Cred: Practical Dev

how do you migrate to production so fast?

Schrödinger's code:

Its both working and crashing until you run it.

26 years ago Linus Torvalds sent out this message to the comp.os.minx newsgroup.

Hello everybody out there using minix -

I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
among other things).

I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. 
This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and
I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-)

- Linus

PS. Yes — it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. 
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.

Fast forward to today and Linux has more than 12 000 contributors from over 1300 companies that contribute to the Linux kernel.

The Linux Foundation released a fairly detailed progress report, including an infographic which I was tempted to include here but you can view it in it’s original context here.

While you’re over there, remember you can be a sponsor of the Linux Foundation too.

Happy Birthday Linux and a giant thanks to not only Linus but every single one of the contributors that have taken part of it over the years.

Yay practical algorithms!

Is there any practical reason why we can't develop native iOS on a non Apple mashine?

I'm tired of having to use my sisters old shitty MacBook Air while my new XPS 15 is dusting up 😡😡😡

... Credits: The Practical Dev

Such innovation, much practical..

My favorite kind of interview question/challenge is anything that is highly practical for the job. At the current company I work, the coding test/interview challenge was to design and implement an API very similar to the core functionality of the actual product. It’s fair, tests for skills relevant to the job, and is much better than irrelevant silly brain teasers and cs questions, I feel.

In terms of specific questions, one of my favorites is one that one of my colleagues suggested I ask to potential candidates: describe what you think your biggest failed project/task was in your engineering career, and what happened/what you learned. I think it’s a good reflective question that can tell a lot about someone.

Theory vs practical.

Interviewed a dev for a junior role earlier this week...my first question:

const numbers = [0.1, 0.2, 0.3];
let sum = 0;

for (i = 0; i < numbers.length; ++i) {
setTimeout(() => {
sum += numbers[i];
}, 0);
}

// Refactor the preceding code so that the following returns true.
console.log(sum === 0.6);

---
He had no idea where to even start, so I asked him to walk through the code with me line by line, he couldn't get past line 1 - literally didn't know what an array was... I walked through the code with him and he just started to look more and more lost.

I didn't even bother with the rest of my questions on OOP, FP, etc...

Am I really expecting too much of somebody that claims to have 2 years practical experience in JavaScript, jQuery, Angular, and PHP?

Do you think this is a problem a junior dev should be able to solve...even if it takes some hand-holding?

Some people deserve to be shot.

There's a difference between a nice font and a practical font 😅

The only book a developer needs to read. 😈

school takes the creativity out of programming.

you want to try something new?
sorry, can't have that. functionality = priority.

school takes the choice out of programming.

- you're gonna use x language
- with x api
- in x environment
- and make it in x way
- because if you don't, your gonna fail x assignments
- because programming is about getting the job done, with no creativity

yeah fuck you too

school takes the cleverness out of programming

you get a turn left function. it turns a 'turtle' left any amount of degrees that you pass it, you have to make a turn right function to turn right 90 degrees. well, if you thought turning left -90 degrees was a good idea to make a turn right function, then fuck you. you have to turn left three timeswith the default 90 degrees instead because it's more practical/logical.

fuck that.

anyone else hate the movements to get programming into schools?

I went on an interview was given an algorithm to solve, solved it in 30 mins and they had allocated 20 mins for it. So I guess I suck. I build shit, I don't do algos that often so I'm obviously rusty.

interviewer: so why should we hire you over a CS graduate.

me: cause I can get shit done.

... akward silence

interviewer: what do you mean by that? like html and CSS?

me: as you can see, I have built large scale real-time web apps with React/Redux (the stack they supposedly use and the position they're hiring for!) the knowledge I have is practical, it can't be learned from books, and it can't be learned from a course. Only building, breaking and rebuilding over time will teach you this knowledge. So essentially a CS grad, who hasn't committed the same amount of hours as I have, can't possibly match me. But they probably can better explain the real world applications of using linked lists...and won't have to Google what Pascal's triangle is like I had to....

interviewer: I see. we will be in touch.

lol well I guess they'll be in touch..

This is my debugging pal.

He gobbles em all up.

No, really, he is. This isnt just for the practical humor. Hes actually my debug pet thing.

I wish this was not true.

True fact!

Had my practical exam yesterday on Data Structures using C.
Had included this in my code
if(!count)
break;

Examiner: What type is count?
Me: Sir, it's an integer.
Then he asked me what was not expected.
Examiner: What does this exclamatory mark do?
In my mind: Now's the right time for the world to end. 😛

I did a 3 years study in computer science.

I got an intern that is on her last year of a 5 years study in computer science too.

So we have the same age, just that I have more practical experiences than her and she have more theoretical baggage than me.

We are discussing on the design of what she will do over her internship and while I'm talking about some JSON modelling she interrupt me to say something like "so this tuple is meaning..." talking about a JSON object. I didn't get what she was talking about (I never did python and didn't learn much about mathematical theorems during my study) so I asked her: "What is a tuple?".. She looked at me with dead eyes saying "what!? you don't know this ?!!" Like I was the dumbest man on earth. Fortunately our PM which is also a coding guy was sitting next to us and explained to me that by saying "tuple" she meant a "JSON object" and to her that it IS normal if I do not know what a tuple is, first because of my studies, 2nd because my job is to be an Android Dev and that I do not need to know this to do my job. He added that by the way I'm doing well my job and that if I wasn't there to help her on her code she would never succeed her internship.

I'm glad my PM intervene but fuck those who always think they know everything better than others without questioning themselves before !

I started to get super pissed off to people saying you don’t need a college, masters degree to get an IT job. Instead go and gain practical knowledge, showing your practical certificates projects is much better than a having a degree that doesn’t prove if you can do the job or not.

Is a degree absolutely necessary to get a job? No, I agree on that. You can tear yourself apart to be known make projects loads of people contribute in GitHub spend maybe years on practicing and creating stuff for your portfolio..

But excuse me what do you think people do in college studying degrees? Are we getting it from the shop in the corner on a Saturday?

Respect people’s achievements and titles. Especially Masters degrees push you hard, make you sweat apart from loads of courses you work at least a year on a practical project, dissertation, thesis and only pass if it is your own opinion and findings. It is not like a multiple choice exam certificate or you study watch videos for few months and create a web page.

Don’t throw shit on people’s efforts and accomplishments without knowing how it is achieved just because you don’t have it.

Yes it is not necessary. Does it make you learn? Yes! Is it practical? Yes! Does it help you get a job? Hell yes! Why most companies look for degrees? Do you think they might know what it takes to get it and the skills and knowledge you gain?

Don’t come and say in IT degrees not worth it without even knowing how to draw UML. Without knowing IT management you go and be a leader later on, no clue on how to manage projects, people and soft skills sweeping the floor.

It doesn’t matter if you are a YouTube celebrity or a president. What does the title say? “Master” now go, respect and digest it! Don’t be a sour loser.

Ooh I am fierce today and not done yet

How I see GPU brands:
- Team blue, Intel:
Oldschool autistic engineers, working GPU but not practical
- Team red, AMD:
Competitive but anarchist, horrid Windows drivers, but good on opensource, anti-mainstream
- Team green, nVidia:
Way too greedy cunts circlejerking each others off during breaks (like Apple employees), delivering on performance, but wayyy overpriced and scammy tactics

That moment when the practical work supervisor don't understand why you don't use netbeans because he thinks that MongoDB is a netbeans plugin.

Practical testing knowledge :P

Practical example of why you should sort your code by feature (users, notes, analytics) instead of technical layer (models, views, controllers, etc)

Interviewer: can you write a code snippet to explain function overriding

Me: *gives a practical example *

Interviewer: *not satisfied*

Me: what would be a proper example for the question?

Interviewer: *writes a text book example *

Her example didn't even need inheritance in the first place. It's one of those forced examples.

Next question: a riddle. Yes, a riddle

Introduction to graphics

Lecturer says "this is a very practical course. In fact I think we should have a practical exam"

All students agree. He would sort out that matter.

Meanwhile he taught us how to making shapes in java, then a house, then a game...

And the exam was for us to make a building where a user can walk through the building using the arrow keys...

What fun we had. We got out marks...and everybody did well!!!!

Learning VIM has no practical value. Change my mind.

A close friend of mine is in his third term in university studying software engineering, asked me how did I land my first job so quickly after graduation.

His question made me stop for few seconds and ask myself, how would my life would've been without Coursera , Udacity, codeacademy and css-tricks.

