From poker to coding

[Nick]

Hey guys, whats up!

My name is Nico, 28y from Vienna, Austria.

As the title says, I am an ex-poker pro. I have played professionally for 10 years after playing Yu-Gi-OH at a pro lvel from age 13-18,but as of a few weeks ago decided it was time to quit the game for good. In poker you have many different variations to play, be it different games that are poker, different formats like tournaments or cash games and then how many players are playing on a table (Heads Up - 1 vs 1, 6 max – 6 players, fullring – 9 players)
If you know 1 format you know 20-50% of any other format too, so changing formats is doable but you still need to build a new set off skills on top your current ones.
My main format was heads up. I like the competition, to outwork my opponents and by battling vs 1 1 I made good money but eventually heads up started to be less and less attractive due to many regulatory reasons in Austria. I wasn’t keen on moving country to pursue poker even more.
I travelled a lot in my early poker years but realized travelling is not what I am passionate about. Every time I travel outside Austria, I realize how much I love Vienna and why it is one of/the most liveable city in the world.

For the past few months, I tried switching formats but I just couldn’t get myself to study anymore, my passion that I had for the game was gone and the more negative sites started to drown on me more and more. The negative things mostly being that it’s a competition and you are competing against other people to make a living, if you don’t have passion for it anymore it becomes borderline impossible. Furthermore, you can never switch off from the game, after you finish your day, your head is still in the game and a tab with 20% occupancy is constantly running, making it hard to enjoy other things in life.
I worked very hard in poker to make it and 200h months were not rare, in the last months however I saw that there is more than poker in life and I decided to switch things up and build a life that I truly enjoy. I am currently moving flats to a smaller one since my current one was being paid by poker and it feels like I am starting life from scratch with a ton of experience. I made great friends along the way, had ups, downs and trips I would never want to miss and learned a ton for life.
However, now it’s to close this chapter.

My passions outside of poker lie in finances and investing. I love putting money to work, seeing it grow and just taking care of my personal finances.
I love competing and am training jiu jitsu for now 1.5 years, fighting competitions regularly.
Starting 6 months ago I went into music and learned to dj from a great teacher in Vienna to focus more on my creative site. I will have my first gig at the end of april which I am highly looking forward to.
Bringing it all together, I love improving, I love seeing myself grow as a person – I went to therapy weekly for a year and really enjoyed how I was able to resolve many personal issues from the past, now live a way more chill life and now keep going to therapy 1/month-, I love improving skills which is why I was able to make a good living in poker, I love to make others grow with me and get to the next level together.
I strongly believe that when something is a skill, I can learn it.

Why create a blog?

I decided to star a blog to document my journey of becoming a backend developer. I got the idea to jump into programming because my GF is doing frontend and we both think that due to the skills I crafted in poker -logic, problem solving- backend is a very good fit for me.
My experience in programming is as 0 as it could possible be. The only thing I ever did was to take pixeled matches from tinder and unpixel them to see who it is haha
Other than that I don’t even know what a backend programmer does, I cant type with 10 fingers, I know 0.
I started to learn with the google course on backend development a few days ago. I love the way they teach and really enjoy the course. The course stats with frontend, because in order to become a good backend developer I need to understand what frontend need, after tat there is a bit of UI and then backend starts.

What I learned so far:

• What is a server
• what is html, how to create body, header, lists and how to link in html.

I am going to update this blog with new skills I learned.


Appreciate your time reading this if you made it this far.
Excited to start something new and build my skill set!

- Nico (feel free to call me nick 😊 )

 

[Nick]

Today I finished the HTML and CSS part of the course.
I learned:
-how to create my first html site(header,body,links to other pages, pictures, DOM)

• how to style it (borders, colour)
• rules in CSS (Ids,create a css style sheet,box model, block vs inline)

tomorrow I will wrap up the section with the final assignment of "Styling a page" and then start the next section of the course
the next section will be about UI and react and then a compelte wrap up for all the topics above

 

[Nick]

Yesterday I revisted all the html and CSS components I learned so far.
I created a very simple webiste using headings paragraphs, a picture, a hyperlnk.
I also used different styling elements o create borders. set margins and define colours.

today I start to learn about Bootstrap and react before starting with the backend part

 

[The Hulk]

Welcome to Code Forum

 

[Nick]

Heyyy whats up!
thx a lot!

