Yesterday, in a meeting with project stakeholders and a dev was demoing his software when an un-handled exception occurred, causing the app to crash.

Dev: “Oh..that’s weird. Doesn’t do that on my machine. Better look at the log”
- Dev looks at the log and sees the exception was a divide by zero error.
Dev: “Ohhh…yea…the average price calculation, it’s a bug in the database.”
<I burst out laughing>
Me: “That’s funny.”
<Dev manager was not laughing>
DevMgr: “What’s funny about bugs in the database?”
Me: “Divide by zero exceptions are not an indication of a data error, it’s a bug in the code.”
Dev: “Uhh…how so? The price factor is zero, which comes from a table, so that’s a bug in the database”
Me: “Jim, will you have sales with a price factor of zero?”
StakeholderJim: “Yea, for add-on items that we’re not putting on sale. Hats, gloves, things like that.”
Dev: “Steve, did anyone tell you the factor could be zero?”
DBA-Steve: “Uh...no…just that the value couldn’t be null. You guys can put whatever you want.”
DevMgr: “So, how will you fix this bug?”
DBA-Steve: “Bug? …oh…um…I guess I could default the value to 1.”
Dev: “What if the user types in a zero? Can you switch it to a 1?”
Me: “Or you check the factor value before you try to divide. That will fix the exception and Steve won’t have to do anything.”
<awkward couple of seconds of silence>
DevMgr: “Lets wrap this up. Steve, go ahead and make the necessary database changes to make sure the factor is never zero.”
StakeholderJim: “That doesn’t sound right. Add-on items should never have a factor. A value of 1 could screw up the average.”
Dev: “Don’t worry, we’ll know the difference.”
<everyone seems happy and leaves the meeting>

I completely lost any sort of brain power to say anything after Dev said that. All the little voices kept saying were ‘WTF? WTF just happened? No really…W T F just happened!?’ over and over. I still have no idea on how to articulate to anyone with any sort of sense about what happened. Thanks DevRant for letting me rant.

Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

PM: You know that screen that pops up at the start of the app asking for permission to access health data?

Me: Yeah the iOS HealthKit permission screen. What about it?

PM: Can you take that out. I don't think people are going to agree to it. I want people to use the app.

Me: Well we can't do that, apple says if we want to use HealthKit we have to ask for permission. We shouldn't be touching that data without permission anyway.

PM: Oh no permission is fine I get that, but is it not implied by downloading the app, its clearly a health app. I really don't want people to download it and then uninstall it because they don't like this.

Me: Not really, not everyone will know what data is needed, some of it might be sensitive to them.

PM: Nah I don't buy into that. I asked 5 of my friends on the golf course at the weekend and 3 of them said they wouldn't agree to it, thats 60% of our user base, we can't have that.

Me: ... ok, well I don't agree that your 5 friends is a fair sample to judge the whole world by, either way we have no choice.

Pm: No this isn't going to fly, can we not build our own HealthKit that doesn't have this kind of permission screen? Maybe we could start our own, and invite our partners to use it?

Me: ... no

Pm: why not? We'll have legal draw up something we put in the terms and conditions.

Me: ... it will take months to build for all the different types of devices we have, if they even let us get access to them, and then we will have a different standard to everyone else.

Pm: ... no your not seeing the big picture, i'll run the idea up the ladder.

**It was approved up the ladder, and subsequently cancelled when they realised the scale of the work involved which is both a "thank god" and a "wtf" moment**

Recipe for a Great Programmer:

Ingredients:
-Books for a computer science curriculum from a top university
-Computer
-Headphones
-Internet
-Stress ball
-Pillow
-Lighter fluid
-Food

Directions:

1. Cover computer science books with lighter fluid
2. Light books on fire
3. Use flames to cook an energy-rich meal for the thousands of hours ahead
4. Pick an IDE
5. Choose a project beyond current capabilities. Good ways to push boundaries:
- Unfamiliar domain (e.g. large scale data processing, UI programming, high performance computing, games)
- Exotic programming language
- Larger in scope than any project before
6. Shut up about your IDE
7. Attempt to build
8. Stop procrastinating on Hacker News
9. Re-attempt to build
10. Squeeze stress ball and scream into pillow as necessary to keep sanity
When stuck:
- Paste stack traces into Google
- Find appropriate mailing list to get guidance
- Realize that real learning happens when you are stuck, uncomfortable, and/or frustrated
- Seek out books, classes, or other resources AFTER you have a good understanding of your deficiencies
11. Repeat #4 to #10 for at least 10 years
12. Results guaranteed! (to the same extent static types guarantee bug-free programs)

source: nathanmarz.com

Seven months ago:
===============
Project Manager: - "Guys, we need to make this brand new ProjectX, here are the specs. What do you think?"

Bored Old Lead: - "I was going to resign this week but you've convinced me, this is a challenge, I never worked with this stack, I'm staying! I'll gladly play with this framework I never used before, it seems to work with this libA I can use here and this libB that I can use here! Such fun!"

Project Manager: - "Awesome! I'm counting on you!"

Six months ago:
====================
Cprn: - "So this part you asked me to implement is tons of work due to the way you're using libA. I really don't think we need it here. We could use a more common approach."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I already rewrote parts of libB to work with libA, we're keeping it. Just do what's needed."

Cprn: - "Really? Oh, I see. It solves this one issue I'm having at least. Did you push the changes upstream?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, nobody uses it like that, people don't need it."

Cprn: - "Wait... What? Then why did you even *think* about using those two libs together? It makes no sense."

Bored Old Lead: - "Come on, it's a challenge! Read it! Understand it! It'll make you a better coder!"

Four months ago:
==============
Cprn: - "That version of the framework you used is loosing support next month. We really should update."

Bored Old Lead: - "Yeah, we can't. I changed some core framework mechanics and the patches won't work with the new version. I'd have to rewrite these."

Cprn: - "Please do?"

Bored Old Lead: - "Nah, it's a waste of time! We're not updating!"

Three months ago:
===============
Bored Old Lead: - "The code you committed doesn't pass the tests."

Cprn: - "I just run it on my working copy and everything passes."

Bored Old Lead: - "Doesn't work on mine."

Cprn: - "Let me take a look... Ah! Here you go! You've misused these two options in the framework config for your dev environment."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I had to hack them like that to work with libB."

Cprn: - "But the new framework version already brings everything we need from libB. We could just update and drop it."

Bored Old Lead: - "No! Can't update, remember?"

Last Friday:
=========
Bored Old Lead: - "You need to rewrite these tests. They work really slow. Two hours to pass all."

Cprn: - "What..? How come? I just run them on revision from this morning and all passed in a minute."

Bored Old Lead: - "Pull the changes and try again. I changed few input dataset objects and then copied results from error messages to assertions to make the tests pass and now it takes two hours. I've narrowed it to those weird tests here."

Cprn: - "Yeah, all of those use ORM. Maybe it's something with the model?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, all is fine with the model. I was just there rewriting the way framework maps data types to accommodate for my new type that's really just an enum but I made it into a special custom object that needs special custom handling in the ORM. I haven't noticed any issues."

Cprn: - "What!? This makes *zero* sense! You're rewriting vendor code and expect everything to just work!? You're using libs that aren't designed to work together in production code because you wanted a challenge!?? And when everything blows up you're blaming my test code that you're feeding with incorrect dataset!??? See you on Monday, I'm going home! *door slam*"

Today:
=====
Project Manager: - "Cprn, Bored Old Lead left on Friday. He said he can't work with you. You're responsible for Project X now."

It's maddening how few people working with the internet don't know anything about the protocols that make it work. Web work, especially, I spend far too much time explaining how status codes, methods, content-types etc work, how they're used and basic fundamental shit about how to do the job of someone building internet applications and consumable services.

The following has played out at more than one company:

App: "Hey api, I need some data"
API: "200 (plain text response message, content-type application/json, 'internal server error')"
App: *blows the fuck up

*msg service team*

Me: "Getting a 200 with a plaintext response containing an internal server exception"
Team: "Yeah, what's the problem?"
Me: "...200 means success, the message suggests 500. Either way, it should be one of the error codes. We use the status code to determine how the application processes the request. What do the logs say?"
Team: "Log says that the user wasn't signed in. Can you not read the response message and make a decision?"
Me: "That status for that is 401. And no, that would require us to know every message you have verbatim, in this case, it doesn't even deserialize and causes an exception because it's not actually json."
Team: "Why 401?"
Me: "It's the code for unauthorized. It tells us to redirect the user to the sign in experience"
Team: "We can't authorize until the user signs in"
Me: *angermatopoeia* "Just, trust me. If a user isn't logged in, return 401, if they don't have permissions you send 403"
Team: *googles SO* "Internet says we can use 500"
Me: "That's server error, it says something blew up with an unhandled exception on your end. You've already established it was an auth issue in the logs."
Team: "But there's an error, why doesn't that work?"
Me: "It's generic. It's like me messaging you and saying, "your service is broken". It doesn't give us any insight into what went wrong or *how* we should attempt to troubleshoot the error or where it occurred. You already know what's wrong, so just tell me with the status code."
Team: "But it's ok, right, 500? It's an error?"
Me: "It puts all the troubleshooting responsibility on your consumer to investigate the error at every level. A precise error code could potentially prevent us from bothering you at all."
Team: "How so?"
Me: "Send 401, we know that it's a login issue, 403, something is wrong with the request, 404 we're hitting an endpoint that doesn't exist, 503 we know that the service can't be reached for some reason, 504 means the service exists, but timed out at the gateway or service. In the worst case we're able to triage who needs to be involved to solve the issue, make sense?"
Team: "Oh, sounds cool, so how do we do that?"
Me: "That's down to your technology, your team will need to implement it. Most frameworks handle it out of the box for many cases."
Team: "Ah, ok. We'll send a 500, that sound easiest"
Me: *..l.. -__- ..l..* "Ok, let's get into the other 5 problems with this situation..."

Moral of the story: If this is you: learn the protocol you're utilizing, provide metadata, and stop treating your customers like shit.

IT Manager: What kind if attachment did you send me in that email?

Me: A .zip?

IT Manager: ...?

Me: A zip file? Zipped Folder?

IT Manger: ...?

Me: Umm... the data file you needed has to be sent in a zip folder because 6 different file types combine to make it? Just download the .zip and extract?

IT Manager: I don't know how to extract the files?

Me: ...

Brother of my friend came to me and asked me to teach him C as it was most important lesson in high school CS. I agreed and started with data types, conditional statements, loops and others that were mostly exam oriented. He was doing good. Then I thought of teaching him a life lesson and introduced him to pointers(questions about pointers are very rare in exams). As soon as I started the pointers, things got pretty bored and he went off topic and started talking about a girl he has crush on and told he wanted to know when her birthday was so that he could gift her something to be ahead of the crowd trying to impress her. I thought to help him out, afterall he's like my younger brother and told him I can help. Result of his previous exam were out then, providing symbol number on Examination Board's website would do the trick because it would return full data of students result which had birthday in it. I modified my previous script to fetch data of his school's result and pass the data to a file. They're together since last few months. He reminds me time to time that my code is what got them together.

It wasn't my curiosity that introduced me to programming. Actually, it was my mother.

It was about six years ago, when I'd told her I'd like to make video-games, like all kids do. She didn't just nod and go about her way. She found a free course that taught programming to kids my age and immediately enrolled me. Looking back, it was surely the best thing she'd done for me, because it gave me a purpose and a future to look forward to.

The course was interesting. We learned the basics of C++, then moved on to harder topics like algorithms and data types. But more and more, I was beginning to feel left behind. Like I didn't belong there. It didn't help that I only programmed on the course, with no practice back home.

I felt scared of the future. Thought I didn't have what it takes to become a programmer. I might have broken the last straw when I started playing truant and went to McDonald's to pass the time. Because every time I did go to the course, I felt stupid and anxious. So I simply skipped.

Time passed. I got more depressed, became more antisocial, my self-esteem took a nosedive. And when it comes to depression, people always seek an escape path.

I got my escape in fiction. Started reading books, tried writing stories, and it got to the point where I asked my mother if I could become a writer and not a programmer.

And guess what? She said, "Do what brings you happiness. This is your life."

It's funny, that such a silly line stopped and got me to think. Turned out, I didn't program for fun, for myself or for my career. I'd done it for my parents, for their expectations and I was scared that in failing, I'd become a loser in their eyes.

I dropped out of the programming course. Not because it sucked, but because I wasn't going there for myself, but for my parents. But I didn't quit programming. No, I watched countless tutorials, youtube videos, browsed StackOverflow, read some books, coded every day, and now I can say without hesitation, that I love programming. I'm hooked. And I don't want to stop.

