IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

My Jr level interview was some fun chat then, "Here, tell us what the problem is and why this page won't load the buttons"

I'm surprised at 7 years they're still gonna ask you academic questions

Not sure if this is the right place so let me know if not.

I did "Computer Games Technology" at University in the UK which was basic programming in Java, some sort of 3D animation GUI and C+/OpenGL for 3D graphics. It wasn't the best course/university, I had severe depression and instead spent my time on World of Warcraft (and flaming people here). I passed by just revising for the exams and carefully fitting projects to the specifications we were asked for, then doing a lot of googling and pasting in bad code.

10 years later I'm now a high school math teacher, which in the UK is 11-16 though some schools have up to 18. Another teacher put a website online which procedurally generated math questions on most topics which we started using, only for him to put it behind a paywall. Out of curiosity I looked at a youtube tutorial on web programming to see how he did it, since at University I never studied it due to doing 3D graphics instead.

Turns out that it's apparently really fucking easy to use HTML and anything more complicated is in Java which I was taught. So I've started working on my own teaching website making procedurally generated math questions to help with my teaching job, it's funny because procedural generation was what got me into programming in the first place (Civilisation and Diablo are procedurally generated). I'm really pleased with my results and I'm working on getting the code as clean as possible before copy/pasting it onto 100s of pages for each math skill.

I've got two areas I would appreciate some insight with and hopefully there are some web designers here:
1) How do I get started with web hosting and uploading my work? I'm worried about things not uploading right or running out of bandwidth.
2) How do I get started with setting up some good advertising, such as google ads?
Not looking for any tutorials, I know there'll be more youtube videos on this. Just some pointers and things to avoid since there are options for which companies to work with.

Edit, bah...long banter... sorry bros.

Keep up mkaing those binary trees- sys admin land is as crazy as you crazy programmers apparently.

Chris said:

1) How do I get started with web hosting and uploading my work? I'm worried about things not uploading right or running out of bandwidth.
2) How do I get started with setting up some good advertising, such as google ads?

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1. do you know or want to know linux? if so you can very easily get a webserver up on a vps for $5 a month.
2. dont bother unless you get thousands of hits but day but you want google adsense most likely.

ex-genj said:

1. do you know or want to know linux? if so you can very easily get a webserver up on a vps for $5 a month.
2. dont bother unless you get thousands of hits but day but you want google adsense most likely.

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This is where I'm a complete noob.

I've got a spare PC I could set something up on. How would that work? Wouldn't it be a burden on my home internet connection?

Lol no one runs servers out of their house its not 1998. Use digitalocean or w/e.

Tons of people run servers from home. I just wouldn't run one from home that I allowed a lot of people to connect to. If you just need good quality web hosting or a VPS check out dreamhost. If you want to be able scale a little better, I'd just jump straight to AWS.

Are you going to need a servlet engine for your Java stuff? That usually costs more money from a managed host so it might be worth just going to AWS and running your own tomcat/servlet shit straight from the get go.

Chris said:

1) How do I get started with web hosting and uploading my work? I'm worried about things not uploading right or running out of bandwidth.
2) How do I get started with setting up some good advertising, such as google ads?

Click to expand...

If you want to lear some linux, then setting up your own VPS is a great way to do that. However, if you just want to get your web site up and running, just get a cheap shared hosting account. You'll be able to just upload everything and have it work. And you're not going to run out of bandwidth hosting web pages with math problems.

Advertising is pretty terrible unless you have serious volume. Instead, make an ebook or something out of your problems that people can print and make their kids do for extra homework, then sell that, basically running ads for your own products. If you don't want to go through that much trouble, sign up to an affiliate program for a few products related to your site, and show affiliate ads. At least then, the ads will be relevant, you'll control them, and you'll actually make money if someone bites.

Control said:

If you want to lear some linux, then setting up your own VPS is a great way to do that. However, if you just want to get your web site up and running, just get a cheap shared hosting account. You'll be able to just upload everything and have it work. And you're not going to run out of bandwidth hosting web pages with math problems.

Advertising is pretty terrible unless you have serious volume. Instead, make an ebook or something out of your problems that people can print and make their kids do for extra homework, then sell that, basically running ads for your own products. If you don't want to go through that much trouble, sign up to an affiliate program for a few products related to your site, and show affiliate ads. At least then, the ads will be relevant, you'll control them, and you'll actually make money if someone bites.

Click to expand...

Thanks those are some great ideas, jusrt what I'm looking for.

I was wondering how much bandwidth hundreds of lines of html/javascript making text math questions would use up, so not much? I assume hosting pictures would usually be the main drain?

I was going to go the other way and have free eBook direct traffic to website (also have youtube videos teaching how to do the worksheets driving traffic) but the other way around could work since there's a few specific teaching resource websites you can sell things on easily. Problem there may be that people can make the ebooks themselves by printing the webpages, but convenience is a factor too .

alavaz said:

Tons of people run servers from home. I just wouldn't run one from home that I allowed a lot of people to connect to. If you just need good quality web hosting or a VPS check out dreamhost. If you want to be able scale a little better, I'd just jump straight to AWS.

Are you going to need a servlet engine for your Java stuff? That usually costs more money from a managed host so it might be worth just going to AWS and running your own tomcat/servlet shit straight from the get go.

Click to expand...

I don't know what a servlet engine is. All I know is that I'm including java files in my HTML and it works on the web browsers on my laptop. The java is just doing math operations, converting them to strings and then editing the content of paragraphs in the HTML or drawing SVG lines.

This is what one of the pages looks like, the numbers are all randomly generated and you click on a question to reveal the answer. It's designed to be projected onto an interactive whiteboard but also works on PC and should work on tablet/mobile.

Netbeans is running it's own little web server. You'll need to deploy that to a tomcat (or other servlet container) container before it will work on a server. Most shared hosting providers only give you php/perl/python so if you want java or .net you're paying extra. You'll probably pay less for AWS at first, but it may get more expensive later depending on your needs.


edit: you probably could rewrite this in python relatively easily. It would make it a bit easier to go public.

alavaz said:

Netbeans is running it's own little web server. You'll need to deploy that to a tomcat (or other servlet container) container before it will work on a server. Most shared hosting providers only give you php/perl/python so if you want java or .net you're paying extra. You'll probably pay less for AWS at first, but it may get more expensive later depending on your needs.


edit: you probably could rewrite this in python relatively easily. It would make it a bit easier to go public.

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I've put a lot of work in with javascript so I'll stick with that, but this is critical information I needed thank you. I had no idea I would need something special, I had a quick look at AWS - they have a lot of services :/

Good thing about this is that if it stays offline it's going to be really useful for my person use so it's not like I'm wasting my time. I put it on a memory stick and it worked on a work PC and my interactive whiteboard just fine without netbeans.

wait a minute is this JavaScript or Java?? There be a huuuuge difference.