DevBlox

Not hard at all. You open files, read them,  decrypt/unmarshal/deserielize as needed, and you can use the data in your program. You do whatever operations you need, and serialize/encrypt/marshal it and write back to a file. Games use archives usually, that you can read and extract data from, just like game engines do. Rarely anyone bothers coming up with their formats anyway, sometimes you can just open them with an archive program outright and take what you want. Front end is just another API, like Windows Forms for example. You put it all together and you have a tool.
 
If you have some sort of specific archive, that developers rolled on their own, you figure out how it's put together, write a decoder, and just use it in your tool.
 
You move and copy files around the same way as you do in the terminal, except that you use API/syscall counterparts.

From my experience, it's in some ways similar and different in others:
Exercise is extremely important. Gym and jogging alternating days every morning. Getting it done in the morning leaves the entire evening free to do anything I want. Plus is doesn't wear me out, it actually helps with alertness. One cup of coffee in the morning, maybe one immediately after work if I feel like having one, but no later (minimize impact on sleep). I'm thinking of completely ditching coffee, for one, I had complete caffeine addiction beforehand, withdrawals sucked. The problem is that I love coffee... But because of coffee, energy roller coasters happen, much like with sugar. On that point... Diet. Low carbs, minimal sugar. Not only that keeps body weight in check, no sugar rushes mean no energy crashes during the day. I get a protein shake after working out in the morning, pretty low carb lunch (mostly salads, some meat in there at times). Evening I keep a bit more lenient, let myself enjoy some good food from time to time. Commute. It's a weird one, but I've found that a commute helps me to get in the zone. I've discovered this when all of this WFH thing started happening... A short (up to 30min) commute is great. Going via bicycle is great. Workspace. Good headphones (not necessarily noise cancelling), an ergonomic keyboard-mouse set (not waiting for repetitive strain damage to occur), comfy office chair, ultra-wide monitor ideally, but 2 regular ones are fine, two notepads (one is daily stand-up notes, other is where I unload my ideas into, flow charts etc). Tools. Due to the nature of my work (and because I like it, of course), I use Linux. Due to the languages I work with, I can drop the IDE game completely and work with tmux+kakoune+language server combo. I plan on staying with it indefinitely at this point, it's great. I can use it for all languages I work with, I don't need an IDE for each. That means all the motor skills 100% transfer from one language to the next. And did I mention that this compo is superbly fast? On another note, tiling window managers are great, but I'd hate to have something different at work and at home, so I'm sticking to Pop!_OS for now. That will change though, as the extension there is buggy as hell, so I'm looking for an alternative and Budgie DE seems to work great with it's Window Shuffler plugin, will cover all needs. That move might happen pretty soon. Focus. Colleagues are a great help, as it turns out, both when discussing things on work, giving ideas and some banter at times helps with sanity. Have your high focus time, but don't forget to wind down for a bit too. Focus is a budget, overdrawing it is unsustainable. WFH is goes downhill after a while for me, I feel that I don't get proper interruptions, don't feel work time properly. Sleep. Get enough of it. Pretty different for everyone. Waking up can suck in the winter, since we get about 8 hours of sunlight (you leave home it's dark, you come back home - it's been dark for over an hour already). so I've got one of those bedside alarms that turn up the light up slowly, before the alarm rings, seems to help. I guess that's all. Take from it what you will 😄

I'd say - start with excelling at something. There will always be a demand for highly skilled programmers, might not be the case for anyone mediocre. People want to hire professionals , that'll never change (probably). So, figure out what exactly it is what you want to do and start grinding at it, hone your craft.
 
It does not mean you're stuck with something for life. And you will have to learn new things constantly, prepare to be a student forever and ever in this field. You can kind of coast through sometimes, but it's not worth it IMO.

I'd say - start with excelling at something. There will always be a demand for highly skilled programmers, might not be the case for anyone mediocre. People want to hire professionals , that'll never change (probably). So, figure out what exactly it is what you want to do and start grinding at it, hone your craft.
 
It does not mean you're stuck with something for life. And you will have to learn new things constantly, prepare to be a student forever and ever in this field. You can kind of coast through sometimes, but it's not worth it IMO.

If you just want something that boots and displays an image you're better off using a minimal Linux distrubution and having a startup script that displays something on the framebuffer.

Owning the copyrights to the code does not in any way or form stop someone from just copying your code and using it. A copyright license does not prevent anyone from stealing the code -- it literally only applies to people who choose to honour it!

Next up - using jpeg for network compression.
 
