Been “learning” Julia for a couple years now, off and on. It is a fascinating language and I wish to learn more. I’m on my 4th book (7 if you count E-books) and still don’t have basics down to my liking.
I’m wondering if there are maybe companies or organizations that I can be involved with / work for (for free) until I am comfortable enough with it. Have considered offering this to local companies in the Huntsville, AL area or even remote to meet my desires. Company wins as I get a better grip while creating software engineered programs at no expense for them. My thinking is that I will be better motivated to learn more when I have specific tasks to perform while filling my goal and they win because they get free labor. For a while anyway.
Is this crazy or what? Is this a viable approach?
A little background: have more than 40 years experience as a general purpose software engineer, focused around embedded, database creation and maintenance, customer support (but totally burnt out with that), and creation and maintenance of office applications. Environments include nuclear power plants, Army R&D labs, a few contracts for general office locations, and so on. And more boring stuff…
Appreciate the welcome!
Programming, for me, is fun almost all the time. Yeah, I am one of those weirdos.
Finding a job or contract is on my mind, but it’s not the end-goal.
Fields? Since grammar school, I’ve been in love with science in general (except the life-sciences.) My two main careers might give you some hints: radiation (safety) technician and engineer, and software engineering in a major US Army R&D Center… Plus, I am a small plane pilot, scuba fanatic, motorcycle touring speedster (ahem), RV camper, and so on. Still can’t decide whether to get one of my high schools lusts-- Celestron 11-14 inch computerized telescope. Lots of money with zero return, so just another high-dollar hobby. At nearly 71, and no wife to have to cost-justify anything, guess I’m a free bird. Only dollars are my limitation.
Maybe you just need to find a specific application that interests you and use that to start working more deeply in a specific domain, picking things up along the way, rather than continuing to read about the language in a “general” way.
You mentioend power plants, there’s a pretty thriving group of packages working on mathematical optimization for power systems. Maybe checking out https://jump.dev/, the main package ecosystem for math programming would be interesting to you.
You also mentioned databases, there are interfaces to various common DBs in Julia that might be interesting to you for DB management: https://juliadatabases.org/
Why not life sciences, if I may ask? A major backlog on my plate is tutorials for BioJulia, and there’s a great resource https://rosalind.info that will teach you molecular biology in the context of programming and bioinformatics problems - writing up solutions to those to l would be a great way to fall in love with another field, learn Julia, and contribute to a small bit growing part of the community
Of course, I did all the required courses for the life sciences. Hated each and every one. High school biology as such a drag. Still got the A’s, though, but I hated it. Still do. I’ve been forced to learn a lot about it, due to family, personal health, and all the normal things. Still don’t like it. Some people like pistachio ice cream, too. Just personal taste, I guess.
As someone who didn’t find biology in school that interesting, but that finds molecular biology fascinating, I wouldn’t write off bioinformatics-related projects based on how you feel about biology: it’s a rather different beast, a lot more like solving mathematical/computational puzzles.
At one point I did some preliminary engineering on an open source sleep apnea testing device. The idea came from an article in an engineering magazine. It would use a low powered embedded device to record sleeping sounds to an SD card. Then the sounds would be postprocessed to determine if sleep apnea is present. Julia is an ideal language for the post-processing. If interested contact me and I will share the preliminary engineering I did.
To me this is closer to the vibration analysis work I do than to biology!
