Jumpstarting Your Programming Career: Tips from a City College CS Student

[nameVoid]

im doing course work in city college in computer science and would like to know the best way to get my foot in the door in the programming industry at this point i have completed both cs1 and cs2.

 

[Tacomablack]

im doing course work in city college in computer science and would like to know the best way to get my foot in the door in the programming industry at this point i have completed both cs1 and cs2.

If you want to get your foot in the door, the best thing for you to do is to get involved. Internships and opensource projects are both good ways to get experience. When your search for your first job, the projects that you have done in your spare time can really differentiate you from other candidates.

Unfortunately, getting a degree in comp sci or it doesn't garrentee you anything. You will be surprise at how may people with other degree are programmers. My opinion i think that experience counts, more than the degree even at entry level.

My advice only go to school for a major that you really enjoy. If you genuinely have interest in a specific field in CS such as computer vision, computation theory, cryptography, artificial intelligence .. etc, then It would be best if you stuck with computer science. Other wise you should major in something else and take programming electives.

 

[chiro]

im doing course work in city college in computer science and would like to know the best way to get my foot in the door in the programming industry at this point i have completed both cs1 and cs2.

Projects are good. Learning teamwork, documentation, proper engineering and development is another thing. Working with versioning systems in a team environment is what you want to show along with specific attributes related to what you want to do.

For example if you want to work with databases for example say Oracle, you usually get some sort of certification. On top of this you would usually have a degree plus experience. I strongly emphasize that you learn how commercial projects are dreamt up, designed, and deployed because that's the way that companies work nowadays.

Learning things like good communication skills are paramount and I say that from experience in working in a commercial setting. They can be even more important than your technical aptitude and ability.

Most projects are so big that often no-one can be everything to the team. Sure people will find their niche in the project and be valued for that, however things nowadays are done so that everyone knows what is going on with things clearly documented and explained in the code and via formal means outlining everything from a high level overview of a section of code to a more detailed points in the code as well as even more information inside formal test documents.

Learn about the software development cycles that are commonly use and try to demonstrate that you not only aware of it, but are somewhat as used to it as much as you possibly can.

I'd say to become a really effective coder you'd need a degree in technical training plus real project experience and that often takes years and years of work. Hopefully the advice I've given you can get you off to a good start.

Cheers

Matthew

 

[ytoruno]

whats cs1 and cs2 specifically?