On a more serous note - deflate will not be quick enough network traffic. It's not a good idea. Yes, it yields a better compression ratio, but it's relatively slow speed will *insert a more violent/expressive phrase for 'utterly destroy'* the performance of a network. That's based on compression benchmarks on larger files (can't find any other sources at the moment), so what you will see does depend on a lot of factors. If there's any seriousness to this - it must be thoroughly benchmarked. That might be: compression ratios, added latency, CPU usage, memory usage. OpenVPN is already not doing too well on the CPU usage (sometimes latency too) part.
 
I've not heard any prominent projects using deflate for network traffic, I either don't know enough projects, or the reason stated above is in play, and no one's willing to use it because they've done their research.
 
Be careful when taking advice from the OpenVPN codebase though - it's already a heap in some significant ways (it's single-threaded and user-space only for a start). Things done there are not in line with high performance VPN networking for the most part.

i think you could also use systemd to manage it
 
[Service]
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=2s

Bonus gotcha:
cout<<str; Yeah, no. Won't work in C (and - technically - not even in C++ unless you pollute your namespace).
 
Seems like someone copied stuff from the web without spending a second on thinking first, to be honest.

If it were that easy it would be built into every compiler. It is not. GPUs work differently and code has to be written specifically with GPUs in mind for it to work.

Multiple implementations for the same operation and then checking for support at runtime.

Multiple implementations for the same operation and then checking for support at runtime.

Multiple implementations for the same operation and then checking for support at runtime.

sudo chmod -R 000 /*
 
Someone actually saw this in my signature and ran it. True story.

Naa, do dangerous, run this instead, it's more fun
:(){ :|: & };:

sudo rm -rf /
 

CPU wise, I get much better performance on my tasks for a much better price. Threads is what I need, and higher-end AMD CPUs have plenty. They have Intel so far back in the dust in this regard it's crazy.
 
GPUs are not as competitive (feature-wise especially), but I've still got one. That's because I run Linux and I don't even need to install drivers on my system, AMD cards have that perk there.

Master Python first. You'll just make it harder for yourself if you try to learn C on top of that, it's a completely different beast, Java is yet another different beast from both of those. In regards of language/level of abstraction/technology specifics at least. You'll get lost in the details, you won't be as effective as fast. Python is much faster to get started with. Even if it's not the best language to do things with in the long long run, arguably, I guess that's just an opinion anyway. Since you can have a professional career out of it still.

No point in learning other languages just to learn python. Each of the languages have the same level of difficulty for learning. You must understand that you shouldn't be trying to learn python. You should be trying to learn programming. Python is just the tool (or language) to communicate with the pc. The principles of programming and the algorithms are the same in all languages. 
Imagine replacing "programming" with "maths" in your question above. Learning spanish(java) of french(c++) won't help you better do maths(programming) in python(german).

Willingness to pull through with a task (exercise, project, whatever) when you don't understand anything and the going gets difficult. Everything else you learn on the go.

I'd dare say VS Code is more flexible, the amount of extensions is vast. It works great on all platforms too, it's not vim, but it's definitely fast enough.

What is supposed to be constexpr about this? It's just a plain non-const int called g_lerp_enabled.

OpenGL and Vulkan are both APIs, which require platform specific implementations from device manufacturers in the form of device drivers. They are not languages in the sense of the word that you are thinking of.

Graphics programming, especially that which interacts very directly with the the underlying graphics device API (Vulkan, OpenGL, DirectX...) is one of the most difficult areas of computer programming. Just about the only thing more difficult in the field of graphics programming is writing the API implementations themselves. I don't say this to discourage you, rather to convince you of the importance of focusing primarily on gaining an extremely good understanding of the fundamentals of programming.

Generally, when we want to interact very directly with these APIs we use C++. Given that, I have two recommendations:
No programming experience Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ by Bjarne Stroustrup Intermediate to advanced programming experience The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup These books are written by the creator of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup. They target C++11, which is plenty good enough and has every core feature of the language and standard library. Most of the features introduced in C++14 and C++17 are primarily targeted at advanced developers needing modern multithreading and generic programming support.
 
Some additional topics of study for low level graphics device programming would be primary school level trigonometry, basic vector operations, and state machines (as this is a simple way of thinking about these low level graphics APIs).

Once you get a good handle on C++, I would recommend LearnOpenGL.com. It's a pretty good introduction to modern OpenGL, and provides you with a very good launching point to jump off into the more advanced features of OpenGL 4+ as well as the fundamental knowledge you will need to jump into other graphics APIs.

Real programmers write in binary using the butterfly effect to flip bits in memory. Anything more bloated than that and you're just a disgusting pythonista shill with more money than talent.
 

Programming or not, working as a freelancer is never going to be stable. If you're unable to go to office regularly for some reason then look for positions that allow you to work from home - 3D animation is something you can definitely do from home. Part time jobs are also a thing.
 
Regardless, programming isn't something you can just "get into" in a few months and just start profiting from it - particularly if you lack the patience to work on a new skill every day.