

Ask HN: Advice for the aspiring? - p4lto

I'll make this as short as I can, I have a tenancy to go off on tandems.<p>A little background on myself that might be useful for context. Been a geek my whole life, high school was more about computer games but I built my first desktop then. Joined Navy out of high-school to work on gas turbines(ship engines, not planes), didn't as have much time to nerd as I had before obviously. Worked at a help desk the last two years I was in for a total of five years. I finished service last year February and hunkered down on studying.<p>It's been a little over a year since I started studying, there were a few times in the first few months that I had trouble deciding where to start and spent a lot of time reading advice columns etc... Eventually I stopped that nonsense, closed my eyes and spun the proverbial(first time using that word) globe of CS, my finger landed on Python. I don't know exactly what I want to do but reverse engineering seems like a lot of fun, it almost requires one to know computers from the bottom-up in many cases.<p>I read so damn much, I have some of the classic books of CS (Mythical Man-Month, C programming language(haven't touched C YET), and others by the wizards) I work on Project Euler problems, strengthen my math at Khan Academy, take courses at Udacity and now learning Ruby via Koans. I'm beginning to understanding the idea of computer architecture as a whole which has gotten me even more interested/excited.<p>I'm the only computer literate member of both sides of the family, don't make many friends what with my focus being elsewhere. Sometimes a family member asks me something about what I am studying, and they always regret it.<p>My question is, as someone with arguably less than a year experience, do you have any advice or criticisms to give?<p>Thank you for your time!!!
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br0ke
Have you considered contributing to an open source project that interests you?
An active project would provide you with an existing architecture, community,
history... possibly even a mentor. (people in college can even apply for
"google summer of code" for a formalized and paying approach)

~~~
GFischer
Aiming for any real-world project sounds like good advice.

Either look for something that interests you or where you think you can learn
from :)

An internship could be an opportunity too.