I literally spent 2 years wasting time in uni then I discovered these sites and started learning while studying just enough to pass subjects that really has no benefit for the future whatsoever.

Even with subjects like data structures and AI, which should be interesting, it was 40℅ theory and the practical part was to complement the theory part, it was never for real world examples.

Kinda feel bad for my friend because he'll end up feeling the same frustration I went through at university.

Even now a year after graduating I feel that the only benefit of my degree was legal.

When would this silly system change ? If university courses can be specialized like online courses wouldn't it bring better talent to the market? And why governments don't take action towards this?

Fuck yeah! Passed Dutch practical driving exam first try! 😁

Finishing off an all nighter the best way I know how (well most practical because the best way isn't entirely possible lol).

How are these EU-Upload Filters even practical for anyone except google? This seems like the most unrealistic specification by non-tech bosses in history to me 😭 What do these people expect the upload filters should compare the uploads to? How the fuck should, say a blog website, ensure that none of the uploads are copyright inflicting? Are quotes copyright inflicting? Or only when I copy paste an entire book and write my name under that? How will that get detected? Do we have a database with all the copyrighted works somewhere, that every company has access to? This shit can basically only work for companies like google which have enough data to implement such filters and thats why they already had an upload filter on youtube anyways. This entire amendment is so fucking ridiculous that it basically has to fail, no doubt. In a few months still nobody is going to have upload filters, watch...

I really should find a better use for my notebook

Colleges aren't teaching enough practical applications of why we devs do what we do. Get students engaged with small business! Get them to think about how they apply what they learn to the real world!! We need creative new ideas from developers that think outside the damn book!

Stop calling people by their old occupation titles. .
Please address them by using their new titles accordingly
and they will like it their job more.

OLD: *Garden Boy*
NEW: *Landscape Executive and Animal Nutritionist*

OLD: *Petrol attendant*
NEW: *Fuel transmission engineer*

OLD: *Receptionist*
NEW: *Front Desk Controller*

OLD: *Typist*
NEW: *Printed Document Handler*

OLD: *Messenger*
NEW: *Business Communication Conveyer*

OLD: *Window Cleaner*
NEW: *Transparent Wall Technician*

OLD: *Temporary Teacher*
NEW: *Associate Teacher*

OLD: *Tea Boy*
NEW: *Refreshment Director*

OLD: *Garbage Collector*
NEW: *Environmental Sanitation Technician*

OLD: *Guard*
NEW: *Security Enforcement Director*

OLD: *Prostitute*
NEW: *Practical Sexual Relations Officer*

OLD: *Thief*
NEW: *Wealth Relocation Officer*

OLD: *Driver*
NEW: *Automobile Propulsion Specialist*

OLD: *Maid*
NEW: *Domestics Managing Director*

OLD: *Cook*
NEW: *Food Chemist*

OLD: *Gossip*
NEW: *Oral Research and Evaluation Director*

Which one got you more?

So here's my setup.
Minimalist and clean, the only environment I can work in.

My laptop spends way more time at home now-a-days since I bought the iPad Pro 12.9 2017... It's just so practical to take to lectures.

As for my desktop... well my keyboard definitely needs an upgrade... Any suggestions on a good keyboard?

My alcohol shrine, keeps me sane 😂😍. Let's see your setups.

So my colleagues and I are somewhat great friends. (As in my first rant, I'm a practical evil joke guy). Since our boss thinks we are working on the production server (in reality, he commissioned it to be done in 4 months time. We all got it done in a month.), we get our own little room in the building, each time one of us walks in, we greet each other with a nice "go fuck yourself". Not to be mean, but just as a joke.

I decide to leave the room to go get a drink and I said I would be back. Guess who wants to see the dev team to see where they are on production? Not our boss, the fucking CEO. This isn't a big company, but this definitely was not expected.

So, he walks in and greets the team. He gets greeted with "Go fuck yourself".

I come back to see my team outside, and the CEO asking me why they said that. So after 15 minutes of ass ripping, the CEO leaves, our jobs barely intact, and I get to talk with the team about why we have to be nice to our superiors.

Using Oracle 10g for our distributed databases practical lab session, and typed many SQL queries in one sheet.
Suddenly this guy came and told shortcut 'ctrl + r' to quickly run selected query.
And the page fucking reloaded and boom, all queries were gone! His evil laugh was more disturbing. 😡😡
Fuck him.

My brother, who is a programmer too, throwed the big java book at me and said: Read this and you'll have a job. So I read it and got a job. I'm a practical learner, so I just picked up the basics from the book. OOP and all that I learned while working. It was like a decently payed apprentice position. But I was my own teacher.

I attended a 2-days scientific conference last week which lasted from 9 AM-7 PM.
I submit my travel expenses today and the university adm got guts to tell me that
I should commute 6 hours everyday to that place instead of staying in a hotel.

Please people, I contribute making our research and name renown to the public. I don't even get paid doing that (did it for the sake of experience).
The least you can do is to support the accomodation. The penny pinching you did in the name of cost saving is embarrasing.

I didn't like every hour spent working in the uni, yet people still ask me why I won't continue to PhD.
No offence to all PhDs out there. It's just that my practical and money-oriented ass couldn't
stand all the free work I have to do if I do that.
I'd rather work in a supermarket, at least I'm getting paid of what I'm worth.
😕

Apply for a job, pass the application stage, pass the practical demonstration and get invited for interview.

2 other candidates dropped out before the interview. It was an internal position for me, the other two were externals.

I still got made to interview for the position even though I was the only suitable candidate and everybody in the organisation knew me from my current role.

Why HR? Why?

P.S. I got the job.

Some of these things have been probably mentioned already in some way, but I'd like to add my two cents nevertheless
I grew up in Germany and have been in the German school system for my whole "school career" and what I always missed was a computer/programming related subject. (A real one, not this thing where they teach how to use MS Office) Something that would have pushed me a bit more into this world of technology and programming way earlier, because I didn't know which possibilities I had. It doesn't happen often that I think that something is better in Slovakia but I have to say that in Slovakia they are teaching CS in standard schools from the age of 11or 12 I think. I don't exactly know what they teach there, maybe it's shit, but it's something at least. I know that most people swear on teaching themselves programming and all but there are people like me who struggle with that.
Then of course I'd like to see the teaching get better. They should teach the useful stuff and focus on practical experience.

I started a project at high school 7 years ago, I had no idea what's clean code or design pattern, just learn while keep coding. I eventually stopped because my code is so terrible I cannot understand it anymore.

Now, after 1 year of working, I look back those dirty codes and think it is actually not that bad. Within hours I even fixed a bug with concurrency.

I start to think, instead of learning to how to write good code, maybe I should learn how to read bad code. That's just much more practical.

Clients keep asking if our software will support XYZ format.

XYZ format is a proprietary format that we are not the proprietors of. Unfortunately, it has become something of a de-facto standard in our industry.

It is not practical to support the format because being able to figure it out is difficult, time consuming and not even a certainty. In fact while we have historically done so for previous versions, it has been upgraded several times so this becomes something of an arms race for us (whether intentional or not).

Responses from clients when we try to explain this vary, but a not insignificant number of them intimate that this is a failing or fault on our part.

It is pretty annoying, and considering the damage in perception it can do, is a pretty interesting and subtle form of economic moat I had not previously considered.

Soooo it's Monday........ 🤯

@C0D4 started the day fixing current projects defects (4 tickets smashed before coffee 💪)

Then after coffee, run a test coverage report and see a significant decline over the past few months, so spends a couple hours adding more tests to get some areas filled in - meh, nothing like 50+ lines per test... to test a if() statement but whatever - complex scenarios will be complex to get too, but no my tests break and I'm missing data I didn't know about🤦‍♂️
So let's comment all that out, and go to lunch ... mmmm lunch.

Get back, start working on those again, and then get handed a new issue, so comment that all back out again, ( ok I know what you're thinking, but I'm working in an environment that does not use git for deployments - don't ask, real pain in the ass I haven't had time to invest into yet - but as code versioning only) anywho, starts to workout this new issue but don't figure it out, enter a 30 minute meeting.................. yea that was 2 hours later but was a very practical whiteboard session only to work out I have something like 16-20 weeks of work over 4-5 projects to get out in like 6 weeks... hahahahahahaha fml..... oh and that's excluding another project which had a 6 weeks of work in the pipeline to get to somehow.... I'm not seeing this one happening, and probably conflicting projects needed on top of that down the track... but we'll leave those out for now!

Whoot is fucking home time!!!

🤷‍♂️I'm starting to think I'm like a team of 5-10 devs right now, maybe I should start asking for 5-10x more 😏

#letsBringOnTuesday!!!!

