r/AskProgramming

I'm a btech student currently trying for developer roles ....so just wanted to know from senior developers how you know how good a programmer's coding skills are and other things like coding, projets, logic, problem solving and all that.

I am currently trying to build a budgeting app. I have Basic understanding of python code and HTML. Im also working on object oriented python programming. Im also looking at taking the codecademy courses on UI/UX design with figma and also learning some flutter so I dont have to pick up a new programming language.

1. How can I break every feature I'll need into smaller, doable task?

2. How can I deploy that app on my own?

3. How do I stay organized?

4. Can I build the app on a MacBook Pro 2020?

Im 17M btw so I know I cant technically own anything yet but I would like a general idea of what I could do.

I just finished the AP computer science A exam. I learned up to arrays and basic inheritance/interfaces (the exam doesn’t include it anymore but my teacher did) and I found out I like programming and I want to continue learning. I’m pivoting for a little bit of time because I need to do a final project in some other language (I picked C# to minimize the learning curve and so I don’t have to do much work) but I want to continue learning Java after cuz I guess it’s useful to know something.

Where do I go next? What should I start learning after getting to like the early intermediate level, and what are some resources that I can use?

Thanks!

So I am in a low purchasing power country and here the AI ultra plan costs 32 dollars and the AI pro plan costs 15 bucks do you think any of these are worth it, or should I just go with a 20 dollar Claude or ChatGPT subscription? Claude and GPT don't have regional pricing

Basically for one reason or another as junior CS student i was hired in a company that does cost engineering and they relied HEAVILY on excel models (instead or software or the software is situational, the output is always excel).

I knew about macros but never explored them

1 year passes and now I'm a half competent VBA developer (half because I still lack the DB and networking skills that are not really needed where work)

I was thinking about pursuing this career because...excel is everywhere and a lot of stuff is easily and reliability automated.

To do an example I made a macro for a guy that made what was usually a 2 weeks job in a 4 days job and I kid you not a macro that in a few minutes does a week's worth of research and data entry (more reliability and accurately as I use API and I manipulate data instead of relying on a human)

But...I have no buisness degree (to be fair no degree at all) but I don't think I can sell myself as a programmer (like, for a strictly ""programming"" job) or a business analyst.

Do you think I could sell myself as that figure or should I pursue something else?

Been helping with a small automotive marketplace project lately, and I didn’t realize how many sketchy listings start falling apart once you actually validate the VIN. We’ve caught mismatched trims, fake engine specs, wrong production years, and even a few cars where the seller's photos clearly didn’t match the decoded vehicle info.

At first, we were only using VIN decoding for basic specs, but it slowly turned into a fraud-detection layer without even planning it. We’ve been testing a few tools, and Vincario has been pretty useful for cross-checking vehicle details quickly before listings go live.

Curious if other people building in auto/insurance/fleet spaces are doing something similar now? Feels like VIN APIs are becoming less about car info and more about filtering out obvious BS before it becomes a bigger problem.

I am wanting to learn python as I am about to enter a college and study btech in Al and Data science, when I asked ppl abt what languages they would recommend for my particular course, most of them said python and numpy.

But I have some questions:

In my city there are a lot of places that offer 'full stack' courses, is it similar to a 12hr video on yt? or is there something else in those courses coz they cost a lot of money.

Is it better to learn offline or online?

Is python and numpy(till advanced) enough for my course or will I have to learn something else? (Tryna go little fast)

This yt video from bro code(12hrs) is explaining really well but it dosent give a certificate(is it required to have certificates after completing a language?)

How much longer to you think React will live? I think JQuery and Angular seemed like they would live a long time, but they're kind of dead.

Are frameworks a bad idea?

i swear to God, picking an IDE/code editor is doing my fucking head in, I've been spending the past 3-4 hours looking for a good option when i could have been doing literally anything else INCLUDING WRITING CODE. Vi/VIm/NeoVim are cool but dont have debuggers. Nano is simple but also doesn't have a debugger. Sublime is confusing (i literally cannot find any tutorials online for sublime on arch), VScode WAS my favorite until i switched to linux and now i dont wanna touch that stuff because the only good C++ debugger on there is made by microsoft (and I switched to linux to get AWAY from microsoft).

All i need is a code editor/IDE (idk the difference, im not an expert in programming but rather an expert in linux) that works out of the box, with a compiler, syntax highlighter, plugin support, and a debugger already in it, that has a GUI and looks "not shit" on the eyes

Any and all help is appreciated! (Also please excuse my language im not usually this pissed off)

Huge thanks to all of you! I'll try some of your recommendations in a bit

I mean, names in general. Variables, classes, functions, etc. What counts as a good/bad name? What do you recommend/discourage when it comes to naming things in your code?

For context I all ready know python but I don't know how to read someone elses python code and get confused when I try to read it. For right now I am just going to keep learning all the keywords in python so it who be easier to understand other people,s code.

