Quote from: GeminiSimba on January 09, 2015, 11:20:03 PM

I was thinking the quickest path to becoming a dev worth hiring or joining a startup in the crypto world was that after I finish learning C I should go to C++ and python? I'm not sure...I guess what I'm saying is, is there any experienced programmers who can give me tips or advice on how I should proceed once i've finished my C course in such a way that I can really get on the fast track to crypto related coding?

Hi GeminiSimba,

judging from your statement, you're bold -- and boldness is maybe the most important character trait you need as a programmer. The second important character trait IMHO is a high frustration tolerance. As developers, most of the time we have to face an overwhelming lack of information, incomplete and even misleading information, a messy setup, half broken tools, crappy documentation and combatants, whose best skills aren't the social ones.

As a first step, I'd recommend that you try to understand why your goals (becoming a crypto programmer) are very ambitious. Unless you're an absolute genius, you'll need years of constant, actual practising to contribute to that area without doing any harm. Thus it would be a very good idea to define yourself some intermediary goals to aim at. Kind of like stepping stones. For example, how about being able to code a web site, which might be for some crypto currency related service? A next, somewhat more ambitious goal would be the ability to contribute to a standalone client application with a nice GUI, learn GUI programming and improve the usability of such a GUI. A next, even more ambitious step would be the ability to work in backend / server processes. Like, e.g. the ability to contribute to a trading engine which matches bids and asks and executes orders. And -- while you proceed on that part, I'd highly recommend that you always try to read and understand other people's code. So that you get a feeling of the actual problems contemporary coding has to deal with. Thus, instead of just using frameworks and libraries (as most programmers do), you could add the additional challenge for yourself to look into the source code of such frameworks and libraries and try to understand why they are the way they are.

The good news is that with todays vibrant open source world, it is very much possible to get your hands on "real stuff", without the need to be part of an university or industrial organisation. I'd wish way more people would build on that unique opportunity and engage into OpenSource development, instead of wasting their time and mental capacity with gaming and social networks. Because it is very much possible that we're headed towards a world again, where computers are completely dongled and -- unless you sign a non disclosure agreement -- all you get your hands on will be toy stuff, not real stuff.

Regarding a starting point for help: have a look into stackoverflow.com ! There is a huge number of beginner questions for each and every language there (including C). This might give you a feeling about the problems other people have to deal with. Plus, especially from the answers to beginner questions, you often get links to interesting blogs.

Beyond that, the definitive, hard-core forums for any widely used programming language are still in the "usenet" (the "news" protocol, which is a very ancient, text based message protocol from the old days of the internet). This is still the place where you find the old farts with years of experience and lots of battle stories, the people who create programming languages and build compilers. There are some sites which bridge the news groups into the Web, so you can read them like a web forum. My recommendation is to look at gmane.org. From there, look into the news groups in the "comp.lang.*" hierarchy.

hope that helps
and: welcome in the community of people actually programming computers!

-- Ichthyo