If you've read this so far, I'm sorry for my rambling. I will now leave you with only one tip: If you decided to do something, do it for yourself. Forget about parents, expectations, career, future, time or money and do it only because you want to. Because nothing else matters. Only your happiness.

I had to open the desktop app to write this because I could never write a rant this long on the app.

This will be a well-informed rebuttal to the "arrays start at 1 in Lua" complaint. If you have ever said or thought that, I guarantee you will learn a lot from this rant and probably enjoy it quite a bit as well.

Just a tiny bit of background information on me: I have a very intimate understanding of Lua and its c API. I have used this language for years and love it dearly.

[START RANT]

"arrays start at 1 in Lua" is factually incorrect because Lua does not have arrays. From their documentation, section 11.1 ("Arrays"), "We implement arrays in Lua simply by indexing tables with integers."

From chapter 2 of the Lua docs, we know there are only 8 types of data in Lua: nil, boolean, number, string, userdata, function, thread, and table

The only unfamiliar thing here might be userdata. "A userdatum offers a raw memory area with no predefined operations in Lua" (section 26.1). Essentially, it's for the API to interact with Lua scripts. The point is, this isn't a fancy term for array.

The misinformation comes from the table type. Let's first explore, at a low level, what an array is. An array, in programming, is a collection of data items all in a line in memory (The OS may not actually put them in a line, but they act as if they are). In most syntaxes, you access an array element similar to:

array[index]

Let's look at c, so we have some solid reference. "array" would be the name of the array, but what it really does is keep track of the starting location in memory of the array. Memory in computers acts like a number. In a very basic sense, the first sector of your RAM is memory location (referred to as an address) 0. "array" would be, for example, address 543745. This is where your data starts. Arrays can only be made up of one type, this is so that each element in that array is EXACTLY the same size. So, this is how indexing an array works. If you know where your array starts, and you know how large each element is, you can find the 6th element by starting at the start of they array and adding 6 times the size of the data in that array.

Tables are incredibly different. The elements of a table are NOT in a line in memory; they're all over the place depending on when you created them (and a lot of other things). Therefore, an array-style index is useless, because you cannot apply the above formula. In the case of a table, you need to perform a lookup: search through all of the elements in the table to find the right one. In Lua, you can do:

a = {1, 5, 9};
a["hello_world"] = "whatever";

a is a table with the length of 4 (the 4th element is "hello_world" with value "whatever"), but a[4] is nil because even though there are 4 items in the table, it looks for something "named" 4, not the 4th element of the table.

This is the difference between indexing and lookups. But you may say,

"Algo! If I do this:

a = {"first", "second", "third"};
print(a[1]);

...then "first" appears in my console!"

Yes, that's correct, in terms of computer science. Lua, because it is a nice language, makes keys in tables optional by automatically giving them an integer value key. This starts at 1. Why? Lets look at that formula for arrays again:

Given array "arr", size of data type "sz", and index "i", find the desired element ("el"):

el = arr + (sz * i)

This NEEDS to start at 0 and not 1 because otherwise, "sz" would always be added to the start address of the array and the first element would ALWAYS be skipped. But in tables, this is not the case, because tables do not have a defined data type size, and this formula is never used. This is why actual arrays are incredibly performant no matter the size, and the larger a table gets, the slower it is.

That felt good to get off my chest. Yes, Lua could start the auto-key at 0, but that might confuse people into thinking tables are arrays... well, I guess there's no avoiding that either way.

Do you know what I love about Oracle data types?

Nothing.

Series of events between me (Mi) and dude in office (DIO).

Instance 1
DIO: There is not psql installed on staging.
Mi: Install it.
DIO: YUM is not working.
Mi: *tries yum it works* It is
DIO: Oh. Didn't work earlier.
Mi: *blank* Make sure you install 9.6
DIO: Cannot find psql
Mi: *types psql, it is already installed*
DIO: Oh, didn't work earlier.

Instance 2
DIO: Made this change to the API, the endpoint is not returning the right value
Mi: *restarts server, shit starts working*
DIO: I am pretty sure I did that, don't know what happened.

Instance 3
DIO: Cannot alter role to give login to this db user.
MI: *runs alter role db_user with login* works
DIO: Don't know why it wasn't working before.

Instance 4
DIO: I have been stuck on this test for the past 1 day, cannot get the API to return the right data while the Rest Endpoint works fine.
Mi: You are hitting the wrong endpoint in the test.
DIO: Oh, I put an extra 's'
Mi: BTW you are testing Spring-Boot with that test and nothing else.
DIO: Yes but what if Spring Boot has a bug?
Mi: ok.

Working on a database priorly designed and maintained by some private agency.

The fuck I'm dealing with!

Boolean values stored as 'TRUE'/'FALSE'. It's varchar, my dudes.

There are no FK relations. Just the values of IDs in a column.

There are no indexes, all on just the PKs, nothing else. Nothing.

Null, what's that? I'm dealing with 'N/A', my dudes.

Unique key, what's that? The table which stores users has all the fields nullable. Email is not unique ( even though that's the required behaviour).

ALL the numeric values are stored as varchar. Varchar, my dudes. Varchar. '1', '1.1'

And finally, the good ole, 1 table to rule them all. Normalisation, fuck that.

And what's the root cause of all this? My PM used to hand them Excel sheets she maintains on her local system. FTW. I don't have a enough explanations.

Me: Bro look, I have learnt so many things from the past couple of days.
-Introduction
-Data Types
-Variables
-Arrays
-Operators
-Control Statements
-Classes
-Methods
-Inheritance
-Packages
-Interfaces
-Exception Handing
-Multi-threaded Programming
-Enumerations
-Autoboxing
-Annotations
-Generics

My senior: Congrats on finishing up the basics
Me: Those were just basics???...///!!! 😜

There are 10 types of developers in this world - those who can extrapolate from incomplete data

Screw the German Telekom!
I recently got a new home without internet so naturally, I went to an isp, Telekom. I went there a few weeks ago and was pleasantly surprised by the personal and the general competence. He told me they would send a technician to check my cable. So I thought great and went home. 1 A week passes, nobody shows up. I then went back to the shop and asked(someone different). He basically told me that such a service must be specifically asked for and a contract has to be signed. I then told
him his colleague told me no such thing, and that the technician should have checked up on my connection last week. He excuses him self and I signed the thingy.

Now you would imagine that this would have worked.
but.
NOOOoooo.

A week came and went and I got pissed. So I went back to the shop the guy from the first try was there. I Asked what happened, he types in his Computer. and. and. and. nothing. Apparently, the previous guy forgot, fucking forgot, to enter my request to their bloody System.
Now I asked if I can Just become a customer.
Guy: Sure, what speed is available in your region?
Me: I don't know...
Guy: Let me check
/Type/ /Type/
Guy: I can't see your speed the technician should have checked.
Me: Um, so, can he check?
Guy: Clearly you don't know what you want
Me:???
Guy:*leaves table*

(shorten but you get the Idea)

At this point, I really wanted to change isp so I went to Vodafone.

Lady comes up to me asks me a bunch of stuff and I explain I would want to change my phone, internet, tv, mobile and my friends mobile(I lost a bet once ^~^) to Vodafone.

What happened next I can't really explain, but she talked to her boss and "cheated" (how she calls it) on Vodafone and got me an AMAZING deal it is cheaper than Telekoms has waay more mobile data, faster Internet and I got a new phone :D.

And guess what she could fucking check, fucking check from here Computer my max internet speed.

I can only hope that the lady got a big fat commission for what she has done.

Managements definition of an MVP:

- Integrate our backend and database with a similar-ish, older internal system built on a different tech stack and different rules.
- Merge the functionality and delete the old one.
- Modify our system to accept 2 types of logged in users.
- Have 2 versions of our API that return different values.
- Update our mobile app to render different data based on which user is logged in.
- Onboard the old system users to this new system.

My definition of an MVP:

- Tell the store we are taking over, that they have to print their labels from our tool, and onboard the users to our app.

SWIFT!!!!! I understand that you're a relatively new language so I forgave you for all of your wrong doings..BUT WHAT THE FINGER IS THIS SHIT YOU HAVE IMPLEMENTED IN YOUR STRING DATATYPE? WHY THE FUCK CAN'T YOU FORM A CHARACTER FROM AN EMPTY STRING? AND WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK HAPPENED TO THE SUBSCRIPT OPERATOR? WHY NOT JUST ADOPT THE "\0" AS OTHER LANGUAGES? But NOOOOO...We're Apple we'll not adopt it..I WAS UNDER THE IMPRESSION THAT STUPIDITY AND LUCK OF INNOVATION RAN IN THE IPHONE TEAM BUT APPARENTLY ITS EVERYWHERE..Its annoying because the String datatype is one of the most common and basic data types so the last thing you expect is this shit..APPLE........SERIOUSLY AND SINCERELY FUCK OFF

Am I the only one who, when working with dynamically typed languages, never uses dynamic features? Like, I never change a variable type, and make sure functions will only return one data type?
I just think dynamic types leads to so many bugs

Felt so awkward today. Bare in mind I am still a junior. I was on a pull request reviewing session on a repo I use. I was being super super pedantic with variable names, data types etc as the people who wrote it are brand new to the company. I then realise I had just reviewed the companies lead developers PR to a different repo. Every time someone comments on a PR on this repo all developers in the company get an email notification. I sat there litrually sweating, bright red with the words 'oh ****' on an infinite loop in my head, staring at the screen waiting to see what was to happen.

Thankfully he was ok with the comments. But now people keep calling me the lead developer (teasing) fml I hate anxiaty

What's wrong with this code?

std::pair<float, float> foo() { return { 0, 0 }; }

"Nothing," would you say.

That's because you're normal.

But the most stupid C++ compiler ever (M$ VS)
issues an ERROR that converting 0 to float incurs possible "loss of data". So you have to write "0.f".

BTW, "0." is a double, so you really have to write "0.f". Or "static_cast<float>(0)" if you like ugly, impossible-to-read code.

I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.

Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')

What's this erogant world?

Someone asked a question in Stack Exchange, he put his design of a school management database and asked for suggestions.
Well, there are many things to improve, relations and data types etc..

BUT, he got 10 very long answers about why every student has exactly a father and a mother, why not 2 mothers and 3 fathers and all some off topic talks that could be said in 1 line..
Like what the... ok we know you're gay but answer the question without being an attention greedy

I'm not much a fan of JavaScript. In fact, I am not very fond of any dynamic language, but JavaScript is one of my least favorites.

But this isn't about that. I use NodeJS for all of my web serving. Why would I do that? Am I a masochist? Yes.

But this isn't about that. I use NodeJS because having the same language on client and server side is something that web has never really seen before, not in this scale. Something I really really love with NodeJS is socket connections. There's no JSON parsing, no annoying conversion of data types. You can get network data and use it AS IS. If you transmit over socket using JSON, as soon as that data arrives on the server, it is available to use. It gets me so hard.

JavaScript is built to be single-threaded, and this is rooted deep into the language. NodeJS knows this isn't gonna work. And while there's still no way to multi-thread, they still try their best and allow certain operations (Usually IO) to run async as if you were using ajax.

With modern versions of the language, the server and client side can share scripts! With the inclusion of the import keyword, for the first time I have ever seen, client and server can use the same fucking code. That is mindblowing.

Syntax is still fluffy and data types are still mushy but the ability to use the same language on both sides is respectable. Can't wait for WebASM to go mainstream and open this opportunity up to more languages!

I once agreed to maintain and develop an application used in a different section of the school to keep inventory and make sure everything is where it is supposed to be.

At first there was enthusiasm, together with 2 of my classmates we agreed and git clone-d the .NET application that now graduated students built and maintained for the past few years. What could go wrong right?!

It became clear that the original students that worked on it followed an older curriculum, meaning they still got taught .NET instead of the core variant that we get now, not only that but it also seemed that they either did not fully grasp the Clean/Onion architecture or didn't get it in class since there were infrastructure components in the 'Domain' project of the solution. Think of 2 DBContexts in the domain model, yep.

One of us bailed in the first week, the other one and I felt bad for the people using the app so we went on and tried to work on the first bugs that were described in a document. One of these bugs was 'whenever I filter on something in the list, everybody gets to see that filter on their screen instead of only me'. Woah that's weird! Let's see how they put that together!

Oh god, they are using a _static_ variable to store filters, no wonder that it doesn't work properly. Ever heard of sessions?!