However when it is time for me to move to another programming language should I slowly work my way down or start with low level. Now I tried to learn a little bit of C but I did not get it. There was a lot of stuff to remember in C and a stuff I was confused on why it was even there. Maybe if I tried to learn it again I would get it. I think starting from the high level is better than starting low level because correct if I am wrong but you will slowly get introduced to lower level concepts.

I noticed in Java you have to declare a variables as in python you don't have to do that. I wonder if that is because Java is slightly lower level than python. There was a chart somewhere but I forgot where that was I think it showed that java was slightly lower level than python.

I am new to python and learning it by working on projects. Now my purpose is to create a data keeping "thing". I don't want to use arrays, dictionaries or other libraries. I hesitated to ask this here at first, but now I want to discuss and see people's opinions. Is such a thing possible with python? I looked a bit and found some Python-C libraries (cytpes). Can I use them ?

I also have some other questions to get out of the beginner phase. Do you use for and while loops all the time or is it just basic thing for starters, when I use them I feel some kind of guilty, like there are better ways and I miss them.

Hi, I am completely new to Java and I wanted to ask what if the best way you recommend me to learn Java as a newbie? For context I personally learn best with projects and questions. So any good places I could get nice questions, some tutorials, and projects?
And any good IDE’s?
Thank you!

As the title asks, what do you expect a junior dev to know before entering the workplace. I am a 3rd year Bachelor's of Information Technology in web design and development student, I have one more semester before I'm out and about with the rest of you.

I'm pretty alright, but I often find myself confused when reading threads on a lot of dev related subs. So, I thought maybe it's best to come straight to the people and ask you all directly, if you were to test the knowledge of a junior dev, what would you expect them to know?

I have developed a small pyqt app for my workplace, I am not a developer by training so a lot of it is a combination of poorly designed classes and methods, and some magic numbers peppered through.
It does the job but the increase in features and complexity makes me want to go back to the drawing board and refactor the code using a model view controller design pattern, hopefully to make it easier to later expand the feature set.
One thing I am not to clear on: currently most of my UI and back end are more or less contained in the same class. It’s messy but it makes it easy to have the system communicate and find the relevant data.

So for example, if at any point one of my logics requires a value previously set by the user in the UI, I simply call the widget’s relevant method ( my_widget.get_current_text() for example).

I take assume that this is a bit of a big no no in an MVC pattern,since we want to decouple the systems from the UI as much as possible? So then, should I:
-have signals emitted from my widgets which on any change (animal_combobox changes to “cat”)
-controller would detect those signals and pass the changes values to the model.
-this would update class variables in the model itself. (self.animal = “cat”)
-any logic executed from the model would uniquely rely on the values stored in the model itself, completely oblivious to the status of the Ui.

Did I get that correctly?

Secondary question, on such a system, would we want to create signals for each user interaction widget in the interface so that each can affect their own relevant variable in the model? Because that may end up requiring hundreds of signals connected to hundreds of variables.
Or is it more practical to instead execute a generic “ui updated, scan and save all variables” (or something in between, I feel like I’m missing a bit of the pythonic / OOP logic to make the workflow more dynamic)

Hello! 👋

Context: working in defense. Not really interested in FANG companies at this point in my career. I’m a software developer at my company n my first degree is in CS. One day it could be cool to get a masters.

Question: if I want to pursue a UX/UI design masters, is that as useful/useless as a SWE masters? I say ‘useless’ because of how f* ‘d the market is. If I had to find a new job, would they look at the candidate the same if they had a masters in UX vs SWE?

I do have interest in UX and design- admittedly probably moreso than programming as a whole. While I enjoy full stack development at my job, usability is a topic that always seems to interest me and I’ve been told I have a good prowess for that.

I haven’t taken any UX focused classes beyond the intro one from my CS program. But if I’m getting the masters paid thru the company, feel like it’d be fun to explore it. Development for me has always been relatively fulfilling but I’m not sure if I’d say I’m ‘passionate’ about it lol. So I’d rather do a masters in something that is more interesting to me.

Thoughts?

So I made a programming language before but it was really bad and I even posted it on this subreddit and got completely dissed. So now Ima redo everything and make a new high level interpreted language called JLP. The syntax will be a mix of C and Rust and I plan on programming the language in Rust. I have an idea on how to start but it would be great to get some advise. Even if you think your bad at programming you can still comment and give me feedback on what you would like about a language.

this would be how you declare a variable

let int x = 5;

da repo: https://github.com/Joseph-Chierichella/JLP

And what repository do they use? Do they use GitHub like most developers but in private mode or do they have their own servers to host their git repositories?

Looking for honest takes on whether I have a genuine case for a promotion, or if I'm getting ahead of myself.