Unfortunately turned sick a few days.
still got study in.

the last things I studied were all python:

• functions
• scopes
• lists/turples/sets
• loops
• data structures

I tried an assignment today in which you had to create script in a coffeehouse when the user chooses 3/5 available items, calculate them together, add tax because USA and give new items a value.
I struggled a lot, mostly with getting data from a dictionary and assignin value to a new item.

Today and the enxt few days I will go through the aovementioned topics and practice them 1 by 1 by 1, then start to add 2 together, then 3 together etcetc until I can all use them together. I wanna get the reps in each of them.
Was the first bit of study frustration so far today in the excercise, but man other leanred python too, so can I.
Its also really fun for me since i was always into excel and python feels like a more automated excel

 

[noweare]

Yesterday I revisted all the html and CSS components I learned so far.
I created a very simple webiste using headings paragraphs, a picture, a hyperlnk.
I also used different styling elements o create borders. set margins and define colours.

today I start to learn about Bootstrap and react before starting with the backend part

Is your website public. If it is post a link so we all can take a look. Good luck in your journey. Just wondering why python and not javascript as html, css and javascript all work together.

 

[Nick]

Awesome that you stopped by @noweare !

The website was not public no, but thats actualyl a cool idea to post things here
The reason for python was that coursera basically has a course "professional back end developer" and for some reason they focus on python there. I talkes to coder friends and also did some research. Friends were suprised why python and not java. Research for job opportunies had similar results. I went through 50-ish job descrpitons, copy pasted them in a word cloud generator and one of the most saught after languages was java. Furthermore I found quite a lot of Junior positions for jaa but didnt find any for python. Since I wasnt in too deep yet with python I switched to java.
The backend coursera course was focusing a tiny bit on frontend in the beginning which I acutally enjoyed since I could see immediately what I created. The focused on frontend in the beginnning because they said as backend you nee to know what frontend needs, whcih also made sense to me.

I am also quite intersted in frontend, but so far only du to above reason. In general me and girlfriend belive i am way more suited for backend.

So started java a few days ago.
So far i learned and practised:

• key syntax
• comments in code
• literals
• data types
• variables
• printf

Had 2 very cool aha moments today
the 2 cool aha moments were that I realized "println" acutally means printline aka it only prints a line and that we use printf to write cleaner code
the 2nd one was due to an excercise. Basically I was introduced to Math.random and I had to change a variable to a random doube between 10 and 20. Couldnt figure out with what I learned so far and kind of frustrated went to the kitchen and went "F* it, what do they expect I multiply by 10 ?"
Got back to the desk, looked at the solutions and I was baffled that the solution was actually: math.random()*10+10.
That felt like a moment that I will be thinking back on in years to come because solving a problem like that is how I enjoy solving problems in real life and now I can basically put that kind of thinking into the real world. I honestly really enjoyed that moment.

Code I wrote today:

The excercise was to take the following and put it into a SVG that translated the text to graphics and manipulate the dimensions of the circle and adjust different parameters.
I had to declare avriables and later also insert the math.random

<svg height='400' width='1000'><circle cx='100' cy='100' r='50' /></svg>

In the end I wrote that code that outputs random dimensions for a circle and then generated it with the outcomes

public class Mainclass {
public static void main( String[] args ) {
int x=100;
int y=110;
double r = Math.random()*10+10;

System.out.printf(
"<svg height=\"100\" width=\"1000\">\n "
+ "<circle cx=\"%d\" cy=\"%d\" r=\"%s\" />\n</svg>\n%n",
x, y, r );
}
}

 

[noweare]

I don't know much about java, in fact I had to google it to see where it is used. Sounds like a general purpose language so you can use it to do a lot of things. I use C the most and some python. Trying to learn Html, Css and javascript to make nice looking front ends for my hardware projects. Good luck with your programming journey, sounds lke your very motivated. Take a lot of breaks and don't get frustrated as programming can be a hair pulling experience some times. : )

