Damn, they must be charging an arm and a leg then, or your firstborn perhaps.

Here’s another one, catch!

This isn’t rocket science!

No. It’s computer science.

I’m glad you agree. Honestly, as someone who has also struggled with this question, I wish I’d done this earlier, because there’s a lot of advantages to it.

It takes a lot less planning and upfront time investment before you get to see your work make a difference in the world. It’s not immediate gratification, mind you, because pull requests can sometimes sit there for days or weeks before someone has the time to review them, but when they get merged, and you get to see the feature you worked on in an app you actually use, it’s still a great feeling.

Most projects will also give you contributor credit, so your name and/or GitHub handle will show up on their repo, website, or in the app’s “about” page, and you can claim that on any job application you might submit in the future.

I honestly think it’s a great way to scratch your own itch (because you can pick what issues you want to work on and build features you’d actually want to use) while also helping other people and benefitting open source as a whole. Any reasonably popular project generally has a massive backlog of open issues, so if you’re at a loss where to even start, you can just look through there and pick something that seems doable.

Yeah, I think you’re already on the right path with that, those are good basics for anything computer science related (and usually required classes if you take CS in college). Perhaps add Numerical Analysis to that list.

Also, Operations Research has some interesting optimization algorithms, and Statistics is useful for anything related to Machine Learning.

I’m a mathematician by training who has worked extensively (and exclusively) in the software field. While I realize I’m probably biased here, I think I write very solid code and have rarely received any complaints from trained software engineers about it.

I did however also take quite a few computer science classes in college and have spent a lot of time learning how to write better, more readable and maintainable code. Having had quite a few jobs at the start of my career where I was the only programmer on a project and therefore forced to eat my own dog food has certainly also helped.

Instead of starting your own project, have you considered simply contributing to an existing open source project instead?

This feels like something that was written by an AI, except for the last sentence.

I haven’t seen this thing in action under normal conditions since I just looted the picture off Faceborg, but I imagine it probably shows a slideshow of ads.

Well, it doesn’t look like a core dump

Perhaps it runs on a Raspberry Pi?

No idea where it’s from or what it usually looks like since I just nabbed this off of Facebook, but my guess is to display ads, or perhaps some slo-mo videos of fresh fruit being tossed in an appetizing manner in an attempt to trigger your Pavlovian reflex to buy some of those oranges.

Couldn’t find any pictures of that particular setup operating under normal conditions, but here are some similar ones to give you an idea:

Using an actual hard drive for an embedded system like this would be a failure in and of itself.

Unless it literally has to store several hours’ worth of HD video content, no reason the entire system couldn’t fit on an SD card.

Or an Adafruit, perhaps?

Iron Maiden would like to have a word with you

I’m coming back, I will return
And I’ll possess your daemons and make your CPU burn
I have ring 0, I have your cores
I have the power to make my evil take its course

Well yes, internally that’s what it does, but from a user perspective it just looks like being handed the package, you never see any of the failed attempts (unless delivery fails completely because the company went out of business). It’s sorta more like having a butler who orders it for you and deals with any potential BS that might happen, and then just hands you the package when it finally arrives in one piece.

It really doesn’t matter. Literally a Raspberry Pi will do for a beginner.