Fun though practical question.

You've accidentaly pasted and sent some internally used password, let it be your account pw or some server's root pw, into a company's chat channel with 100+ other employees. What do you do next? :)

P.S. deleting the message is not possible
P.P.S. this happens. Thanks to windows "Let me just quickly change window focus from putty to chat window" _FEATURE_ I've accidentally shared like a dozen of root passwords with others.

Some people are a little too sensitive about harmless practical jokes. 😒

I feel like "programmers are not computer technicians" joke is kinda overused lately. It doesn' matter if we are not technicians, we are very knowledgeable in computers and people knows that. People of course will try to get help from you when they can so it's not a wonder that they ask you to help with something they are not confident. Everyone that exercises practical professions lives through that. If your sister-in-law is a mathematician it's normal to ask for help if you are not able to come up with the right algorithm for the task. People depend on each other. That's how we survive.
But I'm not saying start helping everybody that can't open a pdf file. Just know who to choose to help. If they are a capable person or someone that's a part of your everyday life they will most likely repay you when you are also in need. Believe me everyone needs help time to time.

My 17 year old cousin got inspired by Hollywood movie and said he wanted to be an Hacker. Now, who can explain him the shit that's shown on the silver screen isn't practical in real life. The life of programmers, hackers is rather about learning continuously throught their life rather than hacking into a quantum computer through a gaming console.
🤬

I'm curious...is there a practical application for reversing a string, other than for tutorials and interview questions?

management logic.

dev : calling api on every product scroll is a stupid idea. we shouldn't do it. what if user has 100s of products bought?
mgmt : it isn't a practical scenario. in prod, we checked the data and we rarely have customers with more than 20 products
dev : 😮🤷‍♂️

dev : this is a rare issue that only happens for very old devices from this specific manufacturer. even manufacturers have acknowledged this.
mgmt : we don't care. fix it, as per data this error has been logged for more than 12 times (from 1 user only)
dev : 😮😢

A funny story I just remember while my code is compiling :

Back in high school, in Math, we were taught how algorithm works, and we made some exercises with practical examples.

I didn't know anything about it back then, so was curious. Was pretty fun, but one day, my teacher said that a IF is a loop. I said "no, this is a test" but she keeps saying that it was a loop, ignoring me (I dunno if she actually heard me) and no one actually noticed it as she repeated it several times (while I was saying that it's not). I just gave up trying to say it's wrong.

Teach programming languages practically. You can’t make a person learn to program when they’re just sitting in a lecture hall staring at the board. Sure, you can teach them concepts like classes/OOP/etc., but you can’t throw 20 lines of code up on the screen and expect everyone to understand it and be able to replicate it or tailor it to their needs.

It’s like learning a language. You can learn the concepts of e.g. tenses in Spanish by sitting in a classroom, but you don’t really know it until you’ve used it in real-world situations. You need practical experience building stuff in a programming language to *really* understand it.

Merge VS Rebase:
- Did you pick a side?
- Practical tips? Like dealing with merge conflicts
- Have you ever regretted using either?

My answer
* My team squash-merges all branches to master so we don't really care what the branch history looks like. Master history should be pretty - but a branch history can be ugly and filled with a dozen commits.
* Practical tip 1: use `git config rerere.enabled true`. rerere stands for "reuse recorded resolution" and this means if you rebase often you don't have to resolve the same merge conflict twice.
* Practical tip 2: use `git commit --fixup oldcommithash` and then rebase with `--autosquash`
* I like using Rebase. But I have regretted the amount of time I've spent on trying to rebase old branches with many commits only to give up and to `git rebase --abort` since I realised I couldn't handle trying to reapply all the commits chronogically as the changes in the 1st commit were no longer relevant.

Just finished my 1 year intership! Now 3 months school till the final exam.

// sidenote: got a job offer from my practical trainer 😀

Will be having first experience as a interviewer.
I pledge that I will ask practical and fair questions and pull the best out of the candidate.

University, first Java practical lesson.

I'm sitting near this guy, clearly hyped up because he managed to install his first linux distro earlier.

After 5 minutes he asks me how to do the task the Professor assigned that morning.

I'm playing dumbass in my head, thinking stuff like "oh big boy installed ubuntu but can't declare a fucking Rectangle class in java lol" (what a dickhead).

I helped him, and then proposed to go out for a quick smoke.

Turns out we're very similar, hyped as hell with linux (like I was at the time), with same CS interests. Still texting sometimes.

I know most of you know this, but after having dealt with both recruiters and real companies I can safely say that recruiters are of no practical value.

I've wasted countless months of my life interacting with recruiters and getting nothing out of them. To me it seems they're only after fluffing their client base.
The only time I got a job was through the real companies themselves.

Now I have learned the lesson: stay away from recruiters.

So I help teach a class of high schoolers to program and I want to pose a question, what can I do to give & better more interesting presentations, and what should I avoid?

Today I gave a presentation and the first half of showing them some practical things you can do with Python didn’t go as well which I figured would be a little boring,

but the second half I showed them a script I wrote to install fonts in Linux and I essentially set it up so that I could rewrite it in front of the class and I walked them through the process of rewriting it to show how useful loops are and they really enjoyed watching the process, so I thought about doing more stuff like that where I just walk them through problems but Idk

Let me know what you think I could do better

I have a serious question.
I particularly address Italian ranters.

It's about time to decide what faculty/"subject" I should go to, and I'm uncertain between "Informatics" and "Informatic Engineering".

Does someone know what the differences between the two are, and, given that I want to do as much programming (and so practical stuff instead of theorical stuff) as possible, which of these two faculties should suit me best?

If you're not from Italy, but from other countries, of course that shouldn't stop you from posting a response, if you want to.
How do Universities work there?
Are they like ours, in Italy, or does it work differently?

Thanks for your patience. 💙

Developers who think complex code is good.

"Oh, lookie here, I can swizzle methods and inject dependencies in the runtime!"

"Although we have no valid use case, let's use dependency injection and follow the commandory stateor patterns because I watched a video."

Just because you learn something new that looks cool does not make it practical, you tosser.

Hey peeps,
I got a question that is bothering me for a while now. I am from Germany and I quit my CS studies a few months ago in favor of a "Berufsausbildung". I don't know if other countries have a comparable equal to our Berufsausbildung, so I gonna give you a quick overview:

In the Berufsausbildung you stay 30% of your time in school where you have to learn the basics and theory parts of your chosen profession. 70% of your time you are in the company ("Ausbildungsbetrieb") that is training you to learn the practical parts your profession and gain work experience. At the end of the Berufsausbildung, you have to work on a project and present it in front of a committee and write some exams.

So the Berufsausbildung is more about learning by doing instead of learning all the little things in the field of your profession.

Now to my actual question. One of my biggest dreams is to work in Japan as a freelance for a few years or more. Working on projects for companies in my home country while traveling through Japan. I know that it is hard to be allowed into the country for a longer time and even working there without a good education. I always have the feeling that I am inferior to people who have a college degree and I am afraid that my "inferior education" might be a huge disadvantage in the future for me. I already gained 3 years of work experience as a dev and in February 2020 I will have finished my Berufsausbildung. What is your experience with working as a dev without any college degree? Are you treated differently than other people that got a degree? And has anyone experience with working abroad with or without a degree?

Thank you very much!

How ignorant we all are about the world. It's not necessarily a bad thing, just a fact. After a four year degree I've learnt so much, how a computer works from the physical phenomena on the hardware level to the inner workings of an OS to the highest level abstractions of modern web development, a wide array of programming languages covering several different paradigms, mathematics from calculus to statistics to algebra, how to work with databases, how to administrate a server, how to build a website, and much more.

And that's just in a degree. I have knowledge in one domain and I wouldn't even call myself an expert in it. Medicine, physics, biology, the hundreds of branches of engineering from civil to nautical to aerospace to automobile, to geology to meteorology to astronomy, to the practical application of this knowledge in hundreds of trades. There's so much more to know in so much depth and only recently have I realized how little we all know on an individual level.

Finding this out has been a mixed bag, on the one hand it's made me value what I know and what others can teach me a hell of a lot more, on the other, knowing that people haven't realized this and adamantly discuss and impose from a position of ignorance isn't very nice.

tl;dr I know that I know nothing

Any embedded systems software engineers out there with practical experience in writing/designing safety critical applications? (think DO-178B/C) I've got a few years embedded experience under my belt between internships, my projects, and now my relatively new job at a major aviation company, but I feel like I'm behind on this topic of safety and code that can't fail. It's simply not taught and I really want to learn more. Partially it is out of personal pride because I want to make a great product, but more importantly, what I work on is protecting a human life. I really really really want to feel confident in what I build. Is there anyone out there who's got some years under their belt that can point me to some good references? Or maybe some helpful tips? Much appreciated. If it helps, all my work is in C.

