So a few days ago I felt pretty h*ckin professional.

I'm an intern and my job was to get the last 2003 server off the racks (It's a government job, so it's a wonder we only have one 2003 server left). The problem being that the service running on that server cannot just be placed on a new OS. It's some custom engineering document server that was built in 2003 on a 1995 tech stack and it had been abandoned for so long that it was apparently lost to time with no hope of recovery.

"Please redesign the system. Use a modern tech stack. Have at it, she's your project, do as you wish."

Music to my ears.

First challenge is getting the data off the old server. It's a 1995 .mdb file, so the most recent version of Access that would be able to open it is 2010.

Option two: There's an "export" button that literally just vomits all 16,644 records into a tab-delimited text file. Since this option didn't require scavenging up an old version of Access, I wrote a Python script to just read the export file.

And something like 30% of the records were invalid. Why? Well, one of the fields allowed for newline characters. This was an issue because records were separated by newline. So any record with a field containing newline became invalid.

Although, this did not stop me. Not even close. I figured it out and fixed it in about 10 minutes. All records read into the program without issue.

Next for designing the database. My stack is MySQL and NodeJS, which my supervisors approved of. There was a lot of data that looked like it would fit into an integer, but one or two odd records would have something like "1050b" which mean that just a few items prevented me from having as slick of a database design as I wanted. I designed the tables, about 18 columns per record, mostly varchar(64).

Next challenge was putting the exported data into the database. At first I thought of doing it record by record from my python script. Connect to the MySQL server and just iterate over all the data I had. But what I ended up actually doing was generating a .sql file and running that on the server. This took a few tries thanks to a lot of inconsistencies in the data, but eventually, I got all 16k records in the new database and I had never been so happy.

The next two hours were very productive, designing a front end which was very clean. I had just enough time to design a rough prototype that works totally off ajax requests. I want to keep it that way so that other services can contact this data, as it may be useful to have an engineering data API.

Anyways, that was my win story of the week. I was handed a challenge; an old, decaying server full of important data, and despite the hitches one might expect from archaic data, I was able to rescue every byte. I will probably be presenting my prototype to the higher ups in Engineering sometime this week.

Happy Algo!

You ever just randomly blank on something super basic? Like something that has been drilled into your head since you started in development and should be impossible to forget? Anyway I just had to Google the newline character.

Ok might as well share my misadventure on a phone screen:

It started pretty normal, the guy talks about his background, the position, and asked me about my background.

Move on to the language trivia; I’m not good at memorizing language features, but I guess it’s what people want, so I’ll be working on that down the road… Anyways it didn’t go well, and the guy somehow made me feel like an idiot even on the questions I got right.

It’s really awkward at this point… but let me tell you I was not prepared for what I can only describe as the fucking coding portion of the phone screen…

No computer. No pencil or paper. No whiteboard. Over the phone I’m saying: “class Dog with a capital ‘D’ colon newline tab def space bark open parentheses close parentheses….”

what the actual fuck

This is something I'm proud of about myself as a developer, which is rare.

My setup with the Alt key.

All the keys in my left hand (as in, for all the keys in my left hand region, qwerasdfzxcv)
have their Alt and AltShift combinations mapped to (almost) all the special chars related to programming.
For example:
Alt + z -> /
AltShift + z -> \

Here's me typing them in 2 seconds.
{}()_-'"/:+=<>[]|#~`\;*!

And, on my right hand, I emulate the arrow keys movement:
Alt + hjkl moves chars
AltShift + hjkl moves and selects chars
AltCtrl + hjkl moves words
AltCtrlShift + hjkl moves and selects words
Alt + n. backspaces/deletes chars
AltCtrl + n. backspaces/deletes words

And the best of them all:
Alt + space -> <return>
AltShift + space -> Shift+<return> (which does a newline in chat editors like fb messenger)
AltCtrl + Space -> Ctrl+<return> (which can do the submit in some forms, like send email in gmail)

Now, my hand sits for real on the home row and rarely moves because it's not there just for vim, but for the entire system as well.
This setup is very compliant with my little mouse use, since I use vim, and the vim extension for chrome.
I still use and need the mouse for some tasks.

Another one huge benefit is that I don't have a problem remembering where the keys are. This is a problem I can have because I go between different keyboards because of having used different keyboards: argentinian, american, japanese and now brazilian (I'm not trying to be cool, it's just a series of circumstances that led me to using different keyboards).

At the same time, this thing might have become a hinderance because it's not as easy for me going to a different keyboard.

Regarding implementations, when I used MacOS I used Karabiner, insanely clean interface.
On linux, I have to create my own mapping in X.

Several months of work got deployed and suddenly the app stops displaying user submitted images. No new changes that looks related went live and the images seem to be stored and read by the code. Nothing looks odd about it other than images not displaying. 4 hours of frustrated developers later an accidental newline at the top of a routing file is removed and all is fine.

Dude what the fuck with C#'s code style?

Pascal case variable names and classes? Don't we do this so we can differentiate between variables and classes??

Newline between parentheses and brackets?

Retarded auto get/ set methods that serve no purpose than to make code difficult to read and debug?

And after all that shit, string, which is a class, has a lowercase s and is treated as if a primitive?

I really have no idea why this language is so widely praised. The only thing I like about it is that it's the only major bytecode language that has operator overloading and reference parameters.

I once wrote a php function to convert newline in a textarea to br, never knew of the pre-built nl2br function!!

