I asked for help about a year and a half ago about getting an internship. I was told I needed experience coding on my own. The language of experience wasn't very important because the main thing to learn was solving problems. These are the projects I worked on:

● Purchasing system, eCommerce - Golang, HTML, JavaScript, MySQL

● Selling system, eCommerce - PHP, JavaScript, HTML, JavaScript, MySQL

● 2D jumping and scrolling game with platforms - C++, SFML

● Guess number across network game - SignalR, C#

● 3D experience, made a terrain from triangles - OpenGL

● Bitmap enlarger - C++

● Asteroids - C++ / SFML

● Bitmap tile maker - C++

● Tonal study program with Graphical User Interface - C++, C++ API

● Quick sort - C++

I now find myself being lured into front-end development and of course games. I was told by my tutor that I am ready for an internship. Here is a link to the top three projects: https://github.com/Josheir​ . In the opinion of the reader, do you think I am ready too, and what type of programming for an internship would make the most sense for me?

Sincerely,

Joshua

How old are you ?

Disclaimer, this is my personal opinion.

“I now find myself being lured into front-end development and of course games”… What do you want to do? It's your life and you obviously have the passion so you need to find what you want. You have some front-end development experience as well as some low level development. My core passion is game development, but my path took a little different path (front-end / back-end web app development). However, I found that game development helped me immensely because I think in algorithms and I'm always writing optimized code. A lot would argue that early optimization is a waste and 95% of the time it is, but that is not always true either. When you're writing an app that must work in the cloud it's a different story. AWS, as an example, charges by not only the size, but how long it took to execute the given task. So optimization is key and game development helped shape my thought process for that. So you need to evaluate every situation / project differently. One thing about this career is it's not always linear, we have to bend, shape, and constantly learn.

“I was told by my tutor that I am ready for an internship”… Yes. Having real world experience is key. Everyone is so afraid to jump into the deep end, but how can you ever learn to swim unless you do? What do you have to lose?

“what type of programming for an internship would make the most sense for me?”… Nobody can answer that. Think again about what you want and focus on that.

I skimmed one file and have a couple suggestions:

1. Find a nice programming standard. Some companies have them defined and some do not. For those that do not, think about a) the other programmers that have to look at your code and b) yourself looking at it 1 year from now. Are you going to know what that particular code meant a year from now? Would your peers?
2. Also part of #1, structure your code. Dumping a lot of files in the root directory is not always the best. On larger projects you should have some kind of structure. Think about your computer… could you imagine if every file was in one big directory? Same methodology.
3. Try to make your code make sense and try to have no “magic numbers”… For instance, in the “original_jump.cpp” file you have “if (positionY >= SCREENHEIGHT - 76)”. What does 76 mean? 76 should be a constant so it makes sense to you and others (like mentioned in #2). For instance, “if (positionY >= SCREENHEIGHT - TASKBAR_HEIGHT)" as an example. The point is, “TASKBAR_HEIGHT” makes more sense than “76”.
4. Another example on #3 is “int answer = ….” and then “if (answer ==1) …" What is answer? Does that describe what that variable is about? The one in question called the function “character.isOnPlatform”, so wouldn't “bool isOnPlatform” or something make more sense? Why is it an int instead of a bool?
5. A personal preference I have is “why make a variable if it's just going to only used once”? Creating a variable is good for debugging purposes, but otherwise it just created “noise”.
6. Another example is https://github.com/Josheir/Project_Platform_Jump/blob/main/original_jump.cpp#L205,​ Why not just say, “return movesLeftInRightEndZoneToo(…)”?

So at the end of the day, it's just little things that you will learn with experience. I think your ready too and you will learn a lot as time passes. Stay positive and enjoy the journey.

I'm forty-eight, why do you ask?

So nice of you, AtomicWinter, thanks! ?

In my opinion you are way too old for intership

Josheir said:

I'm forty-eight, why do you ask?

Programmer71 said:

In my opinion you are way too old for intership

I'm afraid I have to agree that an internship is unlikely for a 48-year-old applicant. A job is more likely than an internship.

Not with that beginer level of experience, you wouldn't get much, learn c# and unity, probably you will end up coding those shitty mobile games for $500 at month

@Programmer71 Which games are those?

Every game you see for mobile phones are programmed in unity, aside that, if you want to have some kind of possibility at your age with a beginner experience, i really advice you to take some serious course , php, java, javascript and all web programming are in high demand in these days. But I predict , with the arrival of unreal engine 5 , a shitload of new startups , which will redefine the <insert genre here > game as we know, will raise and fall in a matter of less than one year, just catch the wave.