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(Inspirational) From young cuber to adult entrepreneur

hippofluff

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I have been inactive for a while but I wanted to make a thread to inform current cubers of the wonders out there once college and life begins (I will try my best to keep this short).

I cubed everyday from 2007-2012, I loved it. I had a natural drive to excel at whatever I did, which was for me cubing, uni cycling, and any other "nerdy" hobby.

Once I got to college I began to enter the world of programming, I quickly grew to love it as I found the same thrill in solving programming problems and building software, as I did with solving rubik's cube puzzles.

To my surprise programming is much more then just coding, I began to collaborate with friends and I developed a thirst to develop apps and make software that affects millions of people.

***To keep this on track, I am trying to connect the line between my cubing passion, and my programming passion. This is because my programming passion is not much different then I felt towards cubing. HOWEVER, engineering software makes money and professional connections while cubing is less likely to support a family or pay you a sustainable salary (in a perfect world....)

So if any young cubers had the attention span to get to this line (I wouldn't have 5 years ago) I would advise you to check out programming, see what's out there. I LOVE hanging out and coding with cubers because we think differently! Think of what it would be like to work at Google, or a start up, or for yourself!

To end this and for some possible motivation I will leave a personal site I developed for myself here using what I learned: http://jakeruth.com/ , I believe everyone here has to ability to change the world with their fingers and I'm not talking about flipping the edges on the cube, I'm talking about hitting the keyboard.

I love to talk about this stuff and get people inspired to be makers, leave a comment or question and I will get back to you as soon as I can :)
 

Seanliu

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I love programming, and would love to be an entrepreneur in the future, although my programming skills are less than basic...
 

hippofluff

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Thats totally fine! I know entrepreneurs on campus with no programming experience that are looking for programmers to help launch their ideas. There are a plethora of online resources to help you learn how to program such as w3 schools, codacademy, stackoverflow, plus millions of pages of documentation for any language/framework out there. Is there any specific type of programming you are looking to get into? (web programming, back-end programming, low-level programming) For starters it is great to know at least the basics of python, java, or c. HTML, CSS, and Javascript are also very fun if you want to start making websites and web games. (That was in no way an exhaustive list and may even be opinionated so keep an open mind)
 

Dene

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As far as I'm aware, there are a lot of cubers that do programming. I could name 20 off the top of my head, and they're only the ones I know well. In fact, I bet if we did a survey, we'd find programming, or something IT related, would be by far and away the most popular occupation amongst the speedcubing population.


While we're at it, why don't you work on a nice cellphone based app for scramble checking? That's something we could really do with right now.
 

hippofluff

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I can totally relate to you that many people I know through cubing end up becoming coders

While we're at it, why don't you work on a nice cellphone based app for scramble checking? That's something we could really do with right now.

That's funny you bring it up because I was just reading some posts on how Felix had a 6 second-ish OH solve that was apparently mis-scrambled (found out because of a video taken, after results were recorded). I am assuming the main purpose for this app would be to ensure that the cube was scrambled correctly at competitions? Definitely sounds useful. I am imagining an app that scans the cube almost like a QR code scanner and just inspects that the colors match a specific scramble? After saying that, it would make sense for this app to also hold the scramble and such.
 

Dene

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This is something that has been brought up in the past as well.

Yes there are a lot of complications with such a program, but if you put your heart to it, it would be great to get it started. I would look into it myself, but I don't know anything about programming.
 

hippofluff

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This is something that has been brought up in the past as well.

Yes there are a lot of complications with such a program, but if you put your heart to it, it would be great to get it started. I would look into it myself, but I don't know anything about programming.

Story of everyone's life is that they are busy haha but I will look into it to see what it entails. No promise on the time frame of this though....
 

