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Hi, member (hint: let us know your name, it will make this a much more personal experience for everyone!)
I've worked in IT over 40 years, now semi-retired. The first 15 I worked as an employee. You get training, holidays, pension, mentoring, but limited opportunity. (I'm talking about larger employers, i.e. those with an IT department). But it's not a job for life - redundancy can hit you whatever field you're in. You can also end up in a "dead-end" job, not learning new skills, and risk getting to a point where you're no longer useful to your employer nor anyone else. I was headed that direction so went "contract": working for 3 - 9 months on each contract, on-site with big companies. It gave me great exposure to many industries, development strategies, tools and environments. After 10 years of that I started picking up what you call "gig" work - working remotely, multiple clients, projects ranging from an hour to three years or more in length. Eventually - with a lot of hard work and even more luck - my income was far more than it could have been as an employee. I'm now semi-retired, expecting a call from a potential new customer in the next hour (recommended by a past client whose systems I still support).
The thing about gig work is that it is inherently unpredictable. You need to be psychic to work out what a buyer might be looking for. You need experience in literally hundreds of different technologies/tools to match the highly specific requirements of the buyer. You are competing not just against a couple of hundred local job-seekers, but against (literally) hundreds of THOUSANDS of other remote-working freelancers across the globe (for many of whom $10/week is a big deal, whereas you need $100/hour just to pay the rent). To break into that marketplace you MUST have either the ability to apply for 100s of gigs per week (and the ability to provide a perfect solution regardless of the tools / vagueness of request); OR you must have a proven track-record of outstanding results. For a while I was the top-ranked UK developer on Rent-a-Coder, and with 100+ 5* reviews I could bid on jobs I wanted and get a very high success rate. But once I'd not picked up any work for a while and dropped to #2, the success rate plummeted. I did a £100 job for a client who couldn't really describe what he needed, he gave me my first-ever 4* rating, and my success rate plummeted even faster. I switched to PeoplePerHour and built up a new reputation there (and picked up my biggest ever client, who then recommended me to others, and I no longer needed to respond to gigs posted on those sites).
If you've got a good education in general IT and development, AND a good portfolio of hobby projects / pro-bono work, AND you can devote 18 hours a day to it, I'd say go for it. But as a newbie, with no experience, no portfolio, a day job (and probably financial responsibility) this is not the way to go. Get a full-time, steady job as a junior developer, find out if you're any good and if you like it. Let someone else pay for your training and build up experience there.
Finally, bear in mind that IT is still generally seen as a young person's career; once you're past 30 you may be expected to take a more managerial role, and find more barriers in your way (though this is where remote working is great - no-one knows how old you are!). It's also an INDOOR job, sitting down - and as a gig worker, generally on your own. You need to be 100% self-reliant, though having said that, join good communities (e.g. CodeProject, and in the UK things like IPSE to look after your business interests. You need to be thoroughly familiar with contract law, employment law, tax law, accounting, marketing and more. You'll be learning new skills + technology continuously and spending a significant amount of your time studying and researching trends for the rest of your career.
Whatever you decide, kudos to you for not just leaping in, but asking the right people in the right places. Best of luck whatever you decide.
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I got LALR(1) table generation done and parsing mocked (it works, but it's not a production ready parser)
the trouble is, it doesn't do error and continue unlike my LL(1) parser and right now i have no idea how to do it. The other issue is it won't collapse nodes or show hidden terminals through the parser (sometimes useful - esp for syntax highlighters to show comments and such)
and i don't know how to get it to collapse nodes because of the way it works beyond a vague idea and the idea is *ugly*. i don't like it, and that means its brittle. =(
so this is gonna take some work.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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But those damned wasps are already feasting on them,
time to go to bed ...
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Grabbed some windfall plums and cherry plums down the road, and filled a little bucket full of blackberries yesterday. A yummy morning today, soon to be followed by a stomach ache. 
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Then you'd better use GIT cherry picking 
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so when setting up a new dev environment on a fresh PC, it's a half day endeavor at least.
I used to imbibe alcohol.
and I used to run the installs like a ref at a rugby match.
I'd get a good buzz going for installing windows and by the time devstudio was installed I'd be drunk.
and call at least 6 fouls during the process.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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That's easier to do these days; in the early PC days you could quickly get too drunk to change floppies properly ... 
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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haha true true.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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this may break existing depth first tree traversal algorithms.
you've been warned.
Now all I need to do is find my fairy dust.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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When you edit a file, it doesn't look to see if the project has new code, and subsequently, doesn't prompt you to get latest for the project. This leads to inevitable "conflict/merge" process which is very problematic in its own right.
But that's okay, we have new icons and the ability to more easily theme VS2019, and that's vastly more important to devs.
(It only sucks during the week because that's when I have to use it.)
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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Iconic
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I cannot tell you how many times I have ran into this same issue. And it has been an issue as long as I can remember. Back to 2008 at least. PRobably before that.
To err is human to really mess up you need a computer
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i hate circular references, especially indirect circular references.
i had a circular reference issue in my predict sets computation which made it unable to compute left recursive grammars - they had to be prepped first to eliminate the recursion.
This was preventing me from doing LR parsing which not only allows left recursion, but is optimized for it and encourages it. However, it needs the same predict set computation that LL grammars do.
Since I couldn't handle left recursion in my implementation of the predict sets computation, I could not realistically do LR parsing.
Now I can. That's a whole new suite of modules for PCK. Heck yeah!
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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You do realize that you are making the chances of completing the article set more and more remote with each passing edit to the code?
Sounds like you are having fun though!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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well, I've got one section done
Pck/FA: A regular expression and finite state engine in C#[^]
So I am making headway there too, but I take your point.
Still, my primary goal with PCK is to be something like Standard Oil of the parser generator world. It consumes everything, even grammars meant for other parser generators.
And exports to other parser generators like YACC (and soon ANTLR)
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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xkcd: Unpopular Opinions[^]
Try it: I can't find anything I liked that got less than 55% (The Dressmaker (2016) - Rotten Tomatoes[^] - and even then it was 66% for the audience!)
I figured that "Last cab to Darwin" - a good "thinky" movie - would do it, but ... 89%! Deserved, but annoying score.
He's right - hating something popular is a heck of a lot easier than liking something hated by the masses.
Got any suggestion, people?
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Go to the soapbox - you probably will find one or two 
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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What 47%!? I loved that movie (best X-Men movie by far  )
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Nothing can beat First class
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson
Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
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Howard the Duck (1986) - Rotten Tomatoes[^]
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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"in your adult life, post-2000"...
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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Ah, missed that part 
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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What if your adult life started much earlier than that?
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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In that case the challenge may not be that hard...
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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