You may know I love to hate tests. Well not the tests actually, what I hate is the TDD culture.

DBMS schema in my app dictates a key can either have a value, or be omitted - it can't be null, and all queries are written with that in mind (also they're checked compile-time against schema). But tester failed to mock schema validation, inserted a bunch of null keys with mock data, actually wrote assertions to check those keys are null (even though they never should be), and wanted me to add "or null" to my "exists" queries.

No, we don't need more tests, and you're not smart with your "edge cases" argument. DBMS and compiler ensure those null values can never exists in our DB, and they're already well tested by their developers. We need you to stop relying on TDD so much you forget about the practical purpose of the code, and to occasionally break from the whole theoretical independent tests to make sure your testing actually aligns with third-party services some code uses.

And no, we don't need more tests to test your mocks, and tests to test those test, and yo dawg, I heard ...

“Practical” tech interviews for senior roles (from my experience): DONT worry! We won’t give you any “leetcode” problems!! Instead, we’re giving you only 40 minutes to do this huge laundry list of tasks that are simple but hella time consuming. We want to see how fast you can type. So you have 40 minutes to write a mini app while we take note of the shit ton of simple errors you make due to the time crunch as your fingers burn through the keyboard and then wonder why no one can pass our “simple” tech exam!!!!

DAMMIT!! the only tech exams I enjoy are ones that involve refactoring existing code bc everything else is a fucking speed test! I’d also MUCH RATHER take these exams WITHOUT someone there taking notes like I’m a fucking lab monkey!

Used to create a web app that is practical and usable in a hackathon. Lost badly due to bad presentation, while the winners only created gimmick stuff, good for the eye, unusable but they had better presentation. Grrrr!

TIL how time-delay relays are used in circuits with a hell lot of power. For example to power and control the motor of a machine that lifts 20 people up to the sky and back to ground again.
FYI this is a simple circuit. We will hopefully start experimenting with SPS/Speicherprogrammierbare Steuerung (Programmable Logic Controllers). I cannot wait to make use of our predesigned circuits with complex logic gates with the new unit we will get to know.
Unfortunately, we will do practical networking (testing cables for the signal strength and speed, building a network of telephones and call each other - guess this is going to be the funniest part lol, etc.) before the SPS and LOGO software phase.

Btw. I am doing an all-nighter rn and repeating everything we did in our recent signal calculation lesson. We have another exam tomorrow.

Fuck Unity.
Today the version that those monsters call stable, decided to not render UI text (canvas) in a project I had to upgrade from an older version.

But it performs this practical joke (that stable software must do) only in the fucking editor.

How am I making sure that the text aligns? Ah, just moving the anchor positions, changing the font size, binary fucking searching for the right position for alignment by moving n pixels at a time, and exporting a webgl build and running it to make sure it's aligned

We're shifting to Unreal next year. I'll make sure of it

Ok so I have done some work with crypto currency mining pools and recently a client requested for me to make a splash page that showed data from multiple instances of these pools APIs. I went to find some documentation for this open source api and to my surprise there is none. I thought of querying the public API from the clients side and it worked, however it's so slow that the data shows up roughly 20 seconds after the page loads.

Easy fix right? Make a PHP server get the data every 5 seconds, cache it and serve the data with the page and use a websocket for live updates! Until I found out that there is no practical way in this garbage framework to get the damn API data without making an HTTP request or mutilating the original source code. I'm so done with this garbage framework. It literally loads pages based on a page and action parameter on the index.php. I quit.

Learnt a very important lesson today..

To add some context; I'm currently in my second semester of uni studying a Bachelor of Computer Science (Advanced), and started the year with no experience with any language.

Up until recently all my practical work has been guided by context sheets, now I have some freedom in what my program does.

Because of the very small projects earlier in the year I have built a habit of writing the whole program before compiling anything. This worked fine since the programs were small and at most only a few errors would be present.

Cut back to today, and I had been writing a program for a bigger assignment. After an hour or so of writing I began thinking I should probably test everything up to this point. I ignored it...

Fast forward 4 hours to having "completed" writing the full program. I knew by this point I was taking a massive risk by not testing earlier.

Lo and behold, I try compiling everything for the first time and countless errors prevent the program from compiling. I tried for quite some time fixing the errors but more just kept appearing as 1 was fixed.

I'm now left with no time to fix the program before the deadline with no one but myself to blame.

Lesson learnt :/

Hello everyone :)

So, I've recently switched from Windows 8 to Debian on my work (or study, rather) laptop, and so far it's been pretty intuitive and practical! But I'd like to explore the world ofr Linux a bit more in-depth, especially considering the fact that I'll "soon" head off to study Security in university. So, here's my question for y'all: does anybody happen to have good resources to share about linux system administration?
Thanks in advance! ^^

So we've had a new guy on our team for over 6 months now... Been training him up doing shadowing.... Training courses... Study time... The works...

He didn't have the specific skills for our team but had 2 degrees, lectured at uni... Seems VERY smart......

Yet he still has barely grasped the basics..... When experienced people talk about challenges they've had he tries to suggest what they do... Constantly raising 'problems' with ways of working but offers no solutions and never collaborates on how we can fix it......

He avoids doing practical learning and thinks he can learn the job from reading docs... .. Sigh....

Gone almost as far as doing daily check ups on what he's actually doing to make sure he's progressing..... Tough one to crack!

In Rx, what is the point of returning Single for all of our networking request responses, if every call to that method, first of all converts it to an Observable so that it can use flatMap, filters, combineLatest etc.

I get that Observable's have more overhead, Single can only return once, thats all clear. But is it not MORE overhead to create a Single, return it, convert it and now have the Observable we were trying to avoid in the first place.

I don't know if its just Rx I don't like, or how the team here is using it. But it is pissing me off, to no end, how massively overly complicated this is. It really feels to me like this is following a textbook approach while ignoring all the practical details.

<rant>
Next person to say "because its the Rx way", is getting a monitor thrown at their head.
</rant>

!dev

I have this urge to get better at coding and software architecture and design. But fuck me if I'm not lazy about it.
All these crazy good books and lectures and here I am, doing jackshit to improve. Can't even finish my own personal projects. Bah.

I know how I'm supposed to go about it, how to keep engaged in a cycle of personal betterment. I lack self-discipline to do it though... Tried meditation for a time, but haven't really stuck to it. Currently trying to follow stoics (Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and some others), but the mindset is not so easy to adopt, and the practical philosophies even harder.

Oh well. Life is hard. Blah-blah-blah. Thanks for reading. Just wanted to vent, really.

Question:
I am planning to learn machine learning and deep learning. I am quite comfortable programming in c++ and python, what would you recommend would be a nice starting point with more attention towards practical stuff.

// RANT

STUDENTS NEED MORE HANDS ON COURSES !

I'm doing a year abroad for the fourth year of my masters. I come from a school that really pushes projects, pitches and research forward while leaving in some theory.

Now that I'm at another uni in a different country I can't help but note how UNPREPARED students are for a professional setting ! And they are one year away from finishing their masters in Software Engineering...

Students should use version control tools, they should test their software, they should apply their knowledge to a concrete project ! A 3 hour course on software testing is only as good as its practical counterpart.

Just wish I could swap a portion of my dev super powers for something more f’king practical like being able to do DIY or mix cement and lay bricks properly.
Every damn time there’s some small job to be done it turns into a god damn nightmare.
Anyone else as single skilled as me or can you actually do real world skills too?

Completely useless.
Well to be fair...
I studied after I already worked as a software dev for a few years, so I already knew most of the stuff.
Most of the time I just pointed out mistakes of the profs.
I still completed it, but I've never used the degree at all. Not even for my recent interview. I did not even put it on my CV. And I still landed the job.

I think that practical experience is way more valuable than having a CS degree. (Apart from CS research/academic positions)

I remember my colleague who was DevOps guy (15+ years exp) in our one very good project about kids' edutainment.

He always breaks things & blames others when only he had admin access of the tool.

When client was very much interested in Android app, our that DevOps focusing totally on REST API & ignored Android app related DevOps tasks.

Our Android CI/CD was not complete till project ended. Due to his stubborn nature we couldn't take benifit of automation testing.

