₦airaland Forum

@Beaf I never knew you were a coder. My respect for you has just gone up like 80%!!

After all your endless trolling in the political sections had already eroded that respect to like 2% or something!

Lets see more of you here and less of you there, eh? I have never posted there, or in the romance sections, etc cos I think they are the time wasters of Nairaland, where people go to waste the time God has given them

Wow, I should have seen this earlier

I think @whoelse has the most awesome solution!

Everybody else just dey blow grammar. See longlong variable names! See comments! Kai, people like to dey WRITE! Me, I come from the old school where when typing into your BBC computer with 8 kilobytes of RAM you dread the ever so common "Out Of Memory" error and remove all them tiresome comments! LOLOLOL!

Complexity analysis? We got some eggheads here! ! Though It really is pretty simple and all programmers should be aware of it. I would link to the wikipedia article but its one of those tiresome pure maths thingies that just makes the simplest stuff seem like wahala

Ah, so @Beaf gave himself the prize by suddenly adding a new condition after the fact? Bad, bad Beaf! But after seeing the prize one can understand why he would want her for himself! LOLOLOL!

Me, would I have entered? Well, no

But only because I don't believe in coding contests where you are judged by some arbitrary factor! If you have a contest where the code is judged by
a. does it compile
b. does it generate the desired output
c. does it have the fewest lines of the submissions
d. does it solve the problem in the shortest time

And the conditions for (b) are CLEARLY stated, then I will surely enter. I dont want someone looking at my code and telling me that because I am comparing two constants I fail!!! LOLOLOLOLOL!

@birdman

Yes, C will always be needed but 90% of programmers will never use it.

Just like 99% of C programmers will never use assembler.

And the truth is, C can never ever ever in a million years be able to match up to assembler when it comes to pure raw speed (6502 assembly programmer speaking)

@ Original poster

Dont be confused by all these holy wars. Just follow my advice above for the fastest easiest route. Visual Basic to start off, then move to java. VB is the easiest language to learn and Java is the best documented and easiest "real" language to learn.

You can go on to C, C++ and assembler later when Siemens hires you to program their nuclear reactors.

I'm reposting this so the OP has a better chance of seeing it:

We are overanalyzing his problem, people. The boy wants to learn PROGRAMMING. He doesnt know squat yet.

Once he understands PROGRAMMING, then he will be able to learn any PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE he wants in a few days max. Then you can start looking at stuff like, 'are there good prospects' or 'what are the career options', etc.

@Topic:

My friend, these are the two languages you should use to learn PROGRAMMING. Once you understand programming, then your next question will be
"What language is best for web development?" and then we can start arguing about php, python, etc.

Here are the answers:

1. To learn HOW TO PROGRAM: Use visual basic. Dont listen to what anyone else says. It is super easy and you will quickly grasp the basics.

2. To learn OBJECT ORIENTED PROGRAMMING: Use Java. It has the double benefit of being commercially successful, and in high demand but most importantly, a lot of quality info on the net about OOP assumes you know java. Also, it is a way to graduate from the hand-holding IDE of visual basic (you will learn what an IDE is when u study VB) to a less hand-holdy environment.

When you are through learning, from there you can jump into ANY language. Trust me. Follow this path and you can't go wrong!

We are overanalyzing his problem, people. The boy wants to learn PROGRAMMING. He doesnt know squat yet.

Once he understands PROGRAMMING, then he will be able to learn any PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE he wants in a few days max. Then you can start looking at stuff like, 'are there good prospects' or 'what are the career options', etc.

@Topic:

My friend, these are the two languages you should use to learn PROGRAMMING. Once you understand programming, then your next question will be
"What language is best for web development?" and then we can start arguing about php, python, etc.

Here are the answers:

1. To learn HOW TO PROGRAM: Use visual basic. Dont listen to what anyone else says. It is super easy and you will quickly grasp the basics.

2. To learn OBJECT ORIENTED PROGRAMMING: Use Java. It has the double benefit of being commercially successful, and in high demand but most importantly, a lot of quality info on the net about OOP assumes you know java. Also, it is a way to graduate from the hand-holding IDE of visual basic (you will learn what an IDE is when u study VB) to a less hand-holdy environment.

When you are through learning, from there you can jump into ANY language. Trust me. Follow this path and you can't go wrong!

Temi, the team lead and originator of the idea that won the recently concluded garage48 competition (www.garage48.org) is a woman, and a .NET programmer. She also served as the DBA while we worked on the project.

The project is callcamp (www.callcamp.net) that is currently being upgraded to a full retail solution. You can read about it here: http://www.portlagos.com and here: http://www.garage48.com

Gina Trapani, co-host of this week in google (http://www.twit.tv/twig) is a woman and she regularly features other female programmers.

