Thinking of getting back into programming

DireEmblem · 11 Apr 2015 at 20:52

Ok so background.

I graduated with a Maths & Computer Science degree back in 2006, and started work in finace. At best the most programming I do is VBA coding, with the occasional system bug fixing.

At university I learned Java/SQL. Is there any sort of community projects out there which I could join/contribute?

I'm also thinking of getting my old server back online, and playing about with it - but then I need ideas on what to do? I am also considering small jobs on PPH. The last one I did was 2 years ago, where I got paid £200 to build a tournament scheduler - which would mix up competitors from various clubs against similar weighted competitors from other clubs - as best as possible. I quite enjoyed doing this kind of work, much more than my day job however PPH work is irregular.

All thoughts/suggestions welcome.

Scougar · 18 Apr 2015 at 03:00

Thinking of getting your server back online... i sense you are not serious if you are just thinking about it?

Have you considered looking into building something in-house for your finance company?

AHarvey · 18 Apr 2015 at 11:55

PPH is pretty much a waste of space now, you compete with people from Indian who will work for pennies, then the clients complain when it goes wrong because they can't communicate properly with them. Seen it so many times on there.

If you work in finance, I'd say jump in with Python. There are thousands of free and paid resources out there (codecademy for one), it's great to work with as its very fast to learn and easy to write

mid_gen · 19 Apr 2015 at 07:11

Assuming you're wanting skills that would be useful in finance, you could do worse than picking up some Oracle certs. Most banks are still using it for a lot of their PTS. Obviously the PL\SQL ones rather than administration.

As for open source projects, probably easiest to just make something from scratch and stick it on github.

jsmoke · 20 Apr 2015 at 15:51

AHarvey said:
PPH is pretty much a waste of space now, you compete with people from Indian who will work for pennies, then the clients complain when it goes wrong because they can't communicate properly with them. Seen it so many times on there.

If you work in finance, I'd say jump in with Python. There are thousands of free and paid resources out there (codecademy for one), it's great to work with as its very fast to learn and easy to write

It's been like that for about 10 years+ has it not, well freelancer has been anyway.