You can't tell him how to do any task, if you tell then it will be taken by him as an insult to his intelligence.

He would waste his 2 business weeks to find a way to do that task, then he would do some frugal trick half heartedly then he will leave it. Still he wouldn't accept your help due to his ego & he would work on tasks which he likes even though they are of low priority.

He was hellbent on cost cutting so he reduced caching availability to save extra billing, now we couldn't had enough speed for even 10 users to show recommendation feed by API.

Due to this our client couldn't show demo to angel investors properly & didn't get funding.

I don't how with such a bad attitude, he could survive so long.

He had plenty of training certificates (Salesforce etc.) with very little practical knowledge.

God save people of his current & future projects.

Its good and practical but those who aim to fill gaps in the programming industry by trying to produce "programmers on demand" via a several month long bootcamp are complete idiots. Nobody can learn to develop a well structured application that's easy to maintain in a couple of months, either that is frontend or back end. We are trying to be engineers , not just solve problems.

I realized that I'm spending about 2 hours in the taxi so I told myself that I I gotta make use of this time and started reading books about pentest and such.
After a while I noticed that this is not working as expected. Because the stuff I was trying to learn by just reading books were mostly practical and I had to see how they really work (like running the codes and so on)
So I reviewed my long term plans and oh! All the topics are practical !

So I'm asking you:
What are the useful topics that I can learn by just reading or what are the other ways I can make use of this time?

I think the fact that even Apple can't unlock your phone if you forget your passcode proves that they use very naive encryption method.

Suppose my data is "Hey This is Some Data" and Passcode is 1234, I could just Jumble this data using that passcode and It will be difficult to decrypt without Passcode. And If data is huge, it will be fairly impossible to do so. But that doesn't make it a good encryption method.

Such encryption, though safe is not practical, Imagine if there was no "Forget Password" Option on any account, I usually forgot my password very often when I was a child.

Apple has been doing such things for years, Using Bad things as a selling point. Apple users are dumb anyways because they don't want to control their phone.

Reset Password is a weak point which might be exploited but in such cases, usability is more important than security. Any service which doesn't allow resetting Password is a shitty service and I would never use such a service, They are too naive.

Software engineering doesn't evolving the way you think of it.

There are no new big patterns. There are no new big concepts and ideas to bring that evolution to us. Rob Pike thinks that the concepts he used twenty years ago are the best possible way of implementing everything and he creates Golang.

The evolution of software engineering, and maybe the whole evolution as a concept is a tick-tock. Software engineering had its latest tick at nineties, when the concepts we call modern were developed. And the latest tock was the rise of the internet, and it given the single-computer-centered Von Neumann architecture really hard challenges. I mean ticks are theoretical inventions and patterns and ideas and etc, while tock is more of some practical, business-oriented implementations.

PHP is still in use. We have troubles with scaling and deployment. Banking systems still run old Java, Windows XP and even COBOL. We had persistence really, really long time ago, and now frontenders reinvent it and call it 'immutability'!

We had our tick many, many years ago. It's time for tock. With not only scientific but commercial use of things such as Clojure, CRDTs and maybe Rust lang, we are heading straight to our new big tock, which'll bring us new great problems to solve.

That's how any evolution goes.

Think I finally figured out a clean way to get the data I need out of the system. The data format has it's origins in what was practical for computers in the 1960s. TGIF - I'll enjoy believing I've solved it all the way until monday.

Teach data structures by showing how they're used in real life situations. Don't make us do some nonsense puzzle shit. For example, a friend of mine is learning stacks/queues right now and his assignment is to build a simple HTML parsing algorithm to determine whether an HTML file is valid. This shows the student a practical use of the data structure and reinforces that this shit actually does get used in real life.

(IMHO) The current system fails to identify that there are at least 2 main paths one can take in our field. Software engineering and computer science.
Software engineering should not be just a course. It should be a craft, a degree. Where one can learn practical things not just algorithms that are used in niche cases.
Computer science branch won't be that different from what we've got now. It can be even more focused on theory.

I have an idea and I want some feedback.

I'm the only web developer and I've been updating our systems so they can be maintainable. Previously we have used Wordpress for landing pages which is complete overkill So here's the idea:

Static sites for landing pages and any forms that would need to filled out would be on a separate site.

Ok so here me out. First the landing pages barely need any maintenance so using pure HTML/CSS/JS wouldn't be a problem. This means I can strip away all of the crap from Wordpress and make the load times faster. Second all of the landing pages forms would be hosted in a single place making analytics easier for the reporting system.

Really I just despise Wordpress and am trying any practical reason to not use it as much as possible. Oh and don't worry I'll use preprocessors and minify the production files.

Lab classes were meant for practical not theory. Mood destroyed

On the most serious of notes, and i need yall to think hard about this.

What makes you a good developer whether Backend or Frontend or Web or mobile.

What qualities actually make you a good developer?

I mean, we all use google, github, stack overflow etc. So what makes Programmer A better than Programmer B.

and in a more practical sense, ive been coding for two years now and i have deployed an API written in node and an instagram automation tool in PHP (which is down now due to lack of funds), i lack frontend knowldge (but i want to make up for that) and i have projects that when i finish, with my connections can and will blow up in terms of income. now you on the other hand, what makes you better than me?

and lastly, how much code do you have to change from an existing project, lets say from github for you to comfortably say, yes this is mine.

Man I hate programming tests that have no practical application. I'm not doing one yet, just saw an example question that made me go...ok...I kinda get what you want but..why would you EVER need this. Googled and the consensus is that..*drum roll* you wouldn't ever need it because it's only useful to see if someone can solve it in an interview.

Why not give actual problems or at least actual test cases of things that way you can see if people can solve actual real life problems. Wouldn't that prove that people can reason their way through things or not? See if they can provide a good solution for something that someone else has already encountered instead of some nonsense that wouldn't have an actual practical application?

Maybe it's just me but if you give me a problem that sounds like it's useless for some reason my brain just goes, "Ah this sounds like it's useless, better not actually devote all my brain power to this"...

Not my story, but something that my friend did which inspired me a lot. So, a friend of mine who just graduated with a bachelor's in physics, had a month off after one of his semesters, and while most of us ended up doing internships in companies, he decided to do something else. He decided to go up to a local mechanic and ask him to teach him how to repair bikes for a month. Now in India, a mechanic is sadly one of the least reputed jobs, so for him to go there and work for free was unusual. After working there, he told me about the things he learned and to what an amazing extent he could apply that practical knowledge he gained. It was truly impressive. Which is why I have decided to do something like this in the future as well. With enough savings, I'm sure all of could survive a month. I can't even begin to imagine the potential of this, you could learn so much practically.

Apparently, a lot of people here are complaining about the fact cs classes (and I'm talking about uni here) are way too much theory and far too less teaching practical things. And don't get me wrong, I don't like viewing cs only from a theoretic point of view either, BUT I think cs education is made to teach you how solve complex cs problems by yourself and give you the tools on how to learn about these things in the future. And this is very much theory.

CS is the science part, so don't wonder if there's a lot of theory in it. If you only want to learn how to program, maybe you should take programming courses instead.

In school though, cs education should be less theory and more doing practical (funny) things, programming, "how does the internet work", "why I should not give my credit card details to random strangers on the internet", things like that.

For my graduate level people(aka Masters degree students or holders)

How normal would you say that: giving dense ass lectures in NN with absolutely NO practical examples and just a fuckload of theory + 1 simulation project in Pytorch in which a robot is to detect collisions is?

is it normal? i mean I knew about Pytorch from a very shallow overview, but these assholes gave that project and expected it completed in a week with a fuckload of dense ass lectures and no practical exmaples.

I know school is supposed to be hard, that is not my gripe, but in yalls experience are teachers more descriptive and fun in other institutions? do I just have shit luck with teachers? I don't feel like wasting my money. If your experience was better then let me know, cuz I want education yes, but i want it better.

I never wanted to be a programmer. I spent years in education being confused and bombarded by information that was poorly explained and made little to no sense.

Then in my final year after having a basic understanding of the building blocks, I just sent out to solve a problem >I< had.

It all just clicked into place and it turns out I had learned but perhaps didn't have an appreciation of how to apply it.

I'm guessing my education was too theoretical and not enough practical.

Started learning React recently cause the job I applied for reqires it.
So far so bad.
I...I don't get it.
It might be that I'm just starting out, but I can't see any practical use for it. I don't GET it.
Ugh..never been this frustrated (which I'm guessing isn't helping the learning process.)
Gonna have to wing the shit outta that interview.