 

[Nick]

Cool, will later on also get mor einto python I guess for ai and data works
Where you from my friend, you studying or already a pro developer ?
So far we are progressing nicely and things make sense for me, however the invitable frustration will def kick in at one point as it is with learning. Its always highs where you feelon top of the world and lows where you think you undertsand nothing haha
Gotta enjoy the highs

The last few days I learned about:

• operators
• Bit operators
• Console inputs
• if funcionts

I was really ecited about console inputs because now I can give input instead of always getting output.
I also really like if fuctions.
After learnign those I immediately wanted to make a primitive chatbot, those that you find on websites as a virutal helper and are always useless
However I was just genuienly curious because they will probably work with if funtions as core method I guess.
Took a sheet of paper, outlined the ideas and decions tree and in about 2.5h was abe to bult it wihtout help which I was supe rproud of. It was by far the longest code I wrote and I did it all by myself except for { brackets where I jsut lost overview.
I wanted the bot to assign a random name to the user. I did that by letting it randomize a number and thhen assigning names deping on the outcomes with if fuctions.
Then I needed the bot to read userinputs and give answers based on specific key words the user used.
The hurdle I faced was that I need the bot to check the whole line instead of just the first word so I looked that up. It was suuuppper fun i gotta say and I lost time when coding it
Now the hurdle over the next weeks will be that I wanna build a super random site, like my profile or somethign like that and implement the bot on the site and make site public here. I have no idea so far how to do it and before I get into that speciif frontend part I wanna finish the basic syntax for java backend.but... I just wanna know

thats the code I wrote.
Today I am learning about how to shorten the if statetments so will probably clean the code up if I know them

public class myfirstChatBot {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        double NameNumber = Math.random()*10;
        String Name = ""; // es wird eine random zahl zwischen 1-10 ausgegeben und so wird der user agesprochen.
        if (NameNumber<=1) {Name = "Larry";}
        if (NameNumber >1 && NameNumber <=2) {Name = "Dave";}
        if (NameNumber >2 && NameNumber <=3 ) {Name = "George";}
        if (NameNumber >3 && NameNumber <=4) {Name = "Roger";}
        if (NameNumber >4 && NameNumber <=5) {Name = "Nick";}
        if (NameNumber >5 && NameNumber <=6) {Name = "Jenny";}
        if (NameNumber >6 && NameNumber <=7) {Name = "Sandra";}
        if (NameNumber >7 && NameNumber <=8) {Name = "Mia";}
        if (NameNumber >8 && NameNumber <=9) {Name = "Ella";}
        if (NameNumber >9 && NameNumber <=9.5) {Name = "Sophie";}
        if (NameNumber >9.5 && NameNumber <=10) {Name = "Karen";}  // es gibt eine % 5 chance das er karen heißt
          
    
        System.out.printf("hey whats up!?%nJust letting you know we are all friends here! %nSo,how can I help you " + Name + "?");

        String input1 = new java.util.Scanner(System.in).nextLine(); //response ohne keywort tree, branch 1. er checkt ob der erste user input die kewwörter enthält

        if (input1.contains("Poker")|| input1.contains("poker")) {
                System.out.println("Poker was a nice endeavour, now its time to move on and build a new career");}

        else if (input1.contains("BJJ")|| input1.contains("bjj")){
                System.out.println("Having fun, doing what I love, the smiling warrior will strike again!");}

        else if (input1.contains("Programming") || !input1.contains("programming")){
                System.out.println("Here in this project you can find my current skills!");}     
                
        else if (input1.contains("How are you")|| input1.contains("how are you")){
                System.out.printf("Maaaan its some damn nice weather out here in VS Code.%n Sometimes its raining stupidity though");}

        else if (input1.contains("When were you born")|| input1.contains("when were you born")){
                System.out.println("Me,the SuperMegaAwesomeCool Bot was born on the 13th of April 2023");}
            
