Happy birthday!!

Perhaps you could try friend-finding apps such as Bumble BFF? You’re likely to find others there in a similar position to yourself. It also focuses on 1 on 1 which should be a little easier to manage with social anxiety.

Clubs are a good call. Look into societies at your university, find something that you’re interested in or think you could be interested in. Societies are social in a way that seminars and other course activities are not. Don’t worry if you don’t “click” with anyone immediately, keep attending and do your best to engage in conversations.

I also recommend seeking out a university counsellor. Most universities will have them and their advice can be valuable.

I program for a living and I think of it more as doing the interesting tasks all day, rather than the mundane and repetitive. Chat GPT and GitHub Copilot are great for getting something roughly right that you can tweak to work the way you want.

Best of luck, get well soon

Comments like this are why I like Lemmy, y’all are good people.

As a software developer I promise you that software development is very much not an exact science.

Programs are complex and there are so many different ways of achieving the same thing that all code has problems and gets a bit messy in places. You can test, but it’s not easy to ensure that everything works the way it should.

The best code you’re going to get will probably be in the space industry, but even that will have bugs. The best you can do is make the code robust even when bugs make things go wrong.

In many cases copilot will do just as well as a junior developer. It’s very good at repetitive tasks and filling gaps in your existing code.

This headline is sensationalized. Only the blood flow to the brain was isolated from the rest of the body, and the brain was not removed during the procedure (it was removed post-mortem to study how the procedure affected the brain).

The main purpose of the study was to separate blood flow to the brain from the rest of the body to make it easier to test the effect of drugs on the brain, without having the rest of the body’s response to the drugs interfere with the results.

Since the process is similar to the heart lung bypass which is already used on humans during heart surgery, this research may eventually lead to better heart lung bypass methods. The current methods can cause problems in the brain for a few reasons including differing blood flow, air and particles getting into the blood, and the body’s inflammation response.

Source: PhD in this area.