Second bug: Sometimes people can't create an account when we sign them up from the admin panel. Alright that is weird, let's figure that one out! Wait a second it seems to work in development? What's this about.

Oh wait I can't create an account on production either? Oh that's weird, wait a second... Why do I have to put my e-mail in a form that was sent to me through e-mail? Why is my address not filled in already? OOH, if someone types in the wrong e-mail address (which is easy since our school has 4 variants of the same f*cking e-mail address) it won't work since it can't recognize the user! Brilliant! Remove e-mail input box and make a token/queryparam determine the user account.

Ah that seems good, it's a mess but it seems a tiny bit better now, great! We're making progress and some sweet buck.

Next bug, trillions of 50x errors on random pages, that's a weird one.

Hm everything works in development, that's odd. Is the production data corrupted?

DID I MENTION that in order to get into the system in development we have to load in a f*cking production database backup ON OUR DEVELOPMENT MACHINE and then ask one of the users' password to login to it and create an account for ourselves? Seeding? What's that, right?!

Anyway, back to bug fixing. I e-mail the the people responsible for the app and get a production admin account, oh I also can't ssh into it because of policies so I have to do everything over e-mail and figure out what's causing the errors. I somehow also wonder if they have any kind of virtualization in place, giving students a VM to do that stuff in doesn't seem so weird does it ? Even with school policies?

Oh btw, 'deploying' means sending a .zip file to a guy in another building and telling him how to configure it, apparently this resulted in a missing folder that the application needed to work and couldn't make on its own. This after 2 weeks of e-mailing back and forth.

After 3 months i quit out of despair and sadness, and due to the fact that I just couldn't do it anymore. I separated everything into logical subprojects and let the last guy handle it, he was OK with that and understood why I left.

Luckily, around that time I already had an actual job at a software development company :)

ah yes, i'm a VERY kinky Java dev

my favorite NSFW act is naming my java variables shorter than their data types

So, learning Java at the moment.

Thoughts so far:

“This IDE is going to make me so lazy! It can write getters, setters, AND toString() for me?!”

“Oh my god, angle brackets. It’s like someone with a love of nesting was made fun of for wasting space and retaliated by crafting a language that inlined nesting data types.”

“Whoa, this would safeguard what kind of input went into the function SO MUCH.”

“DOES THIS MAKE IT EASIER TO WRITE UNIT TESTS?! *excited*

Everyone and their dog is making a game, so why can't I?
1. open world (check)

2. taking inspiration from metro and fallout (check)

3. on a map roughly the size of the u.s. (check)

So I thought what I'd do is pretend to be one of those deaf mutes. While also pretending to be a programmer. Sometimes you make believe
so hard that it comes true apparently.

For the main map I thought I'd automate laying down the base map before hand tweaking it. It's been a bit of a slog. Roughly 1 pixel per mile. (okay, 1973 by 1067). The u.s. is 3.1 million miles, this would work out to 2.1 million miles instead. Eh.

Wrote the script to filter out all the ocean pixels, based on the elevation map, and output the difference. Still had to edit around the shoreline but it sped things up a lot. Just attached the elevation map, because the actual one is an ugly cluster of death magenta to represent the ocean.

Consequence of filtering is, the shoreline is messy and not entirely representative of the u.s.

The preprocessing step also added a lot of in-land 'lakes' that don't exist in some areas, like death valley. Already expected that.

But the plus side is I now have map layers for both elevation and ecology biomes. Aligning them close enough so that the heightmap wasn't displaced, and didn't cut off the shoreline in the ecology layer (at export), was a royal pain, and as super finicky. But thankfully thats done.

Next step is to go through the ecology map, copy each key color, and write down the biome id, courtesy of the 2017 ecoregions project.

From there, I write down the primary landscape features (water, plants, trees, terrain roughness, etc), anything easy to convey.
Main thing I'm interested in is tree types, because those, as tiles, convey a lot more information about the hex terrain than anything else.

Once the biomes are marked, and the tree types are written, the next step is to assign a tile to each tree type, and each density level of mountains (flat, hills, mountains, snowcapped peaks, etc).
The reference ids, colors, and numbers on the map will simplify the process.

After that, I'll write an exporter with python, and dump to csv or another format.

Next steps are laying out the instances in the level editor, that'll act as the tiles in question.
Theres a few naive approaches:

Spawn all the relevant instances at startup, and load the corresponding tiles.

Or setup chunks of instances, enough to cover the camera, and a buffer surrounding the camera. As the camera moves, reconfigure the instances to match the streamed in tile data.

Instances here make sense, because if theres any simulation going on (and I'd like there to be), they can detect in event code, when they are in the invisible buffer around the camera but not yet visible, and be activated by the camera, or deactive themselves after leaving the camera and buffer's area.

The alternative is to let a global controller stream the data in, as a series of tile IDs, corresponding to the various tile sprites, and code global interaction like tile picking into a single event, which seems unwieldy and not at all manageable. I can see it turning into a giant switch case already.

So instances it is.

Actually, if I do 16^2 pixel chunks, it only works out to 124x68 chunks in all. A few thousand, mostly inactive chunks is pretty trivial, and simplifies spawning and serializing/deserializing.

All of this doesn't account for
* putting lakes back in that aren't present

* lots of islands and parts of shores that would typically have bays and parts that jut out, need reworked.

* great lakes need refinement and corrections

* elevation key map too blocky. Need a higher resolution one while reducing color count
This can be solved by introducing some noise into the elevations, varying say, within one standard div.

* mountains will still require refinement to individual state geography. Thats for later on

* shoreline is too smooth, and needs to be less straight-line and less blocky. less corners.

* rivers need added, not just large ones but smaller ones too

* available tree assets need to be matched, as best and fully as possible, to types of trees represented in biome data, so that even if I don't have an exact match, I can still place *something* thats native or looks close enough to what you would expect in a given biome.
Ponderosa pines vs white pines for example.

This also doesn't account for 1. major and minor roads, 2. artificial and natural attractions, 3. other major features people in any given state are familiar with. 4. named places, 5. infrastructure, 6. cities and buildings and towns.

Also I'm pretty sure I cut off part of florida.
Woops, sorry everglades.

Guess I'll just make it a death-zone from nuclear fallout.

Take that gators!

Correct me if I'm wrong, Python is absolutely built on:
--Data encapsulation
--Dependency Hell
-- ambiguous object types
-- You BETTER hope that package has a function to turn that object into another HOPEFULLY SUPPORTED object (basically even more encapsulation)
--Oops this package doesn't support this other package, so you need to do another 20 lines of conversion
I really don't understand what makes Python so likable?? Am I just being stupid, or does exceptions like "This does not support multiclass" the worst fucking exception i've ever seen? Or "Shape (None,1) not compatible with (None,7)"? I get it that you can fix it if you've seen this issues multiple 100s of times, but for the first time, how the fuck am I supposed to debug this?

So last week I really fucked up

I had this new implementation that was supposedly to be integrating smoothly into the rest of the service. It depended on a serialized model made by a data scientist. I test it in local, in QA environment: no problem.

So, Friday, 4pm, I decide to deploy to production. I check once from the app: the service throw an error. Panic attack, my chief is at my desk, we triy to understand what went wrong. I make calls with cUrls: no problem. Everything seems fine. I recheck from the app again: no problem.
We dedice to let it in prod, as the feature work. I go get some beers with the guys, to celebrate the deploy.

Fast-forward the next morning, 11am, my phone ring: it's a colleague of my chief. "Please check Slack, a client is trying to use the feature, it's broken"

FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!

Panic attack again. I go to the computer, check the errors: two types of errors. One I can fix, the other from a missing package on the machine that the data guy used.

Needless to say, I had a fairly good weekend.

Lessons learned:
- make sure Dev, QA and Prod are exactly the same (use Ansible or Container)
- never deploy on a Friday afternoon if you don't have a quick way to revert

I want to explain to people like ostream (aka aviophille) why JS is a crap language. Because they apparently don't know (lol).

First I want to say that JS is fine for small things like gluing some parts togeter. Like, you know, the exact thing it was intended for when it was invented: scripting.

So why is it bad as a programming language for whole apps or projects?

No type checks (dynamic typing). This is typical for scripting languages and not neccesarily bad for such a language but it's certainly bad for a programming language.

"truthy" everything. It's bad for readability and it's dangerous because you can accidentaly make unwanted behavior.

The existence of == and ===. The rule for many real life JS projects is to always use === to be more safe.
In general: The correct thing should be the default thing. JS violates that.

Automatic semicolon insertion can cause funny surprises.
If semicolons aren't truly optional, then they should not be allowed to be omitted.

No enums. Do I need to say more?

No generics (of course, lol).

Fucked up implicit type conversions that violate the principle of least surprise (you know those from all the memes).

No integer data types (only floating point). BigInt obviously doesn't count.

No value types and no real concept for immutability. "Const" doesn't count because it only makes the reference immutale (see lack of value types). "Freeze" doesn't count since it's a runtime enforcement and therefore pretty useless.

No algebraic types. That one can be forgiven though, because it's only common in the most modern languages.

The need for null AND undefined.

No concept of non-nullability (values that can not be null).

JS embraces the "fail silently" approach, which means that many bugs remain unnoticed and will be a PITA to find and debug.

Some of the problems can and have been adressed with TypeScript, but most of them are unfixable because it would break backward compatibility.
So JS is truly rotten at the core and can not be fixed in principle.

That doesn't mean that I also hate JS devs. I pity your poor souls for having to deal with this abomination of a language.

It's likely that I fogot to mention many other problems with JS, so feel free to extend the list in the comments :)

Marry Christmas!

Spent the last month creating a really scalable chat application, with fast front end, all kinds of neat functions such as polls, and a really efficient database structure in Apache Cassandra.. Everything is built to use NoSQL, and even the front-end is using all kinds of features to speed up itself... Now, guess what... The company I'm doing an internship decided that everything needs to be done in MariaDB, and I can basically remove 1/3 of my program, event the front end will get a huge purge of code, and as much as I explained that MariaDB IS NOT FUCKING USABLE FOR A CHAT APPLICATION, and when there are many messages, the access times will get realllllyyy sloow, and that the whole structure there currently is based on NoSQL... Now I can remove all the clustering, custom data types, and bucketing of messages... And store FUCKING JSON IN 'TEXT' FIELDS IN A STUPID SQL DATABASE. FUCK ME

Today I had a problem with a JS framework. The only person who was available who could help me was the one I avoid, because he always knows everything better.
Well, after I asked if he had time for me, he sits next to me and I started to explain.
After looking around, he started blaming my backend code.
(I belong to the kind of dev that tries to write small and simple code. But I also often use the more complex features of the languages.) He suddenly started accusing everyday things in the backend like inheriting a class or using objects and basic data types together as parameters of a method (WTF???) Hell, all I could say at that moment was that I had a problem with this JS framework and not with the backend that worked well. He probably tried for over an hour to find the bug in the backend and just wouldn't listen, after that he gave up. I wonder what this bitch has learned over the years. Can it really be that he forgot the basics of a programming language? Or has the fool never worked with an inheritance before? I think he's an incapable piece of shit, he hasn't even patched my reported vulnerability in his project in the last half year, which allows to inject own code onto the server.
Because of such fucking morons I get a headache when I think about it. How can it be that he's got a higher degree and earns about 50% more. I should leave this company!

The process of making my paging MIDI player has ground to a halt IMMEDIATELY:

Format 1 MIDIs.

There are 3 MIDI types: Format 0, 1, and 2.

Format 0 is two chunks long. One track chunk and the header chunk. Can be played with literally one chunk_load() call in my player.

Format 2 is (n+1) chunks long, with n being defined in the header chunk (which makes up the +1.) Can be played with one chunk_load() call per chunk in my player.

Format 1... is (n+1) chunks long, same as Format 2, but instead of being played one chunk at a time in sequence, it requires you play all chunks

AT THE SAME FUCKING TIME.

65534 maximum chunks (first track chunk is global tempo events and has no notes), maximum notes per chunk of ((FFFFFFFFh byte max chunk data area length)/3 = 1,431,655,763d)/2 (as Note On and Note Off have to be done for every note for it to be a valid note, and each eats 3 bytes) = 715,827,881 notes (truncated from 715,827,881.5), 715,827,881 * 65534 (max number of tracks with notes) = a grand total of 46,911,064,353,454 absolute maximum notes. At 6 bytes per (valid) note, disregarding track headers and footers, that's 281,466,386,120,724 bytes of memory at absolute minimum, or 255.992 TERABYTES of note data alone.