I like being diverse in what I can program. I like software development, web development, networking programming, I’m starting to get into embedding programming and using lower level languages like C/C++ (I’ve used them before but not for anything practical) and I enjoy the diversity. It makes me feel good knowing I can extend my programming knowledge.

Also I like having project ideas lined up so I know what I want to do next. And if I don’t finish one I know is easy but I can’t figure out, I CANT MOVE ON! I have to finish it. It’ll drive me fucking nuts.

Hello.
I am a student of Computer Science Engineering (Bachelor of Technology). I am 3 years into this 4-year course. I am strong in Data structures and Algorithms, and passionate to add more stuff to this list.

I am really done with this University coursework, and want to explore more (specifically, want to do something that is practical, and matters). I, obviously cannot leave the Uni, but I want to make my time at home more productive. Not just to me, but everyone.

But:
1. I don't know where to start.
2. I teach myself everything, and hence, there is much difference between what I know and what people need, and I'm kind of scared of ruining/wasting other's time.

If there is someone out here who has the time out of his/her busy schedule to guide and set me on a path, please do help me. It's getting weird in my head.

Languages I know: C(took a 1-year course), Python, JavaScript [learning JAVA], Oracle, Visual Basic

Things I have done before:
* Developed a fullstack website for Indian Railways (going live in May 2019) [used Python for back end]

I have a sincere need from within to do this, and I am going to learn whatever more I need to, in order to fulfill your requirements. Please just show me WHAT and from WHERE.

Kindly do get back.

What's the most interesting use for a QR code (or any other 2D code) you have seen?

While teaching theory is actually good, it doesn't mean that there is no room for any practical education either. Students needs to be exposed to modern programming languages like Python, Ruby while at the same time be trained in the pioneers of programming like C, C++, Java. It is only then would they be able to make informed decisions on who they really want to be. If you had one practical lab session on C and Java and then the rest of the semester about HTML, students would end up moving away from programming.

Concepts like programming and networking concepts should be included whereas ancient technologies like programming micro-processors (x386, x486, etc) should be excluded. Who programs x386 and x486 micro-processors anymore? While the understanding of how micro-processors and other low-level components in the computer systems work is very essential, doing practicals on them isn't really a good use of students' time, energy or effort.

First time I started playing with the VB macros in Word making little joke viruses to scare my friends.
Was 1997 and I was about 10 years old. Thankfully my playful streak never went past harmless practical jokes.

This year I graduated from high school and started a dual curriculum (50% practical work at a company, 50% theory at university) and after four months I can without a doubt say:

I am not enjoying it at all.

React has been a gateway into the practical functional world.

Having a crack at Clojure/Om/Datomic, and then recognising the roots of functional and immutable programming that I've seen before.

I have a lot to learn.

Looking forward to grasping macros fully. Walk before I run though

Please excuse my ignorance but what distinguishes a junior developer from an entry-level developer, in practical terms?

Is it basically that a junior developer has some practical experience where an entry-level developer has very little to none?

Update syllabus with latest technologies instead of teaching some outdated language which has no practical use in the market.

Google documentation sucks!

Lack of practical examples. They show us very simple example like clicking on button and then straight away redirect to API docs.
Wait, let me at least understand how things fit in together.

Me: Hey google where is step by step guide, at least for setup?
Google: We don't do that here!

When you gotta learn those hard coded values for a practical exam cause your professor doesn't accept other values:)
#feelsEngineeringInIndiaMan

she gave us one day to write 20 practical. i hope she understands the reference.

Found this book amongst other 7 grade school books...
Fuck, kids are learning the basis for every technical job this days, in my time even chemistry was only theory... Let alone practical lessons

Saw an ad on a news/media website looking for front end developers.

Fresh out of Practical Engineering college, which is basically a rapid 2 years teaching academy, I knew the manager previously and applied for the job.
In my standards I failed the "interview" miserably, but nevertheless they still took me under their wings and taught me everything.

1 year later, I'm the lead web and android dev and currently learning AWS and iOS.

it's a fun experience and the unexpected responsibilities have taught me alot.

very interesting how uni stressed me tf out but is still better than school has been.
I'm taking a class which has a theoretical and practical part, and there is a guy leading the practical lesson. and after struggling to find motivation for studying, this class somehow probably gives me my hopes back... even though I'm way less capable than the rest in what we're doing, I still can follow everything, which is very suprising to me because I'm always behind and the class has some recommended classes I should've taken before (but I failed some or didn't take them at all)... I still can follow the class somehow?

so... school taught me to not ask question because even if they say there are no dumb questions... the possibility still existed that I could ask a dumb question (shoutout to my math teacher in 3rd class). so... I stopped and when I didn't understand something I gave up.

now... this class makes me feel differently, I can ask questions and the guy I've talked about talks to me normally, talks to me as human beings should talk with each other and doesn't judge me for making a mistake, because... mistakes are human and when I allow myself to ask questions I can learn from it.

this is really a weird epiphany I had this week

and I also don't know if anything of this makes sense

I hate my AWS professor, he just sucks at explaining the practical part of AWS. How one can make it completely dull, I just don't get - explain almost anything the right way and I am fascinated. I will also say the subject is taught online and I really do not jive well with online teaching outside of self-paced things. He has on one particular occasion given us a homework that he took from an Indian guy online that was impossible to do in our scenario, with AWS Academy student accounts, and we protested by not doing it and calling the professor to the attention of the administration. We'll see how it turns out by the Friday...

!dev

TL: DR - This year is not good so far.

One important thing that I learned this year is you understand a certain person's importance after they are no more.

My grandfather, whom I've always hated, ignored, made my distance from him, just because he was unfair with me and my mother since my childhood, passed away a few days before. Only then I realized what kind of a fucking idiot I am.

On top of that, 2 of my best friends stop being friends with me, for one I had gone too far with a practical joke and for another, I proposed her.

But 2 months from now I expect things to be left behind, locked away in a closet, and throw away the key.

So, I'll just say this, that acknowledge person while they are here, don't hold any grudge towards any fucking one.

Back when I was a total noob at programming probably 6-7year back. I once fucking try to memorize even-odd number program for the practical test because I was unable to understand anything related programming.

It was like - read 20times the include statement and try to remember what was in between < >.

I totally feel embarrassed now after looking back, that silly me didn't even try programming properly.

I just got an offer to transfer to a better uni course!

I just finished my first year of "Computer Applications" which is kind of like computer science with software engineering mixed together. Because of the grades I got (1st class honours) I got an offer to transfer to a more practical course that focuses on team work, testing, agile etc. Needless to say, today is a pretty good day

We got a relatively cheap logic analyzer (we is me and my dad) and we tried finding the drivers for it.

Their website was a dead-end and it didn’t come with any disk or something. Somehow, Seleae’s website had a suitable driver, and it is completely unrelated to the product we bought.

(Seleae is a company that sells god-tier logic analyzers)

WHAT THE FUCK, SPARKFUN?!

Also, regarding the devRant rewrite project I am currently searching for some nice (and practical at the same time) design for the profile view.

!!!Question here!!!

I am enrolled in a full time course (bachelor of Engineering, Computer Engineering), currently in second year, will be in third by June 2017, and I have a job offer from a Japan Based Company, so it legal to do the job while being enrolled in a full-time course? Also, if I drop from the course and focus on job, so will that be good?

The package is really good, but the degree is important (at-least in India), I want to know about other parts of the world also.

I am inclined towards joining the job, but then it frightens me as the culture here is (degree is important, talent is not!), but I have faith in myself, after watching many motivational videos on youtube, I feel like following my passion, but then I need to be practical as well.

What to do, what not to do? I need your help, please let me know what are your views?

Its a confession...
So yesterday we had a practical in our uni... It was on Assembly Language (NASM and TASM)... Its a horrible language to work on... Trust me... I hate it, infact... We all hate it at the uni... But the thing is... We need to pass the practical in order to sit for the theory, and it is really hard language.... So most of my friends brought pen drives... And some brought chits... And sadly... All of them got caught... And were marked as fail right away... But the thing is I also cheated... And I copied successfully... I didnt use any pendrive or removable media... But I used ssh to my cloud server... And since I code on vi, it was pretty easy for me to cheat in the practical... I feel bad that I cheated.... But then I feel proud as well because I used the tech of this generation to copy, and not some grandpa shit like pendrives...
Yeah... That was it... The codes did rain in the exam..
I know I am a horrible person.. But common guys.. Who am I kidding... I am proud that I didnt use any clichè methods... And was talented enough to do so without getting caught...

