all you IT degree types - how do you do it??

[forge]

geez forge, I got all hyped up on coffee yesterday, ran this thread up to 7 pages and that's all you have to say??

what uni are you into anyway?

is it an IT degree?

what were you considering doing with it?

there's totally enough IT peeps here to steer you into the better end of it.

regarding programming and getting better... I've been pounding my head over max/msp but slowly getting better, so I can commiserate with your classes. it dawned on me that the one single thing to get better at coding is to write more code, simple as that. you get the basics down better and better and start to push to learn more esoteric features to solve new problems. whatever it takes to get you writing, whether it's an internship, uni classes, learning at home, use it or lose it. like anything in life, it's all about practice and patience.

To be honest I hadnt even had a chance to read a third of this - so I've only skimmed - and I was in the Uni Bar when I wrote that one!

but to be clear, I didnt quit Uni - just the IT subject

I have been thinking about it alot and personal shit kind of eclipsed it, but in the end I realised I'm just not interested in Arrays and Sort complexity and farking Variables

well not that much anyway - the other subjects (Music and sound technology, sound, image, text) are way more interesting

I think I'm going to change across to sound design which is what I really want to do

Some guys did a gig in the music block today that was really interesting with Max/MSP and they were sound design students


I havent even thought of a use for Max/MSP yet that would warrant the time needed to learn it first, but if I did I'm sure it would be adequate

I actually do want to re-attack a music career I think, but from a different angle

I've been reading some interesting books about the future of the music biz that have been saying the music industry is thriving, it's just the Record Industry that is struggling (at least in the "Big 4" sense)

I think catching up with Pitch black also reminded me that it's out there for the taking if you can be arsed

I got really jaded and cynical for a while there and gave up on it, but I realised that was because my expectations and perceptions of the music industry were all wrong

[/rant]

thanks again all for the replies!

[Tone Deft]

you have to practice max to use it. once you get it, ideas of how to use it will come around. make your own step sequencer, then make your own synth, those two alone will get you to learn TONS. if you don't learn it before you think of some grand project I doubt one could pull it off. it's like not learning to mountain climb before taking a trip up Mt Everest.


I doubt there's much $$ in max unless you become a guru and there's plenty of them and they just make a few $$ teaching it and the occasional appearance. I dunno, everyone wants the jobs making music and stuff but those are the least available jobs. maybe some more people can chime in on how to find a niche in the web design/music/artistic/technical side of things. I hit it from the other side, over the top technical then back to that middle ground.

[pax]

I think the best way to approach college is take the minimum you can to stay full time (in the states 12 hours a semester)

That way you don't get overwhelmed in that drama, and still have time to do your own personal explorations in Max/Ableton, etc... and have time to network/meet people.

Bill Gates went to Harvard people!!! He met Steve Ballmer there... Sure, he dropped out, but it was the connections he made there that put him on the map. Google was started by students of Stanford who met there... Good luck pulling that type of stuff off in your basement.

I definitely don't think the run get a degree, get an mba, get a job lifestyle is conducive to good music... but don't neglect the connections you can make through a good university...

[friend_kami]

i learnt programming on pen and paper before i had a computer (not joking).

then i started putting that code into QBASIC.

learning new bits of Syntax as time went along from the HELP / Syntax menu... making applications that used a syntax for the sake of using/learning that syntax.

i progressed to visual basic for DOS and some assembler in the background, assembler isnt useful unless you're working in hardware these days.. VB for DOS became VB for Windows, and then moved along and learnt ASP which is based on VB Script and has a lot of the conventions i learned with BASIC.

after ASP I learned PHP, Javascript, Actionscript and somewhere in between did SQL related stuff.

once you learn coding as a concept and can be arsed getting your head around syntax structures of diff languages (the annoying part for me).

hopefully that will have given you an idea of one programmers path.

did you program, or did you do pseudocode with pen and paper?
also, if you did actually program, how did you debug it?

just curious.