Hello everyone!

Just wanted to say that today, after 6 years of schooling, I graduated with my Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science!!! And, I got accepted to my local university graduate school to pursue my MCS. They even gave me a teaching assistantship which I will get paid for with full tuition and a stipend. I have to work 20 hours a week as a TA helping professors teach undergraduate courses. So join me in celebration!

What schooling does everyone else here have? Are you working in software?

It was an especially nice graduation for me, because I am 38 and I went back to school after a long time.

2 more years and I get my Master's. I want to start working then, either in industry developing applications or maybe doing game programming if it comes around.

I have the summer off, unless I end up getting a call from a local software company. I plan to devote this summer to full time work on my Eagle library, and I want to have a release ready by the time fall rolls around. Most things are stable, but I'm rewiring the input system currently and it's not quite done yet.

What are you guys doing with your summers?

Everyone who answers one of my questions gets a cookie. I can has cookie standing by.

Congratulations! It sounds like you happen to be on the same path that heads to Professor Land. Have you considered that option?

I am building a home. So far, it does not leak. That's good, right?

Congratulations on graduating, and an additional congratulations for landing a teaching assistantship! I wish you all the best in your continued endeavors!

I have an Associate of Applied Science in Computer Information Technology. I work in the IT field currently as an IT consultant. I also write software, but only as a hobby; my current projects include a flexible blogging CMS and a minimal JavaScript game library (check out my GitHub profile for both).

Best of luck further developing your library. Do you have plans to commercialize it in the future?

As for summer, I will be visiting my grandmother in California in June. I have not seen her in four years (since moving to Louisiana). She is getting up there in age (she is 90 years old!), so it I hope to make the most of this visit.

Standing by for that cookie.

Congrats!!! As far as education is concerned, I am mostly self taught.

Do you think 52 is too late to go back to school? I might be ready to retire by the time I get out!

You can keep the cookie, my type 2 diabetes is gone now and that's the way I want to keep it!

25, been working as a dev in C#/WPF (Application Development) for 2 years, graduated in May 2015.
I have the equivalent of an associate's degree in CS, and a Bachelor of Arts in IT.

Here is my GitHub https://github.com/jmasterx I made a library for Allegro called Agui for the lolz

I always thought you were in your 20's Edgar hahah.

Congratulations! What is the topic of your MSc? Have fun writing a 100 page thesis! (Well, that was the requirement for me and it was hard!)

Yikes! No research for me, unless I go for a PHD afterwards. Straight Master's of Computer Science classes for two years. Don't know what I'll be studying yet, or teaching either.

EDIT

Well, I've been here at a.cc for 10 years already. I did a little GW-BASIC when I was a kid, but I didn't program for years until 2006 came around. I bought a book called C++ Without Fear (1st or 2nd edition) and read through it doing the examples and writing simple little console programs. Been doin it ever since.

Congratulations on your success, rewards, and future prospects, Edgar! I'm truly envious of that.

I have a technical college diploma entitled "Computer Programmer/Analyst". Technically I have two because the "/Analyst" was an optional 3rd year so you got one at 2 years and another at 3.

I have worked as a software developer for about 10 years now. Mostly Web application software in ASP [and .NET] professionally. In my spare time I stick mostly to the free software options though. I struggle to do anything worth a damn in my spare time though.

Congratulations Edgar! Good luck on your MCS!

Same.

I worked from April 2007 to December 2015 as a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Developer/Analyst building GIS application extensions and websites mainly in VB.Net and later C#.

At the start of 2016 I took a job with a different company that has me working a lot more with C/C++ (so far it's been mostly VAX C), they also have me doing Windows Forms applications using C#. I'm looking forward to my next project which is basically overhauling/porting a point of sale system to run on Linux devices (currently it's built to run on Windows XP Embedded).

Congratulations Edgar, may you find your way and live like you want :-)

Congrats Edgar. How long until you write Skynet? I have an associates in mis and about 80 credits short of a bs. Considering my age and the costs, I don't think I will be finishing.