All potentially having to be played

ALL

AT

ONCE.

This wouldn't be so bad I thought at the start... I wasn't planning on supporting them.

Except...

>= 90% of MIDIs are Format 1.

Yup. The one format seemingly deliberately built not to be paged of the three is BY FAR the most common, even in cases where Format 0 would be a better fit.

Guess this is why no other player pages out MIDIs: the files are most commonly built specifically to disallow it.

Format 1 and 2 differ in the following way: Format 1's chunks all have to hit the piano keys, so to speak, all at once. Format 2's chunks hit one-by-one, even though it can have the same staggering number of notes as Format 1. One is built for short, detailed MIDIs, one for long, sparse ones.

No one seems to be making long ones.

In "Sprint Planning", the team is supposed to come up with stories, break those down into tasks, estimate those tasks as a team, then let devs choose what tasks they want to work on based on the stories pulled into that particular sprint.

Instead, our manager creates the stories. He assigns the stories to each developer and then has that developer announce his theoretical tasks (without any research on feature's or project's requirements!) in front of the entire team. So, when I say, "I think it will take me 6 hours to implement this feature", he says, "6 hours? I think it will take 3." and then types the estimate as 3. I have so much rage when that happens. Then we continue to sit in the room for 2.5 hours where we go through this long data entry mess of him typing out tasks and second guessing estimates. There is no team deliberation or collaboration, its whatever the manager says.

While there are many issues I take with this approach, my pet peeve would be the second guessing of the estimates. It would make sense for teams members to second guess estimates as long as they are the same teammates who have the ability and possibility to take on the tasks themselves.

But I disagree with a manager seconding guessing an implementation feature that "I" definitely have to do alone, and they do not possess the immediate knowledge to implement it themselves.

I don't get it.
I tried Kotlin on Android just for fun, and it doesn't support binary data handling, not even unsigned types until the newest version. Java suffers from the same disease.
How does one parse and process binary data streams on such a high end system? Not everything is highlevel XML or JSON today.

And it's not only an Android issue.
Python has some support for binary data, and it's powerful, but not comfortable.
I tried Ruby, Groovy, TCL, Perl and Lua, and only Lua let's you access data directly without unnecessary overhead.
C# is also akward when it comes to data types less than the processer register width.

How hard can it be to access and manipulate data in its natural and purest form?
Why do the so called modern programming language ignore this simple aspect that is needed on an everyday basis?

So I've created this account specifically for this rant. I usually just browse anonymously.

I've recently been hired in a big company that is one of the biggest Microsoft users in the world and my essentially revolves on making it easier for our collaborators to work with SharePoint (and other ms software)

Never in my life have I hit that much of a roadblock. So for the past week I've been trying to integrate what Ms calls webparts. And to modify the default webparts Ms provides you need to their properties (or Metadata). Except here's the big problem these are NOT documented anywhere (unless I failed to find it, if you do know where it is documented please HMU), so I've found myself trying to reverse engineer the js scripts that are served with SharePoint to figure out what the webpart properties are called and what type of data they are! I've been going through endless github repos using the CSOM nuget package (it's the library everyone uses to interact with SharePoint) and I finally found out about this other library called PnP which is a wrapper around CSOM that makes it easier to use. That wrapper has a way for me to load existing page and look at the properties of existing webparts. So here I thought it was the end of my suffering and I could finally get an idea of what it should be. Turns out this method doesn't work because one of the dependencies it has has had breaking changes and they still updated it even though it breaks their code! So for the past two days I've been trying random combinations of key values with different data types and json serialization methods.

Oh and yeah I've also looked at all the http calls via the chrome network tab, the metadata is not served as an individual file but is computed by Ms servers when they're serving you their html files.

So uh yeah run from CSOM if you can..

ah this fucking sucks my boss, who is also the guy developing back end for our mobile app which im developing, isnt working on the back end makes me guess the fucking json strings that hes going to send and buils the front end, then later changes the fucking json structure completely and expects my app to work without any problems, how do you teach these fucking php developers the importance and significance of data types and data structures

what the fuck is up with devs who always send screenshots of code and/or log files? In Slack, which has great functionality for formatting text snippets in a variety of languages and data types?! screenshots of code are really a pet peeve lately. You can't copy the text or click on any urls or do *anything* with a fucking screenshot. so dumb.

As I already said on devrant, I'm a freelance web developer and I also often sell my services for teaching, loving that. Currently I'm teaching PHP with 30 students and it's going very well.

But yesterday, I received an offer for giving another course next month, this time on HTML and CSS, for a company I don't know yet. Almost every line of this email is wrong, outdated by 20 years, or just basically meaningless...

So I thought I could do my best to translate this as close as possible to the original, preserving the wrong formulations too, just for you devranters fellas.

"Hello,

I have an offer for a 2 days course for 5 people (level 1+ and/or 2), on HTML5 and CSS3. Below, the program :

1. XHTML AND CSS2 INTRODUCTION

Advantages and benefits of change

Understanding compatibility for different versions of browsers

HTML, XHTML, CSS edition tools : presentation of the different tools

The CSS language : different types of selectors : class of selector, identifier of selector, contextual selectors, grouped selectors

Blocks of text, boxes of text

The CSS1, CSSP, CSS2 properties

Relative and absolute measures units

2. LAYOUT TECHNIQUES

Full CSS, XHTML websites demo

Positioning with the position property, positioning with the float property

Columns creation

Layout for forms

Layout for data tables

Layout for menus

3. INTRODUCTION TO SVG (SCALABLE VECTOR GRAPHICS)

Role and importance of SVG

Using SVG on client side : basic shapes

SVG structure of document, tags examples

Using CSS styles with SVG

Different integration methods for SVG in a XHTML document

4. OPTIMISATION OF JAVASCRIPT CODE

Introduction to DOM and Javascript

Access to document objects : different access techniques, using this keyword, create elements dynamically

Positioning elements with the help of Javascript : positionning elements relatively to the mouse, move elements

Show/hide elements for creating hierarchical menus

Code optimisation techniques : using objects, objects litterals, loops optimisation

Can you please give me your availability ?"

Seriously...

CSS-fucking-1 ! Is it a course for dinosaurs ?

...And if only my rant was just about the program...

It's totally impossible to cover all these subjects in only 2 days with people of different levels and experience.

The guy exactly said to me : "don't worry about the program, it's an old text but they agreed to it anyway. They just want to learn HTML and CSS, some of them already know it but want to learn more, and the others are total beginers.".

And here is the meaning for the "(level 1+ and/or 2)" part in the email.

So... Surprizingly, I accepted the offer, but asked for at least a 3rd day. I'm waiting for their answer, but I'll do it anyway, adapting the course content to the actual students knowledge. I need the money, after all.

Wish me luck...

It's just sad that these formation companies are selling bullshit to clients that just want to learn something useful. It's too often like that, they sell shitty/useless programs and we have to catch up in real time with students that don't understand why they don't learn what was told to them.

Testers in my team have been told like 1000 times to follow the style guides that we all follow. That's not that big a deal. The big deal is that they were put on this project without having any mathematics background when the project is all about geometric stuff. So after me as a developer having to put so many hours to explain to them why the tests are not covering the requirements or why the tests are red because they are initializing the data completely wrong, I ask them pretty please to do the checks for the coding style and I have already been 4 hours reviewing code because not only I have to go through the maths and really obscure testing code to ensure that the tests are correct, but every line I have to write at least 4 or 5 style corrections. And some are not even about the code being clean, but about using wrong namespaces or not sticking to the internal data types. For fuck shake, this is embedded software and has to obey to certain security standards...

Working on an Android app for a client who has a dev team that is developing a web app in with ember js / rails. These folks are "in charge" of the endpoints our app needs to function. Now as a native developer, I'm not a hater of a web apps way of doing things but with this particular app their dev teams seems to think that all programming languages can parse json as dynamically as javascript...

Exhibit A:

- Sample Endpoint Documentation
* GetImportantInfo
* Params: $id // id of info to get details of
* Endpoint: get-info/$id
* Method: GET
* Entity Return {SampleInfoModel}

- Example API calls in desktop REST client
* get-info/1
- response
{
"a" : 0,
"b" : false,
"c" : null
}
* get-info/2
- response
{
"a" : [null, "random date stamp"],
"b" : 3.14,
"c" : {
"z" : false,
"y" : 0.5
}
}
* get-info/3
- response
{
"a" : "false" // yes as a string
"b" : "yellow"
"c" : 1.75
}

Look, I get that js and ruby have dynamic types and a string can become a float can become a Boolean can become a cat can become an anvil. But that mess is very difficult to parse and make sense of in a stack that relies on static types.

After writing a million switch statements with cases like "is Float" or "is String" from kotlin's Any type // alias for java.Object, I throw my hands in the air and tell my boss we need to get on the phone with these folks. He agrees and we schedules a day that their main developer can come to our shop to "show us the ropes".

So the day comes and this guy shows up with his mac book pro and skinny jeans. We begin showing him the different data types coming back and explain how its bad for performance and can lead to bugs in the future if the model structure changes between different call params. He matter of factually has an epiphany and exclaims "OHHHHHH! I got you covered dawg!" and begins click clacking on his laptop to make sense of it all. We decide not to disturb him any more so he can keep working.

3 hours goes by...

He burst out of our conference room shouting "I am the greatest coder in the world! There's no problem I can't solve! Test it now!"

Weary, we begin testing the endpoints in our REST clients....

His magic fix, every single response is a quoted string of json:

example:
- old response
{
"foo" : "bar"
}
- new "improved" response
"{ \"foo\" : \"bar\" }"

smh....

While taking the basic JS interview:

Me: what are the different data types in JavaScript

Candidate: We have a 'var' keyword

Me: :|

In PHP, constants can only be of simple data types like strings or floats.

You can't make a database connection a constant because it's not a simple data type.
That makes the only way of accessing complex "constants" within functions using the keyword global... which is not encouraged and forces you to make the database connection global (that may not be convenient in some software patterns).
The last option is passing the database connection as a parameter (either to the function or to the constructor of the instance whose methods will use the connection)... which would be good if I didn't want to go full OO. Because it's a pain to do so.

So all in all, constants are not well supported by PHP.
Come on, constants...

python machine learning tutorials:
- import preprocessed dataset in perfect format specially crafted to match the model instead of reading from file like an actual real life would work
- use images data for recurrent neural network and see no problem
- use Conv1D for 2d input data like images
- use two letter variable names that only tutorial creator knows what they mean.
- do 10 data transformation in 1 line with no explanation of what is going on
- just enter these magic words
- okey guys thanks for watching make sure to hit that subscribe button

ehh, the machine learning ecosystem is burning pile of shit let me give you some examples:

- thanks to years of object oriented programming research and most wonderful abstractions we have "loss.backward()" which have no apparent connection to model but it affects the model, good to know
- cannot install the python packages because python must be >= 3.9 and at the same time < 3.9
- runtime error with bullshit cryptic message
- python having no data types but pytorch forces you to specify float32
- lets throw away the module name of a function with these simple tricks:
"import torch.nn.functional as F"
"import torch_geometric.transforms as T"
- tensor.detach().cpu().numpy() ???
- class NeuralNetwork(torch.nn.Module):
def __init__(self):
super(NeuralNetwork, self).__init__() ????
- lets call a function that switches on the tracking of math operations on tensors "model.train()" instead of something more indicative of the function actual effect like "model.set_mode_to_train()"
- what the fuck is ".iloc" ?
- solving environment -/- brings back memories when you could make a breakfast while the computer was turning on
- hey lets choose the slowest, most sloppy and inconsistent language ever created for high performance computing task called "data sCieNcE". but.. but. you can use numpy! I DONT GIVE A SHIT about numpy why don't you motherfuckers create a language that is inherently performant instead of calling some convoluted c++ library that requires 10s of dependencies? Why don't you create a package management system that works without me having to try random bullshit for 3 hours???
- lets set as industry standard a jupyter notebook which is not git compatible and have either 2 second latency of tab completion, no tab completion, no documentation on hover or useless documentation on hover, no way to easily redo the changes, no autosave, no error highlighting and possibility to use variable defined in a cell below in the cell above it
- lets use inconsistent variable names like "read_csv" and "isfile"
- lets pass a boolean variable as a string "true"
- lets contribute to tech enabled authoritarianism and create a face recognition and object detection models that china uses to destroy uyghur minority
- lets create a license plate computer vision system that will help government surveillance everyone, guys what a great idea

I don't want to deal with this bullshit language, bullshit ecosystem and bullshit unethical tech anymore.