A bit of background

I'm 36, based in Manchester, working fully remote for a UK finance software company. I retrained as a Frontend Dev at 33, before that I spent about a decade as a Building Physics Engineer and Energy Modeller. BSc in Architectural Technology, MSc in Architectural Engineering. I mention that because I think it's relevant to how I approach things.

I've been at the company for just under 2.5 years. Started as SE1 (junior) on £29k, got promoted to SE2 (junior/mid) after 18 months in July 2025, this came with a £3k raise. Got a £1k bump in November, effective January this year. Currently on £33k.

I've never asked for a pay rise. Both increases/promotion came to me.

My Dev team is small-ish only about 6 FE and 4 BE Devs. I'm the only SE2. Everyone else on the FE side is SE3 or above. SE3 is what most places would call a proper mid-level.

What I've been doing

A few weeks ago the VP and SVP of Engineering flagged a need for getting the company's 200+ repositories AI-ready against an internal standard (44 requirements covering docs, CI, validation, AI-readiness). No one else stepped forward, so I did and was given the space to run with it.

In just under two weeks, working independently and using Claude via GitHub Copilot, I built:

A 6-stage agentic pipeline. Each stage is a separate skill file with its own role. It scans a repo, assesses it against all 44 standards, plans the fixes, executes them (docs and config files only, no application code touched), generates interactive architecture diagrams as self-contained HTML files, then produces a report and Jira-ready tickets. It's resumable if a session drops mid-run.

A Node.js CLI which can run the full pipeline across all 200+ repos without someone sitting at a keyboard. Raises a PR on each repo for human review before anything merges. Also pushes remaining work to Jira as structured tickets. I built this fully but haven't been able to test it end to end yet. I'm waiting on an Anthropic API key and Jira board creation permissions, both of which are access issues rather than anything technical. I also wrote a full proposal doc for it, cost modelled it (£3.36/repo, estimates of about 188 hours of engineer time saved vs doing it manually), designed a tiered rollout, wrote up the safety model. Presented it to the VP and SVP.

A Unified Testing Agent, point it at any file, it works out what type it is (React component, API hook, service, etc.), loads the right testing conventions, generates the test, flags anything untested in the imports, and logs what it learned to a shared file so the whole team benefits next time.

A 5-stage thin agent to handle a prebuilt development pipeline that takes you from a Jira ticket through to implemented code. Interviews you about the work, reviews the spec, plans it, reviews the plan, then builds. Has crash recovery, review gates, and context window management. Only works with Claude (Copilot can't handle the context management it needs.)

Another 2 stage thin agent which is a lighter version of the above. Just the first two stages. Better for smaller, scoped changes. Outputs either direct implementation or a structured prompt you can paste into a new chat.

macOS/Linux and Windows scripts for installing the company's shared AI skills across Claude, Copilot, Cursor, and Gemini without needing Node.js. The broader shared repo was set up collaboratively with the SVP, the shell scripts were mine.

All of this has been demoed multiple times to my wider team of Mid to Principle engineers. I've done three announcements as things have progressed to an in house AI focused group made up of multiple disciplines across our company. I've also been helping other engineers on the team, some more senior than me, get set up with agents, prompts, and skill files in their GitHub Copilot.

I retrospectively wrote up Jira tickets with descriptions and ACs for all of it too, so it's all formally documented.

Being honest about the caveats

I'm not pretending this is all hand coded. The tooling was built using Claude (Sonnet / Opus), the architecture, the pipeline structure, the agent design, the product decisions are mine, but the skill files/code generation is the LLMs. I think that it's a legitimate and increasingly normal way to build things (When done right), but I want to be upfront about it.

This is also genuinely the first time I've had an opportunity like this. There's no longer track record of this kind of work because this kind of work hasn't come up before. Whether that matters or not, that's partly what I'm asking.

My manager is a Lead BE engineer. Not frontend, not AI. So the depth of what's been built isn't necessarily obvious to them without explanation.

Performance reviews are usually in November. I've never started a pay or promotion conversation before.

What I'm actually asking

My company has a formal SE2 to SE3 framework. The things it looks for include: owning features end to end independently, driving improvements, raising the team's quality bar, demonstrating commercial awareness, and supporting others' development.

I think I've hit most (if not all) of those, but in about two weeks, and for the first time. So I'm genuinely not sure if that's enough.

Specific questions:

1. Does this genuinely support a promotion case, or am I overreading two good weeks of very hard work?
2. How much does the short timeframe actually matter in practice? Does output quality offset it?
3. Is £38k–£40k a reasonable ask for SE3 in the Manchester area? (fully remote) (Currently £33k)
4. Would you push for this now or wait for the November review?
5. Anything in how I'm framing this that would land badly?

Not looking for validation, just want to know if there are gaps in this that need filling before I ping the "Have you got a minute?" to the big bosses.

Cheers!