You know shit is going to hit the fan if the sentence "c++ is the same as java" is said because fuck all the underlying parts of software. It's all the fucking same. Oh and to write a newline in bash we don't use \n or so, we just put an empty echo in there. And fuck this #!/bin/bash line, I'm a teacher. I don't need to know how shit works to teach shit. Let's teach 'em you need stdio for printf even tho it compiles fine without on linux (wtf moment number one, asking em leaves you with "dunno..") and as someone who knows c you look at your terminal questioning everything you ever learned in your whole life. And then we let you look into the binaries with ldd and all the good stuff but we won't explain you why you can see a size difference in the compiled files even tho you included stdio in the second one, and all symbol tables show the exact same thing but dude chill, we don't know what's going on either.
Oh and btw don't use different directory names as we do in our examples. You won't find your own path, there is no tab key you can press to auto-fill shit.
But thats not everything. How about we fill a whole semester with "this is how to printf" but make you write a whole game with unity and c#. (not thaught even the slightest bit until then btw)
Now that you half-assed everything because we put you in a group full of fucks who don't even know what a compiler is but want to tell you you don't know shit and show you their non-working unfinished algorithms in some not-even-syntax-correct java...

...how about we finally go on with Algebra II: complex numbers, how they are going to fuck up your life, how we can do roots of negative numbers all of the sudden and let you do some probability shit no one ever fucking needs. BUT WHY DON'T YOU KNOW EVERYTHING ALREADY HMMMMM, IT'S YOUR SECOND LESSON, YOU WENT TO SCHOOL PLS BE A MATH PRO ASAP CUS YOU NEED IT SO MUCH BUT YOU DON'T NEED TO KNOW PROPER SYNTAX, HOW MEMORY MANAGEMENT WORKS, WHAT A REFERENCE IS AND PLS FINALLY FORGET THE WORD "ALLOCATION" IT DOESN'T PLAY A SINGLE ROLE YOU ARE STUDYING SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT WHY ARE YOU SO BAD AT ECONOMICS IT MAKES NO SENSE I MEAN YOU HAD A WHOLE SEMESTER OF HOW TO GREET SOMEONE IN ENGLISH, MATHS > ECONOMICS > ENGLISH > FUCKING SHIT > CODING SKILL THATS HOW THE PRIORITIES WORK FOR US WHY DON'T YOU GET IT IT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE BRAH

I wanna make a c+friends language and it'd be dev friendly and will throw lots of errors on compile to show love. Also it'll compile slower with each newline so you can always say "it's compiling" there will be classes but people instead and then instead of new I'll have create. As for loops let's go with a friendly do while loop and dontdo while as normal while or dowith i while to have a friendly for loop. Instead of ifs let's say decide() and instead of else let's have or. Instead of functions I'll have well you need no functions you'll have jumps and tests before jumps just like assembly has. Oh and everything will be a pointer because then it runs nicer. To create a variable you can't use = because that's the equal sign in decide you need to use "var int myint is 69" because why not. Then to print to the console "console.outputstream.out(myint)" instead of threads I'll have please like "please work" where work is a jump target. I hope you'll enjoy this language ^^

Yesterday and today combined I spent about 8 hours trying to get my PGP / GPG passphrase to work. Absolutely magically, somehow a newline character had gotten into the passphrase. Yes. That's possible. On macOS, that is.

On my Windows machine I have the same fucking private key protected with the same password. Now try and get a non-windows newline character into any Windows password field, be it a command line or some GUI input. WTF! You'll lose a year of your life with every passphrase error while you have the actual passphrase.

So after all these hours trying to hack my own GPG keystore without success, I remembered how the private key got on my Windows machine in the first place: see tags.

So, in C#, are there any tips or guidelines as to how to write "clean" multiline strings? I mean, imo it doesn't look as neat when the code looks like:

static string kindOfLongVariableName = @"First line of string.
Second line of string...";

With the first line sort of hovering on the side. What I'm used to is with Python where you can just:

variable_name = """'\
First line.
Second line.
"""

And use the '\' to escape the newline, but that obviously doesn't work in C#. Can anyone point me in a direction to start looking? The docs are a bit confusing and not very beginner friendly. :/

So 9 months back I wrote a script that asked for company's symbol to fetch data from a site, just one symbol a time. There were around 300-350 symbols, I tried storing symbols in a text file and supplying input from it, it did not work then so I decided to leave it as it is. Today when I took closer look at the code I wrote, I found that the symbols were being fed to the script, however, the "\n" was included too, so my script was failing to get data in bluk. Modified it today, it's all good. Its kinda crazy, 9 months and only thing stopping my script to work was a freakin "\n".

I am really tired and frustrated.

Where should I even start?

I have created a TeX element with "/Math".

Then I have tried to type in a sum sign which works with "\\sum". BUT it won't let me display numbers below and above the sign. I tried to fix this by typing in "\\sum{someNum}{some\_other\_num}". It didn't work. I tried "\\qquad \\displaystyle\\sum\_{i=1}\^n". It still doesn't work. I tried "\\underset{}{}". It didn't work.

I tried to import the ams package. It didn't work.

I tried to read the official notion documentations. They didn't exist.

I tried some of the above KaTeX commands, because I saw that notion is using a KaTeX parser. "\\qquad" worked whereas "\\;, \\>" etc. didn't work.

"\\newline" and "\\\\" don't work.

When you have your formula written, it displays the latex commands and the results together when you don't edit the TeX/Math element anymore.

I would be very thankful for helpful answers.

just got Java templates for an assignment. the lecturer uses both newline before "{" and tabs for indentation...

Damn python. This actual wasted me 2 hours of time.

Why Python, why?
Anyone faced this?