Holly shit, they will never understand....

If you come to dev, minding his buissness, writing some code, beeing focused, with headphones on, etc. You absolutely destroy his cache of things in mind, you stay next to him gazing at his screen and throwing away madly words that you need some data extracted from database NOW and you will stay standing next to him gazing when he quickly types few lines of ultra-wide screen of SQL querry with all the fucking joins and shit you wanted with exac aliases you understand and makes one typo but query executes and spits out some data. He didn't notice that something is wrong with it becouse he didn't memorize database's data, and he sends it to you.

Now you are coming back to him pissed and in general fighting mood becouse he did one fucking typo when you was actively pressurizing him to make fucking query faster while you absolutely destroyed his flow of work (in meaning he now needs to dive back into code, figure out why he was editing given file and what was idea for further structure)

Now you are standing again next to him and absolutely pissing him off that he fucked up and made one fucking typpo that unfortnately database didn't say "nope" but it instead spit out wrong data.

If you can relate to "you" stated above, sincerly fuck you.
If you can relate to "he" stated above, I feel ya man, its fucking annoying, isn't it?

I hate debugging document oriented data types..
Can't even sysout easily like primitive data types.
Need a debugging duck.

I'm currently between jobs and have a few rants about my previous job (naturally). In retrospect, it's somewhat therapeutic to range about the sheer brainfuckery that has taken place. Enjoy!

First, let me set the scene: legacy B2B web app made with LEMP stack and sencha ext.js 3 + 4 (don't ask) and a lot of madness. Let's call that app "Alpha".

Alpha is a self made CMS build for typical ERP stuff. Yes, a self made CMS: entities are containers, containers have types and fields and values. Like so many legacy PHP apps, it does not have a dedicated FE: the HTML is rendered on the server and then spewed out to the browser.

Easy right? Coding like it's 1999! But there was a twist: Because everything is basically a container, the HTML-templates are saved in the DB. Along with the nessary JS and the CSS. And the translation variables. Why? Because fuck you! That's why. Who needs a git history anyways.

For some reason, Alpha was kinda slow.

There was also an editor, that allowed you to modify templates (web, mail, pdf) on the fly in prod. Because templates contain repeating data (header/footer), one template could contain additional templates. Much confusion. You could change templates via migration (slow, boring) or just ctrl-c/ctrl-v that sucker (fast, much excitement).

Did I mention Alpha was slow?

On with the rant: e-mails! How do they work? Noone knows. How to send mails asynchronous in PHP? Witchcraft is the only possible answer to that riddle. Here is your enterprise™ solution:
1. create mail
2. insert mail into DB
3. WAIT UP TO 59 SECONDS FOR A FUCKING CRON TO SEND MAIL

Why? "Because that way, we can resend mails in case the network is down :)"

Same procedure for the SOAP-API (db-queue + cron). You read that right: all requests to various other systems are processed once a minute.

Alpha slow.

Alpha was only one of several systems. Imagine a bunch of monolithic php apps, interconnected via SOAP, REST and GraphQL like a godamn intergalactic orgy. Image having to debug that cluster fuck.

Let's say there is a bad request. These things happen. No biggie. Remember the db-queue? Let's try to send the bad request a second time! And a third time! Still no luck? How odd. Let's create a specific file in a specific directory: a LOCK-file. Now, "the db-queue is on hold and no request gets processed :)"

Golly gee thanks Alpha.

Anyhow, did you know that MySQL has a join limit of 61 tables?

Major rant incoming. Before I start ranting I’ll say that I totally respect my professor’s past. He worked on some really impressive major developments for the military and other companies a long time ago. Was made an engineering fellow at Raytheon for some GPS software he developed (or lead a team on I should say) and ended up dropping fellowship because of his health. But I’m FUCKING sick of it. So fucking fed up with my professor. This class is “Data Structures in C++” and keep in mind that I’ve been programming in C++ for almost 10 years with it being my primary and first language in OOP.

Throughout this entire class, the teacher has been making huge mistakes by saying things that aren’t right or just simply not knowing how to teach such as telling the students that “int& varOne = varTwo” was an address getting put into a variable until I corrected him about it being a reference and he proceeded to skip all reference slides or steps through sorting algorithms that are wrong or he doesn’t remember how to do it and saying, “So then it gets to this part and....it uh....does that and gets this value and so that’s how you do it *doesnt do rest of it and skips slide*”.

First presentation I did on doubly linked lists. I decided to go above and beyond and write my own code that had a menu to add, insert at position n, delete, print, etc for a doubly linked list. When I go to pull out my code he tells me that I didn’t say anything about a doubly linked list’s tail and head nodes each have a pointer pointing to null and so I was getting docked points. I told him I did actually say it and another classmate spoke up and said “Ya” and he cuts off saying, “No you didn’t”. To which I started to say I’ll show you my slides but he cut me off mid sentence and just yelled, “Nope!”. He docked me 20% and gave me a B- because of that. I had 1 slide where I had a bullet point mentioning it and 2 slides with visual models showing that the head node’s previousNode* and the tail node’s nextNode* pointed to null.

Another classmate that’s never coded in his life had screenshots of code from online (literally all his slides were a screenshot of the next part of code until it finished implementing a binary search tree) and literally read the code line by line, “class node, node pointer node, ......for int i equals zero, i is less than tree dot length er length of tree that is, um i plus plus.....”
Professor yelled at him like 4 times about reading directly from slide and not saying what the code does and he would reply with, “Yes sir” and then continue to read again because there was nothing else he could do.

Ya, he got the same grade as me.

Today I had my second and final presentation. I did it on “Separate Chaining”, a hashing collision resolution. This time I said fuck writing my own code, he didn’t give two shits last time when everyone else just screenshot online example code but me so I decided I’d focus on the PowerPoint and amp it up with animations on models I made with the shapes in PowerPoint. Get 2 slides in and he goes,
Prof: Stop! Go back one slide.
Me: Uh alright, *click*
(Slide showing the 3 collision resolutions: Open Addressing, Separate Chaining, and Re-Hashing)
Prof: Aren’t you forgetting something?
Me: ....Not that I know of sir
Prof: I see Open addressing, also called Open Hashing, but where’s Closed Hashing?
Me: I believe that’s what Seperate Chaining is sir
Prof: No
Me: I’m pretty sure it is
*Class nods and agrees*
Prof: Oh never mind, I didn’t see it right

Get another 4 slides in before:
Prof: Stop! Go back one slide
Me: .......alright *click*
(Professor loses train of thought? Doesn’t mention anything about this slide)
Prof: I er....um, I don’t understand why you decided not to mention the other, er, other types of Chaining. I thought you were going to back on that slide with all the squares (model of hash table with animations moving things around to visualize inserting a value with a collision that I spent hours on) but you didn’t.
(I haven’t finished the second half of my presentation yet you fuck! What if I had it there?)
Me: I never saw anything on any other types of Chaining professor
Prof: I’m pretty sure there’s one that I think combines Open Addressing and Separate Chaining
Me: That doesn’t make sense sir. *explanation why* I did a lot of research and I never saw any other.
Prof: There are, you should have included them.
(I check after I finish. Google comes up with no other Chaining collision resolution)

He docks me 20% and gives me a B- AGAIN! Both presentation grades have feedback saying, “MrCush, I won’t go into the issues we discussed but overall not bad”.

Thanks for being so specific on a whole 20% deduction prick! Oh wait, is it because you don’t have specifics?
Bye 3.8 GPA

Is it me or does he have something against me?

How are Coding Bootcamps and what are they like?

A little background:

I’ve been going to a University (have a year left for a CS degree) and I am so EXTREMELY frustrated. I thought I would get an education but it’s so underwhelming. 95% of it doesn’t involve programming and the classes that do are so elementary that I know more than the professors. By the end of my web design course we had been taught to center text, insert images, insert links, and how to use tables with a single day on CSS using colors.
The OOP courses are all the same, learn variables, types, conditionals, loops, classes, functions, and so forth. Python, C++, and Java. I taught all this to myself when I was 15, I’m 29 now.

I’ve recently gotten extremely interested into full stack web development. .NET Core, React, Typescript. I’m also working with Electron. I’m basically 100% self taught and spend almost every waking moment trying to learn more and apply it.

There’s only one person at my school who has the same passion as me and he’s the president at the coding club but is going into machine learning and big data (I’m the Secretary) and I just wish I could interact with more people who have the same passion. I would love to be challenged. I feel as if I spend more time trying to learn and diagnose problems then applying my knowledge because web development is so complicated when it comes to connecting everything together and I’m still relatively new to it (started like 4 months ago). I’m an extremely fast learner and extremely dedicated so I’m not worried about that being an issue.

I just really want to be a part of a community where I have people who can answer my questions and I don’t have to spend hours or days on google finding a solution to integrating Webpack or using typescript with react, and more. I want to feel challenged.

Can I get this from a boot camp? I recently listened to a podcast from Syntax and it really excited me but I don’t want to be let down again. Either way I’m finishing my degree to get that bullshit $60000 piece of paper but I wouldn’t mind taking a couple months off for something like this if it’s worth it.

I live in CO so if you have any Bootcamps in CO that you recommend, I’d love to hear it and take a trip to check it out in person.

Thanks a bunch!

Am I the only one who forgets to declare data types in Java after months of coding in only Ruby and Python? 😵

The first fruits of almost five years of labor:
7.8% of semiprimes give the magnitude of their lowest prime factor via the following equation:
((p/(((((p/(10**(Mag(p)-1))).sqrt())-x) + x)*w))/10)

I've also learned, given exponents of some variables, to relate other variables to them on a curve to better sense make of the larger algebraic structure. This has mostly been stumbling in the dark but after a while it has become easier to translate these into methods that allow plugging in one known variable to derive an unknown in a series of products.

For example I have a series of variables d4a, d4u, d4z, d4omega, etc, and these are translateable now, through insights that become various methods, into other types of (non-d4) series. What these variables actually represent is less relevant, only that it is possible to translate between them.

I've been doing some initial learning about neural nets (implementation, rather than theoretics as I normally read about). I'm thinking what I might do is build a GPT style sequence generator, and train it on the 'unknowns' from semiprime products with known factors.

The whole point of the project is that a bunch of internal variables can easily be derived, (d4a, c/d4, u*v) from a product, its root, and its mantissa, that relate to *unknown* variables--unknown variables such as u, v, c, and d4, that if known directly give a constant time answer to the factors of the original product.

I think theres sufficient data at this point to train such a machine, I just don't think I'm up to it yet because I'm lacking in the calculus department.

2000+ variables that are derivable from a product, without knowing its factors, which are themselves products of unknown variables derived from the internal algebraic relations of a product--this ought to be enough of an attack surface to do something with.

I'm willing to collaborate with someone familiar with recurrent neural nets and get them up to speed through telegram/element/discord if they're willing to do the setup and training for a neural net of this sort, one that can tease out hidden relationships and map known variables to the unknown set for a given product.

The Zen Of Ripping Off Airtable:
(patterned after The Zen Of Python. For all those shamelessly copying airtables basic functionality)

*Columns can be *reordered* for visual priority and ease of use.

* Rows are purely presentational, and mostly for grouping and formatting.

* Data cells are objects in their own right, so they can control their own rendering, and formatting.

* Columns (as objects) are where linkages and other column specific data are stored.

* Rows (as objects) are where row specific data (full-row formatting) are stored.

* Rows are views or references *into* columns which hold references to the actual data cells

* Tables are meant for managing and structuring *small* amounts of data (less than 10k rows) per table.

* Just as you might do "=A1:A5" to reference a cell range in google or excel, you might do "opt(table1:columnN)" in a column header to create a 'type' for the cells in that column.

* An enumeration is a table with a single column, useful for doing the equivalent of airtables options and tags. You will never be able to decide if it should be stored on a specific column, on a specific table for ease of reuse, or separately where it and its brothers will visually clutter your list of tables. Take a shot if you are here.

* Typing or linking a column should be accomplishable first through a command-driven type language, held in column headers and cells as text.

* Take a shot if you somehow ended up creating any of the following: an FSM, a custom regex parser, a new programming language.

* A good structuring system gives us options or tags (multiple select), selections (single select), and many other datatypes and should be first, programmatically available through a simple command-driven language like how commands are done in datacells in excel or google sheets.

* Columns are a means to organize data cells, and set constraints and formatting on an entire range.

* Row height, can be overridden by the settings of a cell. If a cell overrides the row and column render/graphics settings, then it must be drawn last--drawing over the default grid.

* The header of a column is itself a datacell.

