From a design standpoint, great job on the site! I love all the little interactions and attention to detail. I also like the overall scope of the service and will use it personally. Awesome job and good luck in your future!
Checkout buzzsumo.com and a free version that we built wordlink.com. It gathers all the news in the world (mostly) then sorts it by its aggregated social activity. Likes shares comments tweets pins upvotes, on facebook twitter linkedin google plus reddit pinterest etc...
It's also a search engine used by marketing companies to analyze the news. Scrapy twisted python crawlers and elasticsearch backend for indexing.
You make some interesting points and I appreciate that you weigh out different aspects. The things that you mention are very inspiring to me. Everything that you've accomplished makes me want to work harder than ever. Is there a way I could reach out to you privately to ask you some questions if you don't mind?
Yes, i'd be happy to help as I can. Although take my advice with as big a pinch of salt as any opinion on here. No-one really knows the right way to do this properly. We're all shaped by our experience in this, still young, industry.
Feel free to drop me an email: plouth at gmail.com
> "On a similar front, C.S. programs don't do a great job of teaching what industry really feels like - if I had known, I might not have gone into C.S."
Just curious, what would you have majored in to know what the industry is like?
Internships or co-ops I highly recommend along the way, but when you're that inexperienced you really won't see much of the organizational-structure/politics/churn/team-dynamics that can often exist.
I'm not saying don't do it, but I am saying the creative burst of coding awesomeness that I so much love about tech has a lot of other things around it all of the time, and you don't usually see that in college.
Thanks for sharing your great advice! I truly appreciate it. I'm currently in an intern position with a software company. Working here opened this whole topic for me.
I was contemplating whether or not I was making the right choices for my education. Sure, everyone's different when it comes to learning and choosing their paths. I just want to make sure I won't regret my decisions. Again, that being said, there are pros and cons for these types of situations, but that's besides the point.
I originally plan on majoring in the businesses field, while minoring in something to do with computers(CS, Eng, etc.)
Ultimately, I want to create tools for people to use, make them pleasant to look at, all while contributing to something I could be proud of. Luckily, I have a little bit of time ahead of me to really think about my options to send me into my future.
I've been hearing hints of this for some time now. Doing the hard things in life can open new doors as an individual, or steer you into the right direction for something else.
Thanks for your input. Adding to what you've said, I've read and heard on some occasions (from professionals in my sector) that taking some CS classes as electives was beneficial and wasn't too overwhelming.
You're welcome. Many years ago, I "just got the piece of paper to hang on the wall," Amost as many years ago, I got another piece of paper that hangs on the wall as a credential - not in CS and in a field where credentials have legal standing in the pursuit of other non-academic pieces of paper to hang on the wall. Which is a way of getting to the core decision that you face. What is the value to you personally of the piece of paper that you can hang on your wall?
It doesn't really matter much how much I value a diploma, unless I a hiring manager and you are a candidate and that's the typical case. Diplomas are meaningful culturally. If you already have a piece of paper to hang on the wall your calculus may be different than if you don't. That's ok either way.
If you have a diploma, then Coursera's MOOC's are a middle option. There is the formality, at least in some offerings, of a fixed course schedule and consequently a peer cohort and clear instructor student relationships. And it offers some excellent courses by excellent CS teachers. But it's not going to get you academic credit if you might really want a degree at some point.
I've taken a bunch of them and gotten a lot out of it [I've also dropped a lot of courses when I haven't]. But my situation is my situation - that's why I described it - and not your situation. Or YMMV.