        
        
        else {
            System.out.println("Sorry I didnt understand, please try again"); //er enthält sie nicht, will ncohmal einen input und die Stichwörter von obven sind immer noch nicht dabei
            ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
            String input2false = new java.util.Scanner(System.in).nextLine();

            
            if (input2false.contains("Poker")||input2false.contains("poker")) {
            System.out.println("Poker was a nice endeavour, now its time to move on and build a new career");}

            else if (input2false.contains("BJJ")|| input2false.contains("bjj")){
            System.out.println("Having fun, doing what I love, the SMiling warrior will strike again!");}

            else if (input2false.contains("Programming")||input2false.contains("programming")){
            System.out.println("Here in this project you can find my current skills!");}     
            
            else if (input2false.contains("How are you")||input2false.contains("how are you")){
            System.out.printf("Maaaan its some damn nice weather out here in VS Code.%n Sometimes its raining stupidity though");}

            else if (input2false.contains("When were you born")|| input2false.contains("when were you born")) {
            System.out.println("Me,the SuperMegaAwesomeCool Bot was born on the 13th of April 2023");}
        



             else
                System.out.println("Come on, talk english to me!");
                ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
                @SuppressWarnings("resource")
                String input3false = new java.util.Scanner(System.in).nextLine();

                if (input3false.contains("Poker")||input2false.contains("poker")) {//ich hatte davor überall else if genau wie oben und habs dann korrigiert
                    System.out.println("Poker was a nice endeavour, now its time to move on and build a new career");}
        
                    else if (input3false.contains("BJJ")|| input2false.contains("bjj")){
                    System.out.println("Having fun, doing what I love, the SMiling warrior will strike again!");}
        
                    else if (input3false.contains("Programming")||input2false.contains("programming")){
                    System.out.println("Here in this project you can find my current skills!");}     
                    
                    else if (input3false.contains("How are you")||input2false.contains("how are you")){
                    System.out.printf("Maaaan its some damn nice weather out here in VS Code.%n Sometimes its raining stupidity though");}
        
                    else if (input3false.contains("When were you born")|| input2false.contains("when were you born")) {
                    System.out.println("Me,the SuperMegaAwesomeCool Bot was born on the 13th of April 2023");}
          
                System.out.printf("You need assistance with everything Huh? How do you get through life? Try one of the following Words:%n -poker%n -bjj%n -programming%n -how are you%n -when were you born");
                ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
                String input4final = new java.util.Scanner(System.in).nextLine();

                
                if (input3false.contains("Poker")||input2false.contains("poker")) {//ich hatte davor überall else if genau wie oben und habs dann korrigiert
                    System.out.println("Poker was a nice endeavour, now its time to move on and build a new career");}
        
                    else if (input3false.contains("BJJ")|| input2false.contains("bjj")){
                    System.out.println("Having fun, doing what I love, the SMiling warrior will strike again!");}
        
                    else if (input3false.contains("Programming")||input2false.contains("programming")){
                    System.out.println("Here in this project you can find my current skills!");}     
                    
                    else if (input3false.contains("How are you")||input2false.contains("how are you")){
                    System.out.printf("Maaaan its some damn nice weather out here in VS Code.%n Sometimes its raining stupidity though");}
        
                    else if (input3false.contains("When were you born")|| input2false.contains("when were you born")) {
                    System.out.println("Me,the SuperMegaAwesomeCool Bot was born on the 13th of April 2023");}

                    else
                    System.out.println("Retreat to a mountain and rethink your actions");




                
              

                
                

            
            
             {
                
            }

    



      
        }
    }
}

 

[noweare]

Sounds like your making progress, already programming bots .... cool. I am segwaying into Django so I can practice my front end skills. To build front ends you need a server to test it with is my logic. I was making good progress on javascript but then when it came to fetch and asynch stuff (communication with a server) I need something to test against. I am doing this because I use microcontrollers that now have enough resources to connect to the web and act like a webserver. In this case the webserver is written in C rather than php or javascript (node.js). Good luck. I am from New Hampshire which is located in the United States.

 

[JavaJames]

Hi Nick. Are you looking for feedback on the code you are publishing?