* Columns have no order among themselves. Order is purely presentational, and stored on the table itself.

* The last statement is because this allows us to pluck individual columns out of tables for specialized views.

*Very* fast scrolling on large datasets, with row and cell height variability is complicated. Thinking about it makes me want to drink. You should drink too before you embark on implementing it.

* Wherever possible, don't use a database.
If you're thinking about using a database, see the previous koan.

* If you use a database, expect to pick and choose among column-oriented stores, and json, while factoring for platform support, api support, whether you want your front-end users to be forced to install and setup a full database,
and if not, what file-based .so or .dll database engine is out there that also supports video, audio, images, and custom types.

* For each time you ignore one of these nuggets of wisdom, take a shot, question your sanity, quit halfway, and then write another koan about what you learned.

* If you do not have liquor on hand, for each time you would take a shot, spank yourself on the ass. For those who think this is a reward, for each time you would spank yourself on the ass, instead *don't* spank yourself on the ass.

* Take a sip if you *definitely* wildly misused terms from OOP, MVP, and spreadsheets.

How do you get over the bad times? I keep having to work with shitty legacy systems that were written in perl and flash in the 90s, but my boss keeps telling me "No" on redoing some of the bigger stuff even though it is really needed. I mean, that is your goal here, right? Rebuilding this POS? FFS you still stored passwords in plain text twoo weeks ago! But no, you's rather dig around in Perl than upset some random user because his fucking interface looks different.

But then I also have to work with another system that I could redo in Cake/Laravel in two weeks (it's literally getting and writing data to one table, so two views and user auth), and the previous dev just... made a huge mess. I mean, why would you need to post data asynchronously when it's this one stupid form ? Just do a regular form submit? And the system is really not suitable for extending, because everything is in the database, EVERYTHING! Like, html form inputs? So to add a simple input to the template I have to create a new input type in the types table and then add that to the form structure table? Only to have the input checked by fucking regex? REGEX! Why? Seriously, this is not some high end CMS that needs this level of code reusability No. This is a simple fucking form.

And I can't get it to work. No documentation of course. No comments, either. All of this makes me feel like I'm just the shittiest dev ever. I feel dumb, and useless. Haven't turned on my private PC in weeks because I see no reason to work on any of my own stuff.

I used to have a job, working with Magento and Wordpress. And yeah, it was horrible, it was chaos, but it was fun and I was great at it. I bent that motherfucking system to fit my needs. People respected my opinion, they were convinced I could program this and that, and I proved them right. Did I make mistakes? Hell yeah. Did I give up? Fuck no!

But now, I just feel like I can't even write a simple fucking form any more. I'm just so close to giving up on development as a whole, even though I love it so much.

ECMAScript is everywhere, so I thought: Let's do even more inappropriate and insane things with it ;)

...Like using Duktape (small ECMAScript engine) and exposing LoadLibrary/GetProcAddress along with some helper routines to describe the routine's argument types and return type, and finally providing a routine to invoke those routines.

It's a very rough prototype that can handle up to 4 arguments in a 64-bit Windows environment.

Next "todo" is structure handling which will initially be a case of stuffing data into a Buffer() object.

I'm not sure what exactly I'm trying to do with it or why...

Hello C++ / C programmers. I've noticed my professor putting the ASCII code of a character into an int instead of just using a char to store it. When he does this he's not doing math or anything with them, so is there any advantage to it? My TA mentioned something about memory alignment, but I'm not experienced enough to know how something being aligned differently in memory would help or hurt a program.

To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.

The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).

The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.

Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.

1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.

Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.

2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.

Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.

3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.

Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.

4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.

Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.

5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.

Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.

6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.

(TBC)

Data types in PHP. Typesafe like nothing.

Did the simplest corridor gen I could think of. The tile that makes up corridors is different than the tile that makes up the rooms. They are drawn the same here though. In the floor data structure they are different types. This will allow me to easily place doors the like. The dots are potential door placements.

Now that I have simple room gen working I can work on filling it with 3d models to make up walls, doors, etc.

Most of the time the rooms connect on the whole map. But once in a while they do not. I like this as I will incorporate mining. The final map will be much bigger. This is 32x32 and I want 256x256. I will need to figure out how to determine room density versus grid size.

I need to spend some time cleaning up the code and try and generalize the code. I will need to allow for pregenned rooms as well with defined entry points. The entry points on these rooms is all random. It will probably be tricky to do random room to pregenned room corridors. Proximity seems to work. So prox to a predefined door location should work.

Not a rant, just the completion of a very demanding and interesting task for this week.

Wrote a whole data scheme for this enterprise app my company is developing. Very proud of it, since it has a very restricted size, multiple layers of encryption and data verification, several user types with different requirements, and it all has to be rock solid in an offline environment.

The punchile is...I enjoyed writing the documentation for the whole package more than I should, I guess...spent the whole day being very thorough and documenting every member, function, constructor and exception.

Feelin fabulous.

Situation: I have a love hate relationship with python due to the lack of types as I have in more established languages such as C#, Java and shit even TypeScript

Situation (cont): A rather large codebase that i have developed for multiple processes at work run on Python.

I don't hate it, I just don't absolutely love it, there is a lot of things to like about Python, but man I do have some conflicts with it, I have been facing out to use other solutions that feel scripty, such as the newer versions of C# with .net, but I would say that about 80% of our codebase runs on Python, the rest is PHP.

I am somewhat traditional in the way my programs run, I started with C++ and Java, then for whatever reason (I blame codecademy at the time) switched over to Ruby and Javascript, mostly Javascript. I do not remember how I found Python, I do remember learning it with an online tutorial, shit was easy to get started with.

My codebase running on Python is huge, and they do a lot from automation scripts, to data gathering and database management, never had I been bitten with the "oh noes is so slow" bug since my code is not Google level big, for everything else Python seems rather fast imho

I dunno, big time love hate relationship

I need cyclic data structures but algebraic data types are my first love and tying the knot is impossible with the eagerness F# has. The interfaces and classes I abandoned C# for are the ones I am now writing in F#. What a job well done on my part in avoiding mutability :(

What data types do they use down in the sewers Pennywise.

They're all floats Georgie...they're allllllllll floats.

Do you know what my favorite data structure is Georgie? Stacks. You know why? Because they Pop! Pop! Pop!

The problem with small string data types is th

Data wrangling is messy

I'm doing the vegetation maps for the game today, maybe rivers if it all goes smoothly.
I could probably do it by hand, but theres something like 60-70 ecoregions to chart,
each with their own species, both fauna and flora. And each has an elevation range its
found at in real life, so I want to use the heightmap to dictate that. Who has time for that? It's a lot of manual work.

And the night prior I'm thinking "oh this will be easy."

yeah, no.

(Also why does Devrant have to mangle my line breaks? -_-)

Laid out the requirements, how I could go about it, and the more I look the more involved
it gets.

So what I think I'll do is automate it. I already automated some of the map extraction, so
I don't see why I shouldn't just go the distance.
Also it means, later on, when I have access to better, higher resolution geographic data, updating it will be a smoother process. And even though I'm only interested in flora at the moment, theres no reason I can't reuse the same system to extract fauna information.
Of course in-game design there are some things you'll want to fudge. When the players are exploring outside the rockies in a mountainous area, maybe I still want to spawn the occasional mountain lion as a mid-tier enemy, even though our survivor might be outside the cats natural habitat. This could even be the prelude to a task you have to do, go take care of a dangerous
creature outside its normal hunting range. And who knows why it is there? Wild fire? Hunted by something *more* dangerous? Poaching? Maybe a nuke plant exploded and drove all the wildlife from an adjoining region?
who knows.

Having the extraction mostly automated goes a long way to updating those lists down the road.

But for now, flora.

For deciding plants and other features of the terrain what I can do is:

* rewrite pixeltile to take file names as input,
* along with a series of colors as a key (which are put into a SET to check each pixel against)
* input each region, one at a time, as the key, and the heightmap as the source image
* output only the region in the heightmap that corresponds to the ecoregion in the key.
* write a function to extract the palette from the outputted heightmap. (is this really needed?)
* arrange colors on the bottom or side of the image by hand, along with (in text) the elevation in feet for reference.

For automating this entire process I can go one step further:
* Do this entire process with the key colors I already snagged by hand, outputting region IDs as the file names.
* setup selenium
* selenium opens a link related to each elevation-map of a specific biome, and saves the text links
(so I dont have to hand-open them)
* I'll save the species and text by hand (assuming elevation data isn't listed)
* once I have a list of species and other details, to save them to csv, or json, or another format
* I save the list of species as csv or json or another format.
* then selenium opens this list, opens wikipedia for each, one at a time, and searches the text for elevation
* selenium saves out the species name (or an "unknown") for the species, and elevation, to a text file, along with the biome ID, and maybe the elevation code (from the heightmap) as a number or a color (probably a number, simplifies changing the heightmap later on)

Having done all this, I can start to assign species types, specific world tiles. The outputs for each region act as reference.

The only problem with the existing biome map (you can see it below, its ugly) is that it has a lot of "inbetween" colors. Theres a few things I can do here. I can treat those as a "mixing" between regions, dictating the chance of one biome's plants or the other's spawning. This seems a little complicated and dependent on a scraped together standard rather than actual data. So I'm thinking instead what I'll do is I'll implement biome transitions in code, which makes more sense, and decouples it from relying on the underlaying data. also prevents species and terrain from generating in say, towns on the borders of region, where certain plants or terrain features would be unnatural. Part of what makes an ecoregion unique is that geography has lead to relative isolation and evolutionary development of each region (usually thanks to mountains, rivers, and large impassible expanses like deserts).

Maybe I'll stuff it all into a giant bson file or maybe sqlite. Don't know yet.

As an entry level programmer I may not know what I'm doing, and I may be supposed to be looking for a job, but that won't stop me from procrastinating.

Data wrangling is fun.

What is a ghost's favorite data type? BOOlean!

I figured I would share my Capstone from this semester with a community that might be interested. An eclipse plugin that was developed in our lab is able to implicitly track developer eye gazes as they work in an IDE (eclipse in this case). Before I began work on it, source code, bug reports, and stack overflow documents could be tracked with all of the data on said documents being extracted. For example, if source code is being tracked, everything from the file name and class/method name down to statement types are collected. The tracking isn't on still images. Since it's within an IDE, you can open multiple files, scroll, and modify -- all while tracking is collecting accurate data based on the (x, y) gaze coordinate and the handler assigned to the type of document/file being viewed.

My job was to extend this functionality to track gazes on UML class diagram documents. This means I had to gather data at the highest level: the class/connection being looked at, down to the lowest level: members/methods, their types and containing classes.

Being new to Java's EMF, GEF, and eclipse plugin development, I had a bit of a learning curve. Anyways here is the poster of the functionality I added. 🙃

Not much of a rant haha.

Today I realized that compilers are children, and must be treated as such. Generally, you might tend to expect a language to follow the same rules consistently, but oh how wrong you are, my sweet summer child.

I have a framework that I've been reusing across several personal Unity3d projects for a while, and all was well. This week, I was tasked with creating a PoC that combines a web app with Unity WebGL for data visualization. My framework has a ton of useful stuff helped me create the PoC very quickly, and all was well.

Come 3 days ago and there's one last piece that isn't working for some reason. It almost appears that this one bit of code isn't executing at all. Today, after countless hours of swearing at the computer and banging my head against the wall, I realized that the WebGL compiler has a different implementation for the method that checks assignability of types. An implementation that has different rules than everything else. An implementation that has no documentation about this discrepancy anywhere. I have no words.

tl;dr: The language changed the rules on me. Fuck me right?

My graph based programming language. It'll feature graphs as data types!... whenever I finish it. 😓

Getting tired of old business types managing software projects... I really don’t care if you have fifty years of experience in managing loans in banks, please don’t try to manage software or data projects... this is sooo out of your realm of understanding.

PS I actually like this person, they are a wonderful human, but keep nosing in areas they have no knowledge, and derail the conversation from talking about things we actually need to discuss. Like “how do we build this?”

I'm feeling burnt due to the lack of direction at my job instead of overwork.
I'm working as a data scientist at a large corporation and have been remote for a little over a year. I'm very savvy at programming and other technical skills but my manager wants me to develop my leadership skills and want me to move to a management role eventually. So he's been kinda "grooming" me to take on more leadership responsibility in the projects I'm currently involved in.

However, to be honest, I'm a little torn about getting more management or leadership responsibilities. I'm an extreme introvert and absolutely abhor meetings and having the same thing to people all the time and this sort of things stresses me out very easily. My manager seems set on pushing me towards pursuing a path towards leadership and just basically assumed that this is what I want out of my career and started putting me in the deep end without asking me what I want.

