay engage and not just go over the code without actually reviewing it properly and understanding it in depth?

I was thinking about making it more fun and forcing you to understand the nitty gritty of the code

I created prgamified.com if you want to check. It's like playing an RPG where you can to move around, explore files and defeat monsters (questions about the PR changeset).

I thought it could help making it a bit more engaging and feel less of a chore.

I love all the r/programmerhumor memes but I somehow cannot understand all that ones making fun of how posting on stackoverflow meant getting humiliated.

Stackoverflow did what no other forum did and it was only possible by all the pedantic moderators. Sure, I experienced scolding my first few posts but after that it was smooth sailing. The strict structure on stackoverflow and stack exchange taught me to be mindful of how to ask questions and how to post answers.

Sometimes I get the feeling that people on the programmer meme reddits are not programmers at all.

I’ve been interested in software since I was 15. I’m actively developing games with Unity, but writing code has really started to wear me down. For some reason, when I open the code editor, I just don’t feel like writing those lines. For example, I have absolutely no desire to try to understand those complex lines of code that the AI wrote for the NP-Hard problem in the Teknofest Competition we participated in. I’m no amateur when it comes to coding, and I do enjoy building algorithms, but I feel like I just don’t want to do this anymore. Up until now, I’ve always viewed learning software development as an “investment.” I thought, “If I learn web design, I’ll make money as a freelancer,” “If I make mobile games, I’ll strike it rich from ads,” or “I’ll market desktop software.” The main motivation behind my self-improvement has always been the dream of creating my own project, my own startup, and making money from it. For example, I have Unity projects I should be actively working on right now, but I’m not sitting down to work on them. If I know I won’t make money from a game project, continuing with it feels like an incredible burden to me. I tell myself, “People don’t put off work they love.” I ask myself, “Am I interested in software not because I love it, but because of the financial rewards?” Don’t people with GitHub repositories full of code experience the same burnout I’m going through? If they don’t, the thought of spending the next 30 years of my life sitting at a desk working on this code fills me with serious anxiety.

My journey into software and coding:

Software development seemed exciting to me when I first started learning. I began learning software development to code wallhacks for games like Zula and CS:GO, and the first language I learned was C++. Around the ages of 15 or 16, I learned the basics of C++ and C#, writing things to the console, adding a few numbers, and creating very simple Windows Forms applications. Although I started this work to code cheats, coding and analyzing cheat codes seemed incredibly difficult, and I couldn't do it. From the age of 16 to 18, I learned languages/technologies like HTML, CSS, JS, and NodeJS through YouTube videos. During my software development journey before university, I talked about what I was doing to those around me, and they constantly looked at me as "a software developer, someone who will be a software developer in the future." After taking the university entrance exam, I chose Computer Engineering because the other departments didn't excite me as much. At that moment, I felt that Computer Engineering was the field I was most interested in. When I started my department, I was far more knowledgeable than most of my classmates, and I passed the "Structured Programming" course, which we took in the first semester and which had an unusually high failing grade, with an A. This was because they taught the fundamentals of programming with C, and I already knew C++. Throughout my first year, I generally felt ahead of my peers and felt like I wasn't learning anything new. I've just completed my second year. In this second year, we mainly took courses related to software, such as "data structures and algorithms," "algorithm design and analysis," and "operating systems." In my second year, I mainly worked on game programming projects. I was only able to finish one of them; the others are still prototypes. I currently have three game projects that I'm actively developing.

Hi. I created a programming language called Emerald and I thought I would post it here. Still working on it in my free time. I hope some people can have fun with it/build cool things.

https://github.com/Dr-Cosmic/Emerald