Qvault

The post Is a Coding Bootcamp Worth It Compared to a Computer Science Degree? first appeared on Qvault . When you’re in a position of wondering, “ Is a coding bootcamp worth it? ” you should look at several factors. Coding bootcamp costs, on average, around $13,000 . This holds true no matter if you choose to attend coding bootcamp in person or online, though there’s a lot of variance in how much coding bootcamp costs, ranging from $3,000 to $20,000 depending on the language, the length, and who’s running it. You should also look at alternatives. Maybe you’re asking “ Is a coding bootcamp worth it? ” because you’re at the start of your potential career in computer science. You’re looking at the obstacles in your way to learn computer science and you’re wondering if it’s worth surmounting them. $13,000 (or even $3,000) is a lot to drop on something that doesn’t work out in the end. However, if you’re in the position of wondering how much coding bootcamps can cost, and whether or

The post Is Computer Science Really that Hard? first appeared on Qvault . With the influx of interest in the edTech site I’ve been building , I’ve been getting a question that I don’t think I had previously taken the time to really think through, “Is computer science hard?”. Like most things, the answer depends on your perspective and current situation. That said, my guess is that a standard computer science education is easier than most of my readers think. Take as an analogy two friends, one weighs 300 lbs and is trying desperately to lose weight, the other friend weighs 100 lbs and wants to pack some on. If you were to ask them, “is gaining weight really that hard?” You’d get wildly different answers. There are so many factors including appetite, exercise, metabolic rate, starting weight, work routine, etc. In a similar fashion, some of the biggest factors when determining an answer to the question, “Is computer science hard to learn” would be: Do you have experience with comp

The post Can You Get a Programming Job with Just an Associate’s Degree? first appeared on Qvault . Changing majors is a tale as old as time. A degree that would normally require four years to complete can quickly turn into a more expensive endeavor that takes five or six years for a student that can’t decide what they want to study. The interesting thing about programming jobs is that they don’t require a degree at all, but if you at least complete an associate’s degree, you’ll have a better chance of landing that first job. Do associate’s degrees exist for computer programming? There are plenty of associate’s degrees for programming and computer science offered by colleges all over. Need some proof? Here are some examples. South Texas College – Associate’s Degree in CS Trinity Valley Community College – Associate’s in CS Weber State University – AAS in CS If what you’re looking for is a physical college that offers a 2-year degree in programming, it’s likely that you can f

The post How I Organize My Local Development Environment first appeared on Qvault . When I was just getting into coding, I was very disorganized. I would create a new text file in My Documents , work on it, never create a Git repository, accidentally delete it later, you get the idea. Nowadays I’m quite the opposite. To be honest, the thing that made me get my act together was the quite unpopular and now deprecated GOPATH that early versions of Go required developers to work in. I think it was the right move to not force that organization as a requirement, but I actually quite liked the method personally, and still use a version of it to this day. Where I store code on my local machine All the code that I write, fork, and maintain goes under the ~/workspace directory in the home folder. I only work in Unix environments these days. Within the workspace directory, everything is namespaced in the way that the GOPATH used to handle it. For example, ~/workspace/REMOT

The post All Coding Courses on Qvault Are Now Free to Audit first appeared on Qvault . Last weekend I did a major revamp of Qvault’s payment strategy, after toying with the first version since I launched in the summer of 2020, as it turns out, the microtransaction (gem) strategy didn’t work out to the benefit of my students, nor to the growth of Qvault. As a result, I’ve flipped my funding strategy on its head and decided to make all of Qvault’s content free to audit. Let’s take a look at exactly what that means. What is Qvault? If you don’t know already, Qvault is a code-in-the-browser computer science program. A few of the goals I had when I started building it out were: Linear program – clear starting and ending points. Focus on computer science. Too many boot camps and online courses skip CS fundamentals. Hands-on. We learn by writing and executing code, videos have their place but the majority of coding education should be interactive. All of these were problems fo

The post Using a High-Level RabbitMQ Client in Golang first appeared on Qvault . If you’ve already read my previous post , you know that the amqp package is awesome and you can get up and running with just 40-50 lines of simple code. Unfortunately, the bare-bones amqp library doesn’t handle a lot of the stuff you probably wish it did, things like reconnecting logic, the spawning of threads, queue and binding boilerplate, and flow control. Fear not! I recently open-sourced my own package that neatly wraps Streadway’s amqp library and provides those higher-level abstractions. Behold, go-rabbitmq . My main goals when building this new package were the following: Automatic reconnection handling. The amqp lib doesn’t handle when a Node goes down. The spawning of concurrent goroutines to consume from a queue – there’s no reason for everyone to have to write those same 20 lines of code in each app they build. Reasonable defaults, but total control. Using go-rabbitmq, you still get p

The post The Two Classes of Software Engineer first appeared on Qvault . “Software engineer” has become a ubiquitous term for people who write, deploy, architect, or sometimes even simply test code. In reality, I think there are two classes of “software engineers”; those who understand computer science well enough to do challenging, innovative work, and those who just get by because they’re familiar with a few high-level tools. The laziness with which the tech industry has adopted the term “software engineer” has made it harder for us to distinguish between the two. For the sake of this article, I’m going to refer to those who’ve taken the time to study in-depth as “ computer scientists “, and those who skipped the boring stuff to learn how to deploy a React portfolio as “ developers “. I won’t be talking about the differences in job titles among software engineers. If that’s what you’re here for check out this other article on how much money different kinds of engineers make . I

The post 7 Ways for Beginner Coders to Monetize Programming Blogs first appeared on Qvault . Why shouldn’t your hobby earn you money? Programming is a very lucrative skill to have, whether as a professional career, a freelance gig, or even just a hobby. For programmers who know how, there’s a real opportunity to turn their knowledge and expertise into cold hard cash.  When you combine the ability to program or code with the ability to write in a way that resonates with an audience, that’s a jackpot.  The best part is that you don’t even need to go to college or have five years of experience at Google to have a successful and lucrative programming blog – if you learn computer science online  and set up a learning course for yourself, you’ll have all you need to turn your blog into profit.  The internet is full of readers who want to be entertained, educated, engaged. A programmer who can tap into that audience has a ton of options for monetization. This guide won’t mention Google