I really want to voice my honest thoughts about what I really want to do in my career (to be a technical specialist rather than a manager) but I've kinda procrastinated over the past year when he first started "grooming" me for a leadership role and it's my bad that I didn't tell him earlier.

Right now, I'm thrown in the deep end. I'm given a lot of projects without much of any direction and I'm asked to figure out the people I need to reach out to, the types of meetings I need to set with them, the relationships I need to develop both in and out of my department, etc. However, my real passions lie in writing code, fixing bugs, building models, understanding new technologies and applying them to the business, etc.

On paper, I'm involved in a ton of projects and I seem to be a really busy worker. But right now, I'm having a lot of difficulty reaching out and developing relationships with people that I barely have any actual work to do during the day, because I'm constantly waiting for replies from people or for permission or red tape to get some key information or access to a system in order for me to build something like a model or a program for a particular project. I'm spending maybe 1 or 2 hours of my workday actually "working" which is attending meetings, reading emails, etc., reaching out to someone for the n-th time (even though they continue to ignore me), etc. And that's because I'm blocked on all of my projects - I need an essential piece of information, data, or access to a system or server and the person I'm reaching out to to get this isn't responding. I brought this up with my manager and he says he's gonna try to reach out to these people to help me but so far, it doesn't seem like his help has been effective as I'm continuing to wait.

Though I get paid pretty well, I feel guilty logging in to work everyday and doing very little work, not because I'm lazy but because there really isn't much work for me to do because I'm waiting on so much here and I'm at a point where I can't make any progress in any of my projects without the approvals or other critical information that others aren't providing me.

I know I probably should find another job and I'm currently looking but in the meantime, is there anything else that I should be doing at my current job to hopefully make this situation better?

As an undergraduate junior, programming beyond basic data types is very overwhelming. Web and mobile seem great. So does ML. Open source is amazing to use but scary to contribute to. Seriously, being a programmer or even trying to be can be hard.

Credit goes to a friend. Would tag him, but I don’t know his ID on here offhand...

=======

What data types do they use down in the sewers Pennywise?

Floats Georgie...they're alllllllll floats.

Day1: It is really awesome to give data types for the variable I am about to use in typescript

Day1(few hours later): Let me declare all variables with type 'any'

I like the people I work with although they are very shit, I get paid a lot and I mostly enjoy the company but..

Our scrum implementation is incredibly fucked so much so that it is not even close to scrum but our scrum master doesn't know scrum and no one else cares so we do everything fucked.

Our prs are roughly 60 file hangers at a time, we only complete 50% of our work each sprint because the stories are so fucked up, we have no testers at all, team lead insists on creating sql table designs but doesn't understand normalisation so our tables often hold 3 or 4 sets of data types just jammed in.

Our software sits broken for months on end until someone notices (pre release), our architecture is garbage or practically non existent. Our front end apps that only I know the technology have approaches dictated by team lead that has no clue of the language or framework.

Our front end app is now about 50% tech debt because project management is so ineffectual and approaches are constantly changing. For instance we used to use view models for domain transfer objects... Now we use database entities, so there is no commonality between models but the system used to have shared features relying on that..sour roles and permissions are fucked since a role is a page regardless of the pages functionality so there is no ability to toggle features, but even though I know the design is fucked I still had to implement after hours of trying to convince team lead of it. Fast forward a few months and it's a huge cluster fuck to enforce.

We have no automated testing of any sort or manual testing in place.

I know of a few security vulnerabilities I can nuke our databases with but it got ignored.

Pr reviews are obviously a nightmare since they're so big.

I just tried to talk to scrum master again about story creation since any story involving front end ui as an aspect of it is crammed in under one pointed story as sub tasks, essentially throwing away any ability to calculate velocity. Been here a year now and the scrum master doesn't know what I mean by velocity... Her entire job is scrum master.

So anyway I am thinking about leaving because I like being a developer and it is slowly making me give up on doing things to a high standard and I have no chance of improving things, but at the same time the pay is great and I like the people.

I am very thankful to C as I face less pain while dealing with pointers and memory allocation and deallocation in C++. I am very thankful to C++, as I grasp OOP and template concepts out of it and it was also my first language for DSAlgo implementation. I feel very fortunate to move to Java after C++ rather than python. Although Java's design is f**ked and it feeds on a computer's memory, it taught me to deal with objects( unlike C++). It taught me how objects are clearly different than primitive data types like int, float, char...And best of all, Java provided me everything I need to safely switch to Python, it's all because of Java, I can clearly understand the working of python. All the stuff which I find weird in python before is sounding logical to me now. As java taught me how to deal with objects, I am confident to say that "I CAN DEAL WITH PYTHON". With respect to all my 3 prior languages: C, C++, and Java.

Ever since i started using clojure for private projects i find it increasingly frustrating to work with other languages. They all have their ups and downs sure but i just hate having to transform my data over x different data types to get only a fraction of the result i want from each. Im tired of looking up how to operate each different data structure. I could maybe be ok with it if this whole constant conversion of things was effortless but i find myself spending more time trying to get the language to work with me than doing actual work. There is this friction i feel between me and the language when writing java or python that just fucking tires me.

Just by refactoring to use the correct data types to skip all checking and conversions and also use data bindings, the performance increased several folds.

Why take the time to refactor? It would probably take longer to implement the new features if I did not.

I wrote a type checking utility that also considers all types (JS without TypeScript, so this meant arrays etc.). The desired type had to be declared in a config file and the data didn’t even come from the config.

What would I not do to prevent all possible attack vectors...

feeling like shit at work because I'm not productive at all.... I'm a fullstack web dev and was assigned to create a java data importer with multiple sources, multiple scenarios and using various data types... What makes this difficult is that I'm not used to strictly typed languages, because I'm used to swapping variable types and nulling them down/whatever I need to do with them whenever I want. In java I need to assign the correct variable types, there are no asociative arrays . I've been fixing one issue this whole day. Litteraly one fucking issue. Maneged to fuck javas garbage collection even though it's supposed to be automatic. Fuck. I feel like I need to stay late, and program on the weekends to achieve anything with this assigment because right now I feel like I make 0 progress. Boss leaves for vacation next week for a week, and he's the other dev that theoretically should be working with me...

Supposedly 2 years professional experiencd junior - console.log ("how do you like figure out what data is being passed In and what it looks like? is there some special tool you use when you are trying to get the types or correct nomenclature for the reference?") Me "I just log it to the console or use fiddler. " how do I do that?

Am I the only one who hates it with his guts that most Active Record implementations infer fields from the db?

Which motherf*cker thought it'd be fun to imagine the model through several migrations, or to imagine the data types in the languague itself when looking at the database?

Let me write the model and infer the f*cking changes to create migrations, not the other way around.

I needed to align instruction execution to a 64bit boundary, for custom CPU architecture that I'm building. Basically the ISA had 3 types of instruction lengths; 16bit, 32bit, and 48bit. The core did 64bit fetch from the Instruction Cache, the issue was that if an instruction was in between two blocks of data I needed to fetch two blocks. That would impact performance a bit. So I had to modify GCC sources of the ISA that I'm using. So instead of doing it the right way, I just did it the lazy way and modified the GCC backend to print

.p2alignw 3, 0x00ff, 4
.p2alignw 3, 0x00ff, 2

On each 48bit and 32bit instruction to generate NOPs. And it did work lol.

!rant
C++ / OOP QUESTION

I have a uni assignment / project (Data Structures class), where I have to implement the ins-n-outs of 1D arrays, by creating a dynamically allocated array class, which can accept any type of data (using templates). But there's a problem.

I'd like to implement sorting the elements of the array. But given the fact, that I'm using templates, I cannot treat the elements as integers, nor as strings, or other types...
Also, let's say that the elements of the array are elements of class T, where T looks like this:

class T {
private:
double height;
int age;
string name;
public:
double getH() { return height; }
int getAge() { return age; }
string getName() { return name; }
};

(It's just a random example, pls don't judge for code quality...)

Let's say that I'd like to sort the T elements based on height, print out, sort by age, print out, then sort by name and print out. How can I do this? Is this possible?

Any recommendations for books on statistical analysis and data science?

The more survival guide & short manual types, the better.

Sadly took me a little longer than I’d like to admit to go from well placed print statements to using a debugger. Granted there are times when print statements are needed, but for all the devs out there who are using an IDE with a perfectly good debugger and yet doesn’t use it... please use it. It literally gives you a mapping of all objects and data types around a break point that you can easily glance at to speed up debugging. Go figure!

So, do any of your poor fuckers have the opportunity - nay, PRIVILEGE of using the absolute clusterfuck piece of shit known as SQL Server Integration Services?

Why do I keep seeing articles about how "powerful" and "fast" it is? Why do people recommend it? Why do some think it's easy to use - or even useful?

It can't report an error to save its life. It's logging is fucked. It's not just that it swallows all exceptions and gives unhelpful error messages with no debugging information attached, its logging API is also fucked. For example, depending on where you want to log a message - it's a totally different API, with a billion parameters most of which you need to supply "-1" or "null" to just to get it do FUCKING DO SOMETHING. Also - you'll only see those messages if you run the job within the context of SQL FUCKING SERVER - good luck developing on your ACTUAL FUCKING MACHINE.

So apart from shitty logging, it has inherited Microsoft's insane need to make everything STATICALLY GODDAMN TYPED. For EVERY FUCKING COMPONENT you need to define the output fields, types and lengths - like this is 1994. Are you consuming a dynamic data structure, perhaps some EAV thing from a sales system? FUCK YOU. Oh - and you can't use any of the advances in .NET in the last 10 years - mainly, NuGet and modern C# language features.

Using a modern C# language feature REMOVES THE ABILITY TO FUCKING DEBUG ANYTHING. THE FUCKER WILL NOT STOP ON YOUR BREAKPOINTS. In addition - need a JSON parsing library? Want to import a SDK specific to what you're doing? Want to use a 3rd party date library? WELL FUCK YOU. YOU HAVE TO INDEPENDENTLY INSTALL THE ASSEMBLIES INTO THE GAC AND MAKE IT CONSISTENT ACROSS ALL YOUR ENVIRONMENTS.

While i'm at it - need to connect to anything? FUCK YOU, WE ONLY INCLUDE THE MOST BASIC DATABASE CONNECTORS. Need to transform anything? FUCK YOU, WRITE A SCRIPT TASK. Ok, i'd like to write a script task please. FUCK YOU IM GOING TO PAUSE FOR THE NEXT 10 MINUTES WHILE I FIRE UP A WHOLE FUCKING NEW INSTANCE OF VISUAL STUDIO JUST TO EDIT THE FUCKING SCRIPT. Heaven forbid you forget to click the "stop" button after running the package and open the script. Those changes you just made? HAHA FUCK YOU I DISCARDED THEM.

I honestly cant understand why anyone uses this shit. I guess I shouldn't really expect anything less from Microsoft - all of their products are average as fuck.

Why do I use this shit? I work for a bunch of fucks that are so far entrenched in Microsoft technologies that they literally cannot see outside of them (and indeed don't want to - because even a cursory look would force them to conclude that they fucked up, and if you're a manager thats something you can never do).

Ok, rant over. Also fuck you SSIS

Come on, how hard can it be?

On every fucking TLV data structure I get to handle, the hobo who defined the structure obviously stopped reading the TLV specification after the second sentence.
Fucked up tags, misuse of length encoding, and as a result no real TLV parser can handle that crap. Workarounds and manual parsing all over the place for *every* *single* interface.

Get your shit together, and if you don't want to handle the complex parts, then at least make the simple types right.

So me and a couple of my teammates were developing a website for artists where all the things related to artists such as artworks, events, geolocation info etc. happen to live.
2 months down the line, the client comes up with another team who is supposed to develop iOS and Android apps to give the users the ability to leverage this data.
Now this team is so annoying that they want the API according to the specifications they provide. That's really weird. API should be generic, right?

But no, this doesn't end here, the PM of mobile app team comes up with a specification document for the API and what does it contain, a few endpoints which go as below:-
/home - To bring all the home screen data
/events - To bring all the event screen data. But here is a twist, on Event screen, they have defined different sections for Upcoming Events, Workshops, Talks etc. And for each event type they don't want a filtered API but just this single endpoint which will contain all event types data in their own JSON keys.
FML
:/

I'm developing an app for a client, but they are responsible for the APIs.

Which turns out is the biggest mistake of my life...

