Is here anybody who works as software developer?Say something about you. pleease 
I donāt āworkā as one, but normally I dabble in it frequently.
I write programs as a hobby.
We have some members who do but I am not too sure how often the drop by. Search the forums on āsoftwareā and āandroidā and you will find some posts.
Iām trying to get a job in the field. I graduated with a BS in IT last August. Iām looking into working as a programmer or in software testing. @Malvok which language do you primarily write in? I just know Java but am trying to branch out.
Itās weird my lack of motivation affects every area of my life except work. I even lack motivation to do things I enjoy like playing my guitar or playing video games, but when I had schoolwork I would work on it right away. 
I use both C++ and Python.
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I do not work as a software developer, but Iāve worked for software and computer hardware companies for about 6 or 7 years. Iāve done some software testing for those companies, and one of my bosses indicated that I should try to become a developer within the company. I also write programs as an amateur, as some others here have mentioned.
It seems that one of the relatively easy ways to get into a software company is to pursue a position in some kind of āsoftware supportā role. That is one of the less desirable positions, because people donāt like being yelled at about bugs in the software by customers, and yet have almost no control over fixing the bugs, such as no access to the source code. From a software support role within a company, I suppose one could theoretically make contacts in the company and work into a development role.
Iām looking into getting more serious about software development.
Iāve got a couple android apps bouncing aroundā¦ one is a life managerā¦ Diet/financing/planningā¦
the other one isnāt really a valid idea any moreā¦ I sold out to spotify 
ā¦ which is still lacking a few thingsā¦ but itāll do.
Have to get an android phone first though.
I made a game in the pastā¦ long agoā¦ never really finished but it had 2 playerā¦ you just ran around and shot at each otherā¦ top down in a boxā¦ had health barsā¦
beyond that messing around with some graphical stuffā¦ made a few screen saversā¦ but that stuff is all long goneā¦
Beyond the android platform windows is shaping upā¦ DirectX is now integrated into the Windows SDK and visual c++ is free to make freewareā¦
but itās more about finding programs I needā¦ practical projects that are within my skill set.
I donāt consider myself a programmer at this pointā¦ I am familiar with all the jargon and a few of the languagesā¦ Iāve written programs for school in the pastā¦ worked with manipulating stringsā¦ got a little hazy once they introduced pointers and variable passingā¦
Iām just rantingā¦
I like to speculate about it at leastā¦ computers are fun.
Actually, Visual Studio Community is free for any type of app, free or paid. The only limitation is the number of professional developers in the team and whether or not the organization is āEnterpriseā level.
.
Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps.
An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects.
For all other usage scenarios:
In non-enterprise organizations, up to five users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or >$1 Million US Dollars in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.
This is really cool because the Community Edition isnāt stripped down junk like Visual Studio Express used to be, itās basically the same thing as Visual Studio Professional.
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I used to have a terrible fear and uncertainty about pointers, so much so that I avoided C++ for quite a while. A lot of that was because had I tried to learn C++ from books and videos. I could read about pointers a dozen times and it never really stuck with me. It was only after I got in and started using the language by actually writing programs that I became accustomed to pointers, and then fear passed.
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Thanks for the infoā¦
Yeah I read a lot about themā¦ the concept makes senseā¦
When the function is called the computer has to know what amount of space needs to be reserved and mapped out for the function to execute properlyā¦ doesnāt work well with arrays as they are dynamic most of the timeā¦ so you make the function use the memory address instead of the actual value stored thereā¦
right?
from there you can add to the pointer value to access the next value in the arrayā¦
they make it easy with stringsā¦ more or less transparent and unified with everything else.
programming sounds like fun right nowā¦ but I want to code something usefulā¦ which is hard to do at an introductory levelā¦
Will be waiting to get an android phone and unlock itā¦ then Iāll have a good platform to work withinā¦ the nonsense of computers is all the options in libraries out thereā¦ SDL or OpenGL,ā¦ or DirectXā¦
Iām hoping the android SDK and its wikiās are streamlined to a degreeā¦ I am concerned about writing the GUIā¦ but I assume that wonāt be that difficult if I use the generic stuff.
As far as figuring out the necessary variables and calculations and getting the program flow right Iām pretty confident inā¦
Itās all C++ which Iām most familiar withā¦ and preferā¦
Welpā¦ got all grandiose in about 2 seconds of thinking about itā¦
Iām going to start by making an algebraic calculatorā¦ it should prove useful for later programsā¦ ones where symbolic reduction cuts back the processing time for things like pre-collision detectionā¦
the grandiose part was making a virtual environment and a renderedā¦
guess it gives me a chance to use this visual c++ communityā¦
(oh snap! you can code for android with this)
Iān no expert on pointers by any means but I think two big parts of it are dynamic objects and not wanting to pass big objects to functions because of performance issues.
Letās say you are making a game and add some enemies to the game, but you donāt know at compile time how many or when theyāll be added. You need a way of accessing those enemies. You canāt just create them manually, like:
x = Enemy1;
y = Enemy2;
z = Enemy3;
So you create dynamic objects and use a vector or something of pointers to access them.
vector<Enemy> enemies;
Enemy* x = new Enemy();
enemies.push_back(x);
Another reason is that when you pass things to functions it costs in terms of performance. Itās not much when you pass a simple integer or something, but letās say youāre passing an Enemy object that could have dozens of variables and methods in the class. You donāt want to pass the whole object every time you use the function so you pass a pointer to that object.
int x;
somefunction(x);
Enemy y;
somefunction(y);
Enemy* z = new Enemy();
somefunction(z);
Plus, when passing without pointers youāre making a copy of the data to the function. When you pass a pointer you give the function the real data.
Thatās just my general understanding.
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righteo that lines up with what I knowā¦
still havenāt worked with them very muchā¦
Hahā¦ this convo and visual studio being free basically made me think of this:
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Monkeyman!
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When I started, I found that writing small utilities really helped me get into the swing of things. Like letās say I have a folder with 2000 files in it that need their names changed. Iād write a small utility to do that.
hmmmā¦ tough to think of anythingā¦ Iām basically operating out of the cloud with no personal files on my computerā¦
This symbolic calculator is a program Iāve tried to write beforeā¦ with some successā¦
Iāve never had an environment like this thoughā¦ my own place with my computer set upā¦ shouldnāt be anything distracting meā¦
might as well take a crack at itā¦ Iāve got nothing to do todayā¦ aside from check the mail.
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One thing you can do is go to a drug store, dollar store or Wal-Mart and get one of those really cheap android Tracfones or Net10 phones. I picked up one for $5 once just for the hell of it. It wonāt be great, particularly for any sort of serious game, but itāll run general android apps. You wonāt even have to have service to test your apps.
That might be a good ideaā¦ but Iām busy on this other thing for nowā¦
are those tracphones like smartphones? full user interfaces?
Some of the are.