Tyson

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I can totally relate to you that many people I know through cubing end up becoming coders



That's funny you bring it up because I was just reading some posts on how Felix had a 6 second-ish OH solve that was apparently mis-scrambled (found out because of a video taken, after results were recorded). I am assuming the main purpose for this app would be to ensure that the cube was scrambled correctly at competitions? Definitely sounds useful. I am imagining an app that scans the cube almost like a QR code scanner and just inspects that the colors match a specific scramble? After saying that, it would make sense for this app to also hold the scramble and such.

Operationally, how would this work? Do you have a dedicated person on staff whose job it is to check scrambles? And if that is the case, would this app make it faster than this staff member doing this process manually?

Or is the idea that you just have something automatically running, that scans a side of each cube as it goes by, and since the app would know which scrambles are allowed for the round, it would be able to give a thumbs up or thumbs down?

How do you solve the problem with someone getting solve three again on solve four?
 

Jason Green

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I thought this was an interesting post, and I relate to it from an opposite perspective. I've been a software developer and now manager for 18 years, and am just recently getting into cubing as a hobby. I guess that makes me a real odd ball because it appears only kids do it. :) I actually found this post by Googling "adult cuber."

I learned how to solve the cube about 6 years ago using Lars Petrus' method, and got to about 2 minutes and never practiced much. I really didn't know or care about speed cubing, it was more of a party trick for me! But a couple months back a teenager I know told me he does it in about 1:30 and it sparked my interest. I've been learning the CFOP method since then, and average around 55 seconds right now but still practicing (just have to finish memorizing G-Perms and I'll have 1 look PLL down).

Anyway, I agree with what you said. Cubing seems to satisfy the same parts of my brain that programming does. I like to look for patterns, and try to solve problems quickly, and the cube is just enjoyable to improve on!

Good luck! Maybe I can hire you and you can give me some cubing lessons! hahaha
 

Rastinha

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I thought this was an interesting post, and I relate to it from an opposite perspective. I've been a software developer and now manager for 18 years, and am just recently getting into cubing as a hobby. I guess that makes me a real odd ball because it appears only kids do it. :) I actually found this post by Googling "adult cuber."

I learned how to solve the cube about 6 years ago using Lars Petrus' method, and got to about 2 minutes and never practiced much. I really didn't know or care about speed cubing, it was more of a party trick for me! But a couple months back a teenager I know told me he does it in about 1:30 and it sparked my interest. I've been learning the CFOP method since then, and average around 55 seconds right now but still practicing (just have to finish memorizing G-Perms and I'll have 1 look PLL down).

Anyway, I agree with what you said. Cubing seems to satisfy the same parts of my brain that programming does. I like to look for patterns, and try to solve problems quickly, and the cube is just enjoyable to improve on!

Good luck! Maybe I can hire you and you can give me some cubing lessons! hahaha

I found this post the exact same way, haha :). I'm a high school Computer Science teacher who came from a web development background and I just got into cubing because I have always planned on learning to solve one. I love programming too, and am really digging the cube so far. I have been at it a week and learned CFOP (2 look OLL and PLL for now), haven't had much down time to practice though, but am averaging around 2 mins and get the lucky odd ball around 1:08. Should be under a minute in a week or so as my finger tricks are mucky as and I'm still pausing to remember algorithms.

They certainly seem to appeal to similar people, I actually got into it because some of the computer science kids I teach had been carrying them around solving them pretty quickly so I got inspired :)
 

Jason Green

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I found this post the exact same way, haha :). I'm a high school Computer Science teacher who came from a web development background and I just got into cubing because I have always planned on learning to solve one. I love programming too, and am really digging the cube so far. I have been at it a week and learned CFOP (2 look OLL and PLL for now), haven't had much down time to practice though, but am averaging around 2 mins and get the lucky odd ball around 1:08. Should be under a minute in a week or so as my finger tricks are mucky as and I'm still pausing to remember algorithms.

They certainly seem to appeal to similar people, I actually got into it because some of the computer science kids I teach had been carrying them around solving them pretty quickly so I got inspired :)
Hey Rastinha, here is a thread some of us oldies are hanging out in, I just joined it. :)
https://www.speedsolving.com/forum/showthread.php?t=37405
 
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