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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • flubba86@lemmy.worldtoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlAnd don't forget RTFM
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    4 months ago

    Actually this is the biggest hurdle in leaning how to code. You can blame the huge numbers of “learn to code in 24 hours” articles and videos online and the the influx of “5 day bootcamp” courses. Its like teaching someone the basics of how to drive a car but never teaching them the road rules and never taking them on the road.

    A better analogy might be learning a foreign language. It’s like teaching someone all the words in Spanish, but never putting them together in a conversation.

    I’d argue that if you say “I know how to code, I know what variables are and how to print text to the console, how do I make an app?” Then actually you don’t know how to code. You might know the basics of a programming language, and that is the first step in learning coding, but there are many steps after that.

    I identified this gap a few years ago after seeing a couple of my friends (one finished a boot camp, and one finished a software development major at Uni) both were in this same situation. I determined there is a big gap between “knowing a programming language” and “knowing how to make software”. It’s like going from “I know how to write words” to “I know how to write a novel”. It’s not something that comes easy. It’s something that can take time (often years) to get good at. This is the reason you see requirements like “3 years software development experience” on entry level programmer jobs. The number of people in your situation is incredibly high. The coding bootcamps churn them out by the hundreds every month.

    A couple of years ago when I was between jobs, I created a Gumtree ad advertising “post-bootcamp” courses, that aimed at bridging this gap. It was a series of private 1on1 lessons aimed at teaching someone to go from “knowing how to code” to being “software developer” job ready. Lots of people have many different learning styles and different paths they took to this point. The key is focussing not on the giving them the missing information, but teaching the person how to identify what steps are missing and how to find resources to learn them (because that’s the real missing knowledge wink).

    Unfortunately I found some people didn’t want to learn how to learn for themselves, and just wanted me to hand them the “secret missing parts” on a platter.



  • This is the first time I’ve even heard of CoreELEC despite using LibreELEC. Thanks for mentioning it. I have doubts every obscure cheap Android box is supported though.

    LibreElec reduced official support for SBCs with Amlogic Cpus (like the Odroid C2, Odroid C4, and Odroid N2) in 2018, that spawned the fork called CoreElec. Then LibreElec removed Amlogic support entirely in 2019 (they wanted to just focus on Raspberry Pi SBCs). That caused a mass exodus of users and most moved to CoreElec. That was around the same time cheap TV boxes started appearing on AliExpress, and a lot of them happened to have Amlogc CPUs like the s905X, s905X2, s905X3, and s922X, these are the same CPUs in Odroid C2 and Odroid C4 and Odroid N2, so CoreElec was able to add support for most of them.

    CoreElec remains tied to LibreElec upstream, receiving the same updates.

    They have a comprehensive, accurate and up-to-date hardware compatibility list. They don’t support all Chinese TV boxes, but if it has an Amlogic CPU, there’s a high chance it is supported. If you’re unsure, just look at any one of the hundreds of “will this cheap TV box work?” threads on their forum.


  • I’ve owned four different android TV boxes from AliExpress over the years, from different manufacturers, different sellers, and different versions of Android. None of them ever came with malware. I’m a member of the CoreElec community forums where thousands of people own android TV boxes, hundreds of different models and hundreds of different firmware versions, and nobody ever once talked about having malware on their device. That LTT video is ill-informed and out of proportion. Anyway, nobody ever buys the Android TV box to use whatever crappy old version of Android they include, they immediately wipe the partition and install CoreElec on it, with kodi and all the plugins you’d ever want.

    I have two of them running CoreElec for my media centres, and one with Armbian OS with HomeAssistant installed, running my home automation. They’re the best bang-for-buck ARM powered Linux hardware you can get, miles better than a raspberry PI.







  • I used be a computer technician at a small town computer shop around 2008-2011. More than half of our customers were over 60.

    Sometimes I needed to take some tech support calls, and sometimes I needed to make house calls to troubleshoot the folks issues.

    Literally every support call started with “Why doesn’t the email work?” while the actual problem ranged from ISP issues, and modem faults, PC faults, Windows configuration errors, to dead monitors or a broken mouse. Literally any computer fault could be described as a failure to access their email.