!rant

So this happened sometimes ago.
We ,primarily, makes accounting software with industry specific integrations of manufacturing,etc. A soon-to-be new client visited our office for a meeting and a quick demo.
He's not satisfied with his current software and wants to switch but keeps bragging about how his current software operates and it's easier for him.(Only because he's been using it for years.)

NC : We used to do like that. Blahblahblah.

My Boss : Well, I built this new office last year. I visited "Taj Mahal" just before that. It was so beautiful. But it doesn't mean I should build a "Taj Mahal" for my office because it's not practical. Same goes for this software.

The client has a great sense if humor. He burst into laughing after 5 secs of silence. Not a single word of his current "system" after that.

PS : My first post.

So recruiters seem to cause a lot of trouble for the members here so I thought maybe we as a community can write an open letter and publish it somewhere. If a large enough group of us signs it, it might get some traction and start a discussion.

It would be nice if recruiters were made aware of the problems people are facing in the recruitment process, and we too can hear about the realities they are facing with candidates and clients.

We can send this letter to any recruiter as a reply to bad recruitment practice, so it can have practical and educational value too.

Yay or nay?

My reasoning is stupid, I just think it's cute in a pimp my ride kind of way. I heard you like getting colossally pounded in the fucking ass, so we put a virtual machine inside your compiler so you can use your binaries while you compile your binaries.

But there is a practical angle to it, too. It's state, structures and execution within the code itself -- that is, in a sense, generators "embedded" within the source, but without any kind of special syntax.

Rather, the code is all the same, and I'd have the option to make calls at compile time: the output of these calls could, in turn, be part of the resulting binary or processed by further calls.

It'd greenlight the wildest fuckery in the jungle, because *that* is the true and ultimate abstraction: programs that write other programs with minimal human intervention. But is my (still) theoretical, cheap ass two-dollar prototype approach held together with clown jizz and prayers better than the endless cumloads worth of corporate investment that's dumped and pumped into generative AI on a daily basis?

Well... **lights cigarette**
That's what we're about to find out, mother fuckers.

I have a question on the Signal app.

Two family members have an extensive chat history. One of them accidentally deleted the data. The backup function was not active. However, the other side still has all the data. Both are using Android smartphones.

How to transfer the data? Re-sending works only five messages at a time, which is not practical with some thousand messages.

Is it possible to export the data from one smartphone e.g. via USB to a PC, then import that via USB on the other?

I'm a practical learner. Usually i get myself a simple example from codeproject and play around with it.

I constantly switch between tutorials, documentation and doing it. Doing it makes me find questions and i can remember things better if i care about them, which happens if they are the answer to a question.

Within those experiments i build working example code and document it in a way that fits my needs. When i haven't done the stuff for some time, this self-made examples, help me continue where i was.

Serious question, looking for actual educational answers: I've used Linux for around 5 years now, but what, from a practical user standpoint, makes Arch so much "better" than other distros, as many seem to believe?

The customer was really persistant that we should not use ANY locks when reading from SQL server, not even Sch-S locks, because "noone else is using locks".

After two days of trying to explain to them the concept of "Dirty Reads" and the practical imposibility to avoid Sch-S locks, they finally gave up.

The best part was when they asked in a quite condescending way "this is funny, why do you think that nolocks causes dirty reads?" and I sent them a link to the MSDN page about nolock that cleary states "Specifies that dirty reads are allowed.".

Algorithms class assignment..
"Prove that the merge procedure cannot run in place".

Searching google...
There are multiple merge procedures (though super complicated) that run in place.

What's the use of this class if we can't be practical because we must be theoretical, but we can't mention real theoretical stuff because it's so complicated??

I mean we are being told something that is just wrong..

I really hate this fucking professor. She went to Oxford and now thinks she's the smartest person in the universe..

I was introduced to disassembly/reverse engineering today. It's amazing how many production applications use isLicenseValid() or other helpful function signatures to assist in my practical learning :p I'm looking at you sublime text

I don't know if this can be classified as a legit "regret" or not, but anyway (hence no wk78 tag).

I've always chosen to focus more on the theory behind computers and computing rather than on practical dev skills. Not saying that the more theoretical things aren't fun - concepts from theoretical CS and maths still regularly blow my mind, as do the more "esoteric" languages like Haskell, Idris, and Coq. However, after seeing you fine folks here at dR talk about practical development, it feels like there's a whole world of stuff that I've missed about computers and programming, especially web programming. I think I'll tackle that next when I have some free time, maybe spend some time learning PHP to see what all the hate's about... (really though, it must do something right if it has such a huge userbase, plus, I think devRant uses it too...?)

Anyway, just wanted to say that you folks are really cool and an awesome source of inspiration. Best community ever.

A previous rant made me start doubting my choices.

I just graduated from college (but college here is probably not what you call college. You choose whether you do one more year and gain the 'x technician' certificate or you do two years and get the 'practical engineer' degree)

Hope you understand it.

Anyway, so I continued 1 year (I skipped 1 year so it's like I did the whole two years) and I have a practical engineer degree in electronics.

I love programming and really want to work in the field but (since I know nothing about the market) I don't even know if I'll get a job without going to university and getting a degree (which I want to get, I want to learn Software Engineering though, not CS)

So now to my question, do you guys truly think getting a degree will be a waste of my time?

tl;dr I want to get a Software Engineer degree, but a lot of posts say it's a waste of time. Who agrees and who doesn't?

Even though I’ve been working through a C# book about WinForms, which I’m half way done with, I still don’t feel like I’m working productively and I hate the negative feeling it’s giving me.

It’s going to sound stupid but it’s making me feel like I’m not spending enough time programming even though I’ve been programming quite a bit this week. I mean the small apps aren’t practical they’re just for learning how it all works but still. Im not reading the book for learning the programming logic it’s for the WinForms knowledge.

I think it’s just that I want to make progress on my main project and just have a 4+ hour coding session.

does recursion have any practical use outside of being a cute/elegant solution under constraints where stack overflow isn't a concern due to small input size, and leetcode?

im having trouble thinking of anywhere you could justify using recursion in industry outside of leetcoding people

i assume the iterative approach would be preferred in scenarios where scaling matters

Take the bitter truth @bittersweet told so sweetly.

Add this: If you want great software developers, don't put them into a dark room and teach them the theory of software development. Teach them the longing for the wide and endless space of possibilities.
> Quote after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

So basically give them practical problems which them to desire the theory. Provide an integration of open source contributions into education. Online and offline.

The hotly debated topic that anybody can learn to code is always seems to devolve into a definitional or even epistemological argument to the point of being valueless. But I like to think about it like this:

Anybody can learn to code in the same way anybody can learn to drive. The most rudimentary of searches for 'dash cam fails' should provide some valuable context for the practical implications of this.

So I applied for a Cloud Architect position. The process was very intensive. Roughly 6 interviews, 2 practical assignments and a written exam. In total it took me 3 weeks to go through the screening process. I aced everything, and was told they were going to send me an offer. I received an email on the 21st of April asking me if I was still interested. I replied back immediately saying I was most def interested. The next morning I get an email back from the hiring manager, who happened to CC the client as well, saying I took too long to reply to the offer, and the job was filled. I was perplexed as to how I took too long to reply. I went through the email chain that the client also received, and saw the hiring manager changed the email headers in the reply chain from the 21st of April, to the 12th of April. So it made out that I did indeed take too long and the client went with someone else! WTF! Very unprofessional, but very little I could do.. I wasted a lot of time and energy and heartache with this!

Alrighty starting to get basics of vim down. From now on it's mainly rinse n repeat until it flows. Any suggestions what else to do to make myself a useful vim-python "ide"? Is there a way to get syntax highlighting, auto complete etc? What else is needed to get a cozy, practical vim python ide?

Our informatics practical instructor's logic:
Put everything inside functions :D
Sure that'll help xD

Don't have a cs degree, when I was in college I didn't know what I wanted to do, so I got an bachelor's in math figuring that would open a lot of doors. Did a boot camp after college to test the waters and found out i had a real passion for engineering. 2 years later I am teaching people with Masters in cs how to get shit done at my job. Morale of the story, your education in the theoretical doesn't mean shit when it's time to get practical work done.

Is it sane or practical to write C programs on PAPER dealing with processes and child processes that handle files and other processes and sh*t?

I don't know 😐

Is it practical to use Git on system disk as a replacement to Windows' System Restore?

