I decided to resurrect the “Most Asked For VB Code” section of my old site. I figured there were a lot of helpful bits of code in there, and that it was a waste to simply discard it. You can view it here:
I went through and checked all of the code to ensure that it still works, and I tidied up some of the messier looking segments. It’s cool to look back at some of the code I wrote when I was 16/17 and think “hey, that’s pretty clever!” But then some of it also made me go “holy crap, I was an idiot!” I was especially embarrassed by how many times I used variables named “pat” or “patorjk”. I believe early on in my programming days I saw some hacker posting code on a message board and he would use his handle as a variable name. I thought that was pretty cool so I picked it up. Sadly, no one ever pointed out to me that this was a bad programming practice and that it made code hard to decipher.
I suppose that’s one of the disadvantages to teaching yourself. You can end up unaware of certain bad practices until they come back to haunt you. When I was a Teaching Assistant back in grad school I worked with a beginner class where students could lose up to 60% of their project points on style alone. I remember having irate students come to me and ask how they could have received a “D”, or in some cases an “F”, when their project worked perfectly.
I was kind of upset with the harsh grading guidelines too, but there wasn’t anything I could do. Looking back, I still think it’s too harsh to put so much of a weight on style. All that will do is discourage smart people who have picked up some bad habits. This reminds me of an essay I read recently:
I like how the author romanticizes the idea of the “street programmer” (the self-taught programmer), and I like how he points out the weak points in a university education. Though a university does do a good job of weeding out complete idiots, I’ve seen a number of people who can barely program (ex: “I can’t program in Java, I only know C++”) who go on to make 80k+ a year. Then there are people I know who are self-taught who could program circles around those people and they make less than 50k a year. It boggles my mind. A degree and good social/networking skills seem to be the most important things when getting a good job, which saddens me a little, but oh well.
Opera and Other Things
I downloaded the Opera web browser recently, just to see what this page looked like. I noticed that the TAAG program looked like crap so I’ve redone some of the CSS for it. Later this week I hope to do another update to it to add in some new features.
A while back I was working on a new web app, I haven’t touched it in over two weeks – my plan is to start working on it again later this week and to try and release it asap.