I don't know whether data types are unknown to them or they are just playing a sick game with my emotions.

They have a different data type depending on how they feel, e.g.

- a boolean can be true, false, 0,1 or 2...
- an array can be an array or just a single item...

Who in their right mind can do this?

A year ago I built my first todo, not from a tutorial, but using basic libraries and nw.js, and doing basic dom manipulations.

It had drag n drop, icons, and basic saving and loading. And I was satisfied.

Since then I've been working odd jobs.

And today I've decided to stretch out a bit, and build a basic airtable clone, because I think I can.
And also because I hate anything without an offline option.

First thing I realized was I wasn't about to duplicate all the features of a spreadsheet from scratch. I'd need a base to work from.

I spent about an hour looking.
Core features needed would be trivial serialization or saving/loading.

Proper event support for when a cell, row, or column changed, or was selected. Necessary for triggering validation and serialization/saving.

Custom column types.

Embedding html in cells.

Reorderable columns

Optional but nice to have:

Changeable column width and row height.

Drag and drop on rows and columns.

Right click menu support out of the box.

After that hour I had a few I wanted to test.

And started looking at frameworks to support the SPA aspects.

Both mithril and riot have minimal router support. But theres also a ton of other leightweight frameworks and libraries worthy of prototyping in, solid, marko, svelte, etc.
I didn't want to futz with lots of overhead, babeling/gulping/grunting/webpacking or any complex configuration-over-convention.

Didn't care for dom vs shadow dom. Its a prototype not a startup.

And I didn't care to do it the "right way". Learning curve here was antithesis to experimenting. I was trying to get away from plugin, configuration-over-convention, astronaut architecture, monolithic frameworks, the works.

Could I import the library without five dozen dependancies and learning four different tools before getting to hello world?
"But if you know IJK then its quick to get started!", except I don't, so it won't. I didn't want that.

Could I get cheap component-oriented designs?

Was I managing complex state embedded in a monolith that took over the entire layout and conventions of my code, like the world balanced on the back of a turtle?

Did it obscure the dom and state, and the standard way of doing things or *compliment* those?

As for validation, theres a number of vanilla libraries, one of which treats validation similar to unit testing, which seems kinda novel.

For presentation and backend I could do NW.JS, which would remove some of the complications, by putting everything in one script. Or if I wanted to make it a web backend, and avoid writing it in something that ran like a potato strapped to a nuclear rocket (visual studio), I could skip TS and go with python and quart, an async variation of flask.
This has the advantage that using something thats *not* JS, namely python, for interacting with a proper database, and would allow self-hosting or putting it online so people can share data and access in real time with others.

And because I'm horrible, and do things the wrong way for convenience, I could use tailwind.
Because it pisses people off.

How easy (or hard) would it be to recreate a basic functional clone of the core of airtable?

I don't know, but I have feeling I'm going to find out!

NEED AN URGENT HELP HERE!!!

As much as I try to stay away from the satanic language that is javascript, I have to read up on it if I need to pass this semester.
Guide me towards the different types of objects in javascript, anyone?
Here's what I know so far- js treats everything as an object, but what I don't know is that are there categories? [the "everything" referring to the primitive data types]

"The data types ntext and ntext are incompatible in the equal to operator."

Thanks SQL Server, really helpful.

nothing new, just another rant about php...
php, PHP, Php, whatever is written, wherever is piled, I hate this thing, in every stack.

stuff that works only according how php itself is compiled, globals superglobals and turbo-globals everywhere, == is not transitive, comparisons are non-deterministic, ?: is freaking left associative, utility functions that returns sometimes -1, sometimes null, sometimes are void, each with different style of usage and naming, lowercase/under_score/camelCase/PascalCase, numbers are 32bit on 32bit cpus and 64bit on 64bit cpus, a ton of silent failing stuff that doesn't warn you, references are actually aliases, nothing has a determined type except references, abuse of mega-global static vars and funcs, you can cast to int in a language where int doesn't even exists, 25236 ways to import/require/include for every different subcase, @ operator, :: parsed to T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM for no reason in stack traces, you don't know who can throw stuff, fatal errors are sometimes catchable according to nobody knows, closed-over vars are passed as functions unless you use &, functions calls that don't match args signature don't fail, classes are not object and you can refer them only by string name, builtin underlying types cannot be wrapped, subclasses can't override parents' private methods, no overload for equality or ordering, -1 is a valid index for array and doesn't fail, funcs are not data nor objects when clojures instead are objects, there's no way to distinguish between a random string and a function 'reference', php.ini, documentation with comments and flame wars on the side, becomes case sensitive/insensitive according to the filesystem when line break instead is determined according to php.ini, it's freaking sloooooow...

enough. i'm tired of this crap.
it's almost weekend! 🍻

I had a splash of inspiration. I would like to develop a method for analyzing unknown bitstreams of data. The method would involve determining the format of the data by trial and error machine learning algorithms. This would allow determining data types and byte formats and meanings of streams of data. Could be useful in data forensics. I would call the method: heuristic translation machine learning. I am currently developing code that does this. It will be fun to learn about reinforcement algorithms.

I think I may have just had a bit of an epiphany...

Algorithms and Data Structures are sort of like libraries and frameworks.

JS is probably the easiest example since npm has a lot of libraries.

For most cases, underscore.each and lodash.each $.each achieve pretty much the same thing except one maybe better in certain cases.

And data structures are sort of like Angular, React, Electron, ReactNative. Each has its own purpose or style and are good for solving certain types of problems?

So day-to-day you don't really care what Sort() algo you use.. unless you really need to perfoarmance tune it for a specific case.

And data structures, depending on the type of problem you have, one is easier to work/think about the problem in although not examply... Usually have to use a few of them at once.

How is this going to help me in interviews... I'm not sure... other than reconfirming that knowing specific implementations of Sort and Trees is usually BS... most of the time just need to know you should Sort or use a Tree...

Trying to figure out why switching underlying object in data binding does not update.

checking type validation, nothing
checking types in bound events, nothing,
maybe some exceptions it thrown? nothing...

check the "class"... IT'S A FUCKING STRUCT

I feel like i am not living my life correctly. i have made myself as a slow learner for the things i like .
i would want to dedicate a specific amount of time to a particular topic until i make written notes of it, repeat that stuff in my mind and make sure its engraved it in my brain.
if i don't get that time in normal routine, i force that time into my routine by disrupting my sleep/ reducing social interaction/ skipping the actual work to learn about it until i feel satisfied.

But even after that i am left unhappy, because i realize that the particular skill in question is a very small part of the whole product and i will be still dedicating a lot of time to the project.
I also feel sad because my Saturday got wasted learning this whole concept, which now looks very small, when i could have gone to a date or have a relaxing time with friends/family

How do you learn new stuff? for eg, i am learning php via udemy videos(5-6 mins each) since last 4 days. my goal is to make a small blogging website in 30 days. so far i have watched 10 videos and only able to learn how to setup mamp server, echo, some stuff on variables ,data types and functions.

How much would you have learned in a weekend? what is your approach?

Being too careful and always trying to reduce memory and processoe usage might be a bad thing after all. Lengthening development time and inducing more stress on the developer just to reduce resource usage is not very sensible when dealing with small to medium size programs that doesn't deal with big data/file types.

What made me notice this habit in programmers was when I was smashing my head on the keyboard contemplating what method I should use to store the history of outputs for a fucking text based program that has minimal gui elements..
Having ocd as a programmer is a nightmare. But thank god it's not as bad as it was a year ago. I couldn't even read something without repeating the same page over and over again because my stupid brain decided that I was not reading it right. WHAT THE FUCK IS READING IT RIGHT ? Thank god for my psychiatrist and pills. I can atleast work on my projects without wanting to kill myself now ! 😂

Where can I find those types of "homework assignments" where let's say a company sends you a sample project and asks you to add few features where in that way you learn new technology in a practical way?

I know there are some public "homework assignments" projects from Wix where you're given a sample project that uses let's say react framework and typescript where you have to learn react and add features and send it.

These projects IMO are the best way to learn new technologies fast instead of going through the documentation and figuring wth are they talking about before you realize the full potential.

Are there any of those "awesome lists" in GitHub or something? No I'm not talking about "algorithms and data structures" type of thing, I'm talking real practical samples that I can learn from and extend it.

So I believe in replicated effort.
I like the idea of multiple groups of people creating or engaging in the very same endeavor at any moment as long as intermediaries between these people visit on each project and determine its merits.

Examples could be data gathering, or development or research.

Example maybe being multiple people operating methods of altitude heightmap gathers or canvas imaging and publishing the data.

Or canvassing neighborhoods for new construction.

Or as in my case creating a nice handy dandy file types database for use as lookup table values in my application.

You know what I hate however ?

HAVING TO DO IT ALL THE HELL OVER AGAIN NO MATTER HOW QUICK OF A TASK ONCE I'VE DONE THE TASK ITS LIKELY NOT GOING TO GET MUCH BETTER THE SECOND OR THIRD GODDAMN TIME AROUND !!!!

Hi,
looking for a bit of help.

Has anyone a recommended tutorial / introduction to .NET development, TFS and Visual Studio?

And - for later - a good reference for the datatypes / advanced topics / build system?

I'm starting to work on a Windows only DLL plugin and quite frankly - I'm lost.

TFS and Visual Studio is new to me and feels awkward...

And thx to experience I can understand most parts of code but the build system is unknown to me.

And a lot of the data types .NET has ...

Thanks in advance!

I have this love-hate relationship with strong typing.

Right now, the types are shared between:
Postgres <-> DB Data Models <-> GraphQL <-> TypeScript <-> MobX-State-Tree

A register machine with strings and hashmaps as the only data types and no stack. You have to make one from a linked list of hashmaps.

What are exemples of underused data types that you wish we used more often?

Using Set or Map or WeakMap instead of the normal Object+handmade dirty functions (JavaScript), for exemples?

So for a question on Codeforces, I got the basic logic right, but for one particular test case, the input is a huge number of 250 digits. But the most unsigned long long int can handle is 19 digits. So I used double instead of int, but that makes me lose precision. And I also cannot use the % operator (modulo) which is int only. How do I get around this ?

I search for a problem. Write down all of its aspects. Write down the process I would like to implement for each aspect.

At this point I ask myself which language/db/library... is compatible with my processes. I write down all the data types I would probably need and a rough outline for the ui.

After that I just start coding and go with the flow 3 rewrites later I need a break.

Not very efficient start.

i understand way too little about web data types. while having to store a shitload of data in cookies (sorry for that, no localstorage for local sites, insensitive though) i was so proud of compressing strings with bitshifting only to find out that uriencoding bloats chinese characters massively up. fml

My friends were wondering if I could teach them the basics of coding. What order should I do it in? The basic things I want to teach them are input/output, data types (numbers, strings, arrays, etc.), flow control (loops, if/else), functions, variables, and maybe oop if I'm in the right mood.
Also, would python be a good language to start with? It's definitely the language I know the best.

I've been sitting here staring at extension types and I wonder, what if I had a partial file with partial data ?

In general one could say that in every case where say a header is missing that is ALWAYS going to have some identifying characteristics even given a characteristic statistically frequent pattern of data, that there is always a null value that appears as total chaos.

But I wonder, is there a way beyond simply trying every goddamn possible combination of things until meaningful data is extracted to identify a file by its content when part of that content that is usually used for such a purpose, is missing ?

What kind of application or technology would be required for this ? Certainly not neural networks, but obviously some kind of ai right ?

Hey guys, i'v been working in a company for almost 1 year as a web developer. I only know the basic data structures and algorithms even after this year and also my co workers didn't seem to know graph,trees and other algos like dijikstra and all those advanced algo types. I'm searching for a job with better salary should I have to learn all these to get paid well ? Where even I can apply these things in my job? Is it worth ?

can someone explain me what are ADT(abstract data types)

TypeScript is bullshit. Change My Mind:

I am a student and I started learning typescript as an advanced project at the recommendation of my teachers because I am a bit ahead of where my software development course is.

I started by testing the logic of types, and then I encountered type: unknown.

According to the TS handbook:

"If you have a variable with an unknown type, you can narrow it to something more specific by doing typeof checks, comparison checks, or more advanced type guards that will be discussed in a later chapter:"

So according to what this says, if you check a variable of type unknown, to equal a certain object type, typescript will allow you to assign that unknown value a I tested this out with a data type - objects and typescript freaks out.

Also, if create object with a property assigned to a function, it won't even show you that property when you console.log the object

ALSO, you can't post urls in this website, so this website is also pretty trash.