Lived Experience Forum

[Abcd]

I was wondering if anyone on this site is a programmer who has had their mental health mean that they are isolated in doing or talking about programming with anyone...

I am having a break from Uni due to my mental health... Meetups for programmers seem to be linked to Uni student groups, Programming language groups re talking features of languages, ones targeting women in programming and beginner programming.. And the odd hackathon event which isn't good for sleep, anxiety or stress.

I have looked at reddit sites such as programming buddies but its mostly beginners or people re currently studying at Uni wanting to do programming projects for resumes (which is stressful because you have to be bright and market yourself which isn't something easy to do with depression) and its exhausting (from past experience) to pretend to be normal...

So I was wondering if anyone out there is interested in collaborative programming or to just to discuss IT stuff or experiments with Linux or WSL or have a study buddy learn a new topic..

[wellwellwellnez]

I'm someone who's recently got the bug. So far, gotten myself up to how to retain data in json files. I must say, struggling though all the Unity/C# forums I'm so impressed and endeared by the generous spirits of coders. So many other communities covet their knowledge. Coders need to nurture each other because with clean-coding in shared systems, everyone's code benefits. I really didn't expect to experience such a deep level of connection to something so much bigger than myself. So, I think I get what you're missing and looking for right now.

Maybe game-dev-jams could be a fun thing. The grown-up coders I learn from seem to get a lot out of them. My guess is they'd be at least slightly less intense than hack-a-thons.

[MDT]

hi there @Abcd
I did some programming when i did a cyber security course in 2021.
I learned some python and some SQL. We used a Linux system too and also did UNIX.

OVerally i find programming interesting and also quite important for the way we interact with machines

also like @wellwellwellnez says about generousity of coders...

i placed my sourcecode on a forum and then someone helped me complete my assignment lol

[quirkyquokka]

Yes absolutely! I'm a full-time IT nerd who kinda went a bit against the grain in my learning pathway; between that and my assorted mental health problems and neurospiciness I didn't really fit the mould there. I'm about 5 years post-uni now and managed to land in my dream job as a programmer and data engineer.

Most of my stuff is around Python, JavaScript, cloud databases and getting into AI and machine learning a bit as well. I'm a mega Linux fanboi, and even had it on my work computer at one point but sadly had to revert back to Windows because that's the world we live in 😞 so I'm often switching between Windows (with lots of WSL) and macOS.

Also, highly highly recommend getting yourself involved with an open source project if you can (I'd aim for something kinda small and niche). You don't even have to be a particularly good programmer to help with a lot of the "low hanging fruit" (in fact, oftentimes you don't have to be a programmer at all because there's always documentation etc to be done) and the open source community is incredible.

[MDT]

Hey @quirkyquokka

Where does one find that sort of thing?

In regards to pen source

[Abcd]

Repositories online

github

gitlab

It's just that it's not that great for human connection re depression and I don't have people to talk to regarding IT stuff... eg I felt really down recently after I found some very minor things in an open source mindmap program and I gave a solution to fix a minor issue with a script installing a markdown export filter because I couldn't talk to anyone who understood WSL, bash, script, Linux, KDE as terms...

So you fork the code and do pull requests...

And if it is seen as an improvement it will get merged or fix issues.

https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-pull-requests/proposing-changes-to-your-...

[quirkyquokka]

Hey sorry -- thought I replied but didn't.

GitHub is a great resource, you can look behind the scenes at a lot of various projects. Microsoft has some cool stuff on there, you can look at the Linux kernel, but I also find it a really good source of information for other stuff that's not necessarily even coding related, like this "Awesome Remote Job" thing.

Lots of ways you can get started either with simple code fixes (and I mean REALLY simple - my first one was changing a (c) to a © symbol in an About window): https://github.com/MunGell/awesome-for-beginners

And if you speak another human language, you could even get involved with translating, documentation or anything like that!

Projects are always looking for help with testing and data stuff too.

Hope this helps!