My cat broke into my computer and hacked the system, and of course this is just a joke. Now let me be serious. I did already complete 70% of the C# Fundamentals Course, and I got the impression that I understood most of it, I really did.
But when I close all browser windows to try something on my own in Visual Studio, it seems like everything I learned is lost. I mean, I get the idea to try out something small, but I can’t remember the syntax that I learned. Looks like it will take more time until I memorize everything. The auto-complete feature of Visual Studio helps, but sometimes I still don’t know where to put certain commands or how to use them.
Anyway, I wanted to motivate myself and I wanted to know what I can do without any help, without using Google or code snippets that other people wrote. I wanted to check out where I do stand. I think I should repeat some of the lessons, but I can at least do some funny things already that were taught somewhere at the beginning or middle of the course.
I wrote a small program today that will open the Windows console, and there will be a question that I have to answer. If my answer is correct, I will get a message and the program will end, if I type in the wrong answer, the program will basically go back and ask the same question again. Since it doesn’t matter at the moment how useful the program is (it’s just practicing), I made fun of myself and wrote the program on a way that it asks me for the name of my cat. Now you should understand the screenshot that I embedded at the top of this post. Here is how the program looks like as code…
static void CatQuestion()
{
Console.Write("Hi! I am your cat! Please type my name: " );
String firstAnswer = Console.ReadLine();
if (firstAnswer == "Shyna")
{
Console.WriteLine();
Console.WriteLine("Good human, you still know my name! Now bring me some snacks... =^..^=");
Console.ReadLine();
}
else
{
Console.WriteLine("Sorry, but that is not true. Please try again...");
Console.WriteLine();
CatQuestion();
}
}
Diary of Dennis 
You make me miss my programming days. I got a degree in computer programming in 2004 but never got a job doing it so now I have forgotten almost everything.
I programmed with Visual Basic back then and I could do some cool things with it, but my interests changed so that I forgot everything too over the last decade. I get the impression that Visual Basic was not too different to C#, at least if I remember right, but there is so much knowledge lost that I can start from scratch anyway now. So, I know what you mean. If you don’t use your knowledge, it’ll get lost… it’s sad that it happened because you couldn’t find a job in this sector. By the way, exactly the same happened to me several times too. I got a certificate in network administration, but that was at the time of Windows ME and Windows XP… later I found a job in a PC repair shop, but never a job as network administrator and while I can completely understand my home network today and can manually set IP addresses and what not (laugh), I did probably lose the more advanced knowledge that is needed to set up large company networks. Not to forget that many things might even have changed with Windows 7, Windows 8 and I have absolutely no idea where to find things in Windows 10 since I don’t use that OS. It’s a shame, because I would have liked the tasks, it’s just that I didn’t find a job as network administrator back then I could forget all my plans.
I think similar things happened to me with other things. I was in a business school for example, learned things that could have been useful in an office job. I still know how to do certain things with Excel but most of my knowledge about business stuff is basically lost too because I didn’t find a job in an office. It’s sad if we acquire knowledge and have fun with it but don’t get to the point to use it because the local job market doesn’t have demand for more people with these skills. To learn something in my city, that was always almost like speculation on the stock exchange, really… my asset, in this case my skill was either in demand or just a bubble that popped. I could have been more flexible, like moving to another city, but that’s not me, because I like it here where I live. So, I became more flexible with what jobs I did take, it was just never what I really wanted to do (sometimes there were exceptions). 😀
My mistake was working full time while going to school part-time. That left a loner time period between classes and things I learned became obsolete before I graduated. I also forgot more because of the passage of time. If I could go back in time I would have tried to get a student loan so I could learn everything in a short period. That might not have been possible though because I was raising a child and needed the money.
That sounds difficult, indeed. A friend of mine tried this, she tried to get a degree in biology, to eventually be able to work in research with animals, she was especially interested in marine biology (Baltic Sea, North Sea). She did both too, trying to get the degree and working. Student loan was no option because she got it already once previously, or for some similar reason that I can’t remind. She worked as helper for a vet clinic at that time, but in her case, she gave up to study after a year because she was completely burned out from doing both at the same time. She then got pension for a year because it lead to a depression and a year free time helped her so that she wrote new applications. Today she is working in a big Zoo in another city, and she is happy. She is laughing about it today and says “Well, the job doesn’t pay as if I would be a researcher, but it’s fun and I don’t want to stop doing this now”. It’s a bit of a different story, but in some way similar because her conclusion was the same than yours… To fullfil her dreams, she said “I should have studied biology first, taking the student loan and commit to it fulltime”.
Happiness is the ultimate goal in life, not money. I’m glad your friend found a good job.
That is absolutely true, money alone doesn’t make someone happy… joy comes from different things.
[ Smiles ] Programming can be fun (Provided one knows what they are doing).
But also headache if you went through 70% of a big course to realize that you only remind 30% of the taught syntax. But this guy in the video course said that’s normal, it’ll take time until it sinks in and until the knowledge connects. I am still confused about a lot of stuff, I know what I could try out, but then I often still don’t know how to type it or Visual Studio spits out errors that there is something wrong with my code. Anyway, I do all this out of curiosity again since I was interested in programming back then, decades ago… maybe I can get into it again, otherwise who cares… I don’t force myself to turn this into a passion, but if it becomes one automatically, that’s fine 🙂
When I was learning it — and I have since forgotten ALL OF IT and I mean every single bit (though I can still read it if I need to) — the only way were cheat sheets of the most common combinations I would need and endless repetition. Constructing something relatively simple and then reconstructing it again, from scratch, seeing if I could do it more elegantly the next time. I never got really good … I was way too slow for any real usefulness professionally … but I understood what my colleagues were doing and could spot errors (sometimes). I think you just have to keep doing it over and over again. Cheat sheets, or cheat stickie notes. I had them everywhere, taped to the monitor, the desk, pinned to the walls. The older we get, the harder rote memorization becomes.
I think it’s like with every activity… you need to do it a lot to learn it. I find C# very interesting but I am not sure if I want to spend too much time on it. There are already way too much activities in my life, but well, curiosity did make me go through the course, and maybe to refresh older knowledge that got lost as well. I think also here you can get into it on a way that it’s impossible to forget what you learned but I am not sure if I am so serious about it. For now it’s a fun side-activity, since spring is still away. 😀