I also have a BA in Computer Science, though in my case it came at the end of a three-year course. The course was very dry and I actually ended up quite demotivated by the last year, so I spent that time learning Japanese and working on things with Allegro and stuff instead.

Luckily my hobby projects carried me into a job at Jagex, but I was lucky to have that. I applied to some other games companies and didn't get very far - that seemed to be the norm. Jagex was run by a guy who had made games by himself, while the others were presumably run by career CEO types and HR teams and stuff (not that I understood that at the time).

I heard that many companies see a university qualification, not necessarily as a sign that you are skilled in the area it covers (since universities and companies so often diverge in material and universities often don't give you practical experience), but rather as a sign that you are committed, diligent and generally intelligent.

My summer will be largely filled with business as usual, but in August Lore and I have a week-long holiday on one of the German North Sea islands where cars are banned. I think there will be much swimming

[EDIT]

I've just started playing with that myself! At first sight it seemed fun, then I started experiencing the inherent pain of "it's XML". What's it like when you've been doing it for a couple of years?

I used to program with GW-BASIC/BASICA, then QuickBasic which was a compile based (like QBasic, only it wasn't compiled). But I needed more speed and found a book called QBASIC TO C. The book was criticized for not properly teaching C, but I loved it and it really helped me move to it as it would show QBASIC and then how to do the same with C, which was a great way to teach it. Especially once I found DJGPP for DOS and eventually Allegro around the same time; which kind of sucks to be honest as I was starting to write my own library to do graphics etc... and I almost wish I never found Allegro as I may have progressed further in my knowledge. But... Allegro was too good to pass up at the time.

Yeah xaml is not so fun, and when you get to doing non trivial things with it, weird behaviors tend to pop up. And it's bulky. I do a mix of frontend and backend development and I'm always hoping for more backend-oriented projects. Making ui in WPF is fun, but xaml being dynamic brings about a bunch of silly headaches that when you find the answer you go "Seriously???"

This describes almost every Microsoft framework I've ever used, and I've been using Microsoft frameworks for 10 years.

WPF is heaven compared to every GUI (and Microsoft GUI) framework I've ever touched. Also, .NET is heaven.

Yeah, they have quirks, but I've never seen or been as productive per line of code, or per hour, with any other language or framework. It's quite exceptional. If they ported WPF and .NET (completely!) to Linux, I would literally mail Microsoft a thank you cake/gift basket, and spend hours every year telling everyone how amazing Microsoft is. ... "If" they did it...

Like, I'm almost half-tempted to try making a game in C# but then I'd be screwing over my Linux audience and, on principle (and thanks for all the GNU and GPL projects that make my life easier), I want to give back to them.

I'm still on the fence about D. I'd probably have answers now but my medical issues prevent me from making much progress. D has NO easy GUI the way WPF is. D also has a garbage collector. And, D crashes a HELLAVALOT more often than C#. Whereas C# ALMOST never crashes (typically binding failures to dynamic libs of wrong versions, as well as being taken down by non-managed code linked from C/C++/etc). Everything is an exception in C# and the MSDN documentation are worth thousands of dollars and they give that shat away for free.

As for degrees, CONGRATS. I've got a degree in... Mechanical Engineering... but I'm still a professional software developer and IT administrator.

Please elaborate. What is it about WPF that you like so much? What is it about all the other ones that you don't like? Details, please. Keep in mind I'm designing a GUI library that might be just what you're looking for once it develops a bit further.

@Edgar

WPF has DataBinding which is really nice.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms752347(v=vs.110).aspx

I can make a class CalculatorViewModel

In my view.xaml:

<Button Content="1" Command="{Binding NumberEntry, CommandParameter=1}"/>

Which magically binds my button to a command of my viewmodel.

If I want a Calculator I do:

var view = new CalculatorView();
var model = new CalculatorViewModel();
view.DataContext = model;
_app.AddChild(view);

I would crack open VS and play around with WPF, I think it could be valuable research for EAGLE.

See how quickly you can do certain things, learn what's better about it than your library, learn what's worse, etc.