Ask HN: Junior developer here, seeking a mentor

1 points by anbardoi 2y ago ↗ HN

Ive been passionate about CS for a couple years now, programming/learning just about every day. Im trying to go to college and major in CS. Shooting for MIT or Harvard. I use Arch Linux as a daily driver which gives me a lot of XP just from it being super DIY.

Most of my experience is with Python, Bash, HTML, CSS/SCSS. I am starting to learn low-level systems languages like C and Rust, with a focus on Rust. Im also getting myself familiar with relational databases. I'm still getting a feel for what I actually want to do, so I experiment a lot, just like to learn how stuff works.

I personally haven't met anyone IRL that is interested in programming or tech in general, so I've kind of been going about it by myself. It would be awesome to meet people who know more about it than me, and bounce ideas back and forth and learn from them. Would also love to contribute to a project, my github contributions are pretty low and it would be good XP.

6 comments

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Nextgrid 2y ago ↗

One of the things that helped me back in the day was installing and running Arch Linux for some time. While it's not programming per se, it gave me the terminal/shell/sysadmin skills I needed in my programming career.

If you have time and don't already have good UNIX skills I highly recommend it. Do it on "hard" mode though, no shortcuts. I'm sure there are scripts out there to install Arch easily, don't go for them - do it by hand!

anbardoi 2y ago ↗

I've been using Arch Linux for about 6 months now— on both my work laptop and desktop at home I've spent a LOT of time adjusting both of them for their use-case. My laptop is mainly for dev stuff, and my home desktop is the same but with extra tweaks and optimizations for gaming.

I use KDE for a desktop environment, however its increasingly starting to annoy me. I've honestly spent most of my time optimizing and ricing it on both devices. I use Neovim for an editor with nvim-tree.

But after all this ricing and adjusting, I've pretty much run out of stuff to do. Thats why I'm hoping to meet people that might want to work together on stuff

meiraleal 2y ago ↗

Your best bet is to join some discord of interesting programming tools or communities you like and start following the technical conversations, ask questions, reply the ones you can help.

anbardoi 2y ago ↗

Any servers you recommend? I just posted here because I know theres a lot if high-level engineers here, and I'd love to meet someone I could help and learn from. Discord would definitely also be a good avenue.

FloatArtifact 2y ago ↗

I volunteer supporting some open source projects for accessibility.

I would enjoy getting to get to know you a little and if there's something of interest you'd like contribute you'd be welcome. Reach out at 1mexjte78@relay.firefox.com

anbardoi 2y ago ↗

Thanks, I appreciate your support! I sent you an email. I'm looking forward to hearing back!