You still have to immortalize the cell line. NIH3T3 cells were immortalized by culture conditions. Others are immortalized with viral treatment. The end result is the cell line is similar, but not the sams as the source. Take a primary tumor out of a patient and culture it and it will slowly die over a few days or weeks.
I think a good way to handle that is to ask them what they want to end up building. Want to make Android apps? Java. Want to make the front end part of web pages? HTML, CSS, JS with some preprocessors and libraries. Want to work on the back end? Ruby or Javascript/Node or one of the others.
Treehouse's learning tracks (https://teamtreehouse.com/tracks) are useful for a beginner to look through to get a general idea of what that would involve.
Every now and then spend a whole weekend (or just a week of after-work hours) learning the new hot X to the point you can honestly say you know something about it (it doesn't take that much for an experienced coder to learn a new thing) and bam, you have another buzzword for your CV. Select as needed to get through HR filters.
Still not the same as working experience. And honestly I'd rather get payed for tinkering around.
Resume Driven Development is where it's at. Docker? Our "modular monolith" works just fine, but with Microservices we can now rewrite everything in Rust and Elixir. Lock ourselves with yet another build / automation tool just to remove trailing whitespace. Add RethinkDB and Redis and that new graph database now that we're at it. Let's pray for updated NixOS binaries!
For toy projects I'll stick to OpenBSD, Perl and ancient tools like make, awk or even rc.
I've noticed the same thing as a contractor. I only seem to get hired if I am one of the first few bidders. Otherwise there is a slim chance I will get noticed.
"Push-pull-rebase bottleneck: if you rebase and push and someone beats you to it, you have to pull, rebase, and try again. This gets worse as commit rate increases and people do needless legwork. Facebook has moved to server-side rebasing on push to mostly eliminate this pain point. (This is part of a still-experimental feature in Mercurial, which should hopefully lose its experimental flag soon.)"
What if there are merge conflicts?
I don't know about Mercurial, but in Git there are tons of cases where rebasing cannot happen automatically.
The process is optimistic. You submit your commit and it runs async in the background with success or failure sent to you via email and SMS. You still run into merge conflicts, especially if you are touching a frequently tweaked bit of core, but not having to babysit the process is almost always a win.
I have always wondered why nearly every time I enter a convenience store in Japan sure enough there are 2-5 people standing there reading magazines for seemingly a really long time. I always wondered why don't they just buy it and at read it at home?