There is no negative female programmer stereotype, it will not make you seem male, or make you get fat/ignore your appearance. Many of the top female programmers are very attractive, and anything that indicates intelligence makes you more desirable!

There are a few small pitfalls though:

* Male dominated field (Shouldnt be a problem)
* Irregular working hours (You need understanding family, but this goes both ways)

Thankfully, the problems of sexism, marginalisation, etc are NOT present in the programming profession, in fact men welcome female programmers because the level of interest is so low!

So welcome to the fold! Hope you plan to stay

@Goodmuyis

Hi, I'm here to tell you tat you already have all it takes to become a programmer-namely zeal.

Let me put it into perspective:

When I started learning programming, I had no computer of my own. Only one family I knew had a computer and I had to travel almost 50 kilometers to get there. I had no generator,and neither did they. Power was non-existent.

I had no internet access. I had no means of communicating with the world overseas, not even a telephone. What I had, were books, mostly gotten from people who didnt care about them, and a pen with which to write down my programs so I could type them in and test them whenever I got access to a computer.

Obviously, times have changed now and you definitely have better access to technology than I did then. Afterall, you posted on Nairaland. What this means is that all you need now is for the desire to be genuine, and you WILL excel.

Programming is not like graphic design and so forth where you need 1 million dollar equipment and powerful software to be effective. Programming is universal to all computing machines, and it is what creates the powerful software so of course NO SOFTWARE IS NECCESARY except maybe notepad.


IN SHORT:

* Get zeal
* Get books (or reading material, start with wikipedia, since you have time/internet to spend on nairaland)
* Get pen and paper

And start writing your code.

Whenever you have a chance to use a computer, you need to following:

* ANY computer, even the oldest, slowest, most useless 386 is good enough. In fact, for a programmer, the slower the better. Fast PCs are not for learning to code.

* On that computer, you need only 2 things: A text editor (notepad already exists,and you can use notepad++ if you have internet) and a compiler (every language has a free compiler you can download. Wikipedia will give you links to free compilers for any language and instructions on how to use them)


Let me warn you of something: If you are afraid of the command line or dont want to go through the 'hassle' of configuring something with notepad files and command line instructions, then I'm sorry but you are not the kind of programmer we want in Nigeria.

There are too many PHP cut-and-paste monkeys in Nigeria masquerading as 'programmers'. I met many TRUE PHP gurus at the recent garage48.org competition and I hope you want to become one of them, or perhaps learn another language like C-sharp or Java

Good luck! Call me when you make your first million ;-)

Hi, guys! Callcamp Project Manager and mobile dev here :-)

Just to help us out a little here, callcamp, the winner of garage48, is not a "call center application"

When you find out what it actually is, and what we were actually able to demo, you may think of it as a little more than "lacking in ideas" :-D

I have a writeup on the front page of my blog here: www.portlagos.com: Its pretty long, but if you go through it, you'll get an idea about what it is we did, what we couldn't do, and what the experience of garage48 was.

In the end, you may feel Nigerians are not exactly "lacking in ideas", anymore! To be honest, I met so many bright and capable Nigerians there, people who actually know how to write code, not the usual PHP cut-and-paste kiddies. I met so many people with incredible skill and a true love for all things tech, There were guys who only ever use Linux and the VI text editor to write code and the pumped out working systems at lightning speed!

To cut a long story short: Callcamp is not simply a call-center application. It's job is to lower call-center costs by allowing freelance agents to sign up, and have support requests routed to them wherever they are!

The system we demoed would take a generic SMS, search through and locate any free agents with a high enough "callcamp score" and via an android application (which we also demoed, in fully functional form) enable the agent to execute a callback. This would be routed to the SMS-originator's phone and then support can be given!

We also demoed a broadcast system that enables the agent to read up on the current status of whatever he is supporting, since obviously free agents are not on site. We didnt demo escalation, but in the final version, an agent who recieves a support call that he deems above his answering level can proceed to escalate it to frontline customer service with priority! Of course escalation in this form may affect their "callcamp score", but we have a pretty sophisticated idea for how we will do the ranking, and of course we plan to have the customer decide on this as well!

In the end, it will lower call center costs, raise the quality of support calls/requests, provide a great way to earn extra money for those with a lot of knowledge and free time!

Finally, to the guy who mentioned IVR systems: We all know that an IVR is basically a way of accepting defeat when it comes to customer service. I dont think they are useful for anything apart from automated "grunt work" such as activations registration, and so forth. Our agents will be able to route calls for such automation-friendly tasks to an IVR also!

SO, once more, www.portlagos.com, check it out, and peace :-)