This guy is easily the biggest idiot I've ever seen. First off, there is no such thing as Valedictorian at UMD. Second, he claims to want to start his own company and become the CEO by sheer will and hope. No business plan, no money, nothing practical, just a few CS classes and a dream. But don't worry, "nothing is insanely difficult if you want it badly enough!"

My first gig was with an MSP doing tech support and eventually some proper infrastructure design and mangement.

Regularly myself and colleagues would find reasons why we should be doing things 'this way' and how we're doing wrong by our customers by not following best practices. (Things like firmware upgrades on routers, switches, servers)

We regularly got shutdown, just told 'no, it's not to be touched if it isn't breaking'. This obviously got us pretty worked up and kinda devided us.

The thing is, It wasn't until my next gig that I sorta realised they were kinda right to shut us down. There was clearly a risk to reward equation we weren't thinking about as employees with no financial stake in the company.

In an enterprise setting, sure doing those kinds of upgrades is necessary, and normally you have a team full of experts and tools to help you do those tasks whilst also mitigating as much risk as possible.

So at the time it felt like a bad experience, but looking back now I realise that from a business perspective it wasn't practical for us to constantly risk breaking things just because 'i read somewhere that we should do this'.

I think to be successful as a developer, IT tech, systems engineer, it's really important to get to know the other departments of the business and how the work you do affects them.

Watching YouTube and reading the documentation.
Preferably with a practical goal (e.g. a software that does something).

So I got this thing about getting multiple units of things I like for some time. practical examples:

- Got a tattoo, then I got later 4 more(but I think getting more tattoos is pretty standard)
- got one pencil, then I bought 8 more and a can to store then
- Bought a mouse, then now I got 3. (all of them are microsoft it's one of the few things I like from MS)
- Got a laptop sleeve, I got 3 now
- Got a keychain for my car keys, now I have 6
- I got a piercing, then I got 10 more(eyebrows, ears, nose, tongue, mouth). But I removed most of them, a pain in the ass to clean all those jewels
... list goes on

I haven't been with a psychologist, but I'm guessing that could be some obsession/compulsion or I'm just pretty standard and this is kind of normal. Anyone can relate?

For web devs here, do we really still need to support browsers of the evil (yeah I'm talking about MS browsers, Edge included) ?

I mean, building a css ui library here in 2017, without the benefits of custom properties, grid and so many other cool things, is so fucking frustrating.
A practical example : color theming with custom properties = Fuck Yeah / color theming without custom properties = so verbose and painfull, sucks.

The library is mostly for private usage at the moment so... I'm about to drop IE and Edge in the deepest shithole of the darkest cavern of my memory, and move on coding my lib with modern CSS, with almost no regret for the ghosts of the past who are still using these shitware today.

Should I ? Or should I... maintain compatibility as we traditionnally do ?
What's you guys opinion about this ? Can we finally kickban these browsers from our lives ?

What's better for finding candidates for a development role: having the candidate solve a complex whiteboard problem or have the candidate refactor some code (maybe a couple of small modules) while explaining as he/she goes through each step?

I personally feel both are good, but I think refactoring is a very much needed skill when you're dealing with the complexity of millions and millions lines of code, so being able to change your inital design to make it more readable and flexible later on is crucial. And refactoring usually goes hand and hand with having tests in place.

An interesting exercise would be to give the candidate a test suite with the corresponding code that's tested in a working state and let the candidate decide how much refactoring needs to be done. In the process the candidate would need to break and fix tests of course while changing things... it'll give a good measure of their ability to take code and change it to a "better" state of design and flexiblity.

On the other hand I do think there is a place for cliche white boarding problems because it really shows one willingness to tackle complex problems which do arise in most development jobs. Asking the questions and being persistent goes along way and can really help when you're collaborating with other developers to solve an issue at hand.

Overall I think there should be a white board problem, but I don't think that should be the deciding factor. Rather couple it with other very practical skills you should have as a developer already; among those being refactoring.

It has to be Keybase.

It is exactly what I need - A secure yet practical cloud storage, where only you own the crypto key, with the added bonus of maintaining a blockchain-based identity online, with proof system and all.
Also has a secure PKI-Based E2E chat when I want to talk to someone about something I don't want the general government to necessarily know.

Definitely recommend the service! Even with the odd decision to include an option of a Lumen crypto wallet or whatever, you can just ignore that feature if you're not into it and it doesn't slow you down.

So this is something that happened in the first year at college.
I was at one of the top 50 engineering colleges in my country. To get admission here one needs to get a good score in the qualifying exams.
Now we had a cs related course in the first year which covered basic programming and coding concepts.
So in the first practical session we had to just write a hello world program in C.
The guy next to me for this session was the class topper who had secured the highest marks in the qualifying exams.
Now, as most of us know that program has a line that is:
printf("Hello World!"); or a variant of this.
This guy gets stuck while writing this line, so I ask him if I can help him.
He turns to me and said, " Man, I'm trying to get this comma to go up but it's not working"
Extremely confused I look at his terminal, only to realize that he was pressing shift+, and trying to get the " sign.
That guy went on to finish with a 4.0 gpa and is currently doing his masters.
Although hilarious, this serves as a very good lesson to all the beginners out here.
If you learn from your mistakes and improve you can definitely succeed in your life!
Just remember to actually look at the full keyboard though!

Anyone else remember at googles summer of code in 2006-ish google catching heat for hiring strippers to give the male devs lap dances ?

those were they days ! I wanted to work for google so much after that.

we need to bring the debauchery into development lol

notably, google has erased all evidence of that new story now that they have become staffed baby raping, tree hugging, snarky fucking homosexual clowns.

and btw i am an environmentalist and I don';t care if someone is actually gay. I'm also practical and like boobs. unfortunately i don't think thats whats working at google.

Wait until you're too old for it to be any practical use, then learn something nobody uses.

After rejoining, this place really does seem a bit deserted. So ill try to bring some controversy to this place.

AI, a hype? Machine learning wearing a mask? Pattern recognition on steroids?

What do y'all think? In my opinion its an awesome technology that has many practical applications but it is far from what they try to tell us it is. Its awesome, yes. But under the hood still mostly pattern recognition, classification etc. LLMs seem a bit more complex but still the same thing.

Sure, it's easy to write a program that does a given task a lot better than a human, however its limited to doing exactly that.. So is a calculator.
What I think of then hearing AI is what is now known as general intelligence but just a question of time until they come up with something that can do more than AI and call that general intelligence and actual general intelligence will be called something else.. You get me?

Teacher made us do a practical Cisco exam in a room that was 31 degrees celsius. Hot damn

Making CS more practical oriented and hands-on focussed would help a lot. It will develop more interest and attract more students. Nothing feels better than your own code doing what you intended it to.

Im implementing kafka with little to no theory understanding. Now that i have finally managed to implement it Perfrctly, even started kafka, zookeeper and kafka-ui through docker compose and it works perfectly in the backend app, i can finally now see the power this technology withholds, and now i have even more understanding of how it (approximately) works, and Now I'm more willing to learn the theory to understand it under the hood.

Does someone else find it much easier to fuck around and find out when learning something new before being overbloated with boring dry theory?

I fucking hate theory. Any kind of theory. Its boring as shit. But now that i have gone through practical implementation of this and can understand how powerful backend i can build with it, Now I'd have no problems learning theory

Say what you will but React JS development is utterly exhausting. Every React project is a totally new stack and there is no consensus in the ecosystem.That is how I feel after having worked on 5 big SPA React JS projects over the course of 5 years.

The structure of these projects was all but similar: most used HOC's, some render props, functions-as-a-child, hooks or rather component lifecycles, some used container-components, some Redux, others sprinkled business logic & state all over, and yet others use a mix of server-side rendering and "hydration"...

I dangerouslySetInnerHTML on LazyExoticComponents, and dared not useEffect on the DO_NOT_TOUCH_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED root property. Hooks embrace functions, but without sacrificing the practical spirit of React, you see.

I didn't make this up. It's verbatim from the code and the docs.
This is not web development, this is at best a tedious fantasy multiplayer game or at worst, a costly joke.

Anyone know any good JS ES6 courses? Don't mind the price. It's great if it encourages practical learning :)

(Got a new developer on the team, junior AF)

Hey,
I studied law first and got a retraining about Java from my company for 6 months (just very basic concepts about servers, databse,.. besides java). I really enjoy programming now and that is what I want to do. Do you guys think I need to study computer science to become a good programmer or to change my employer (payment here is really moderate ~ 30k € max ,after taxes, but safe work and good payment after retirement) ? Is there any international certification that should be enough ? Just dont know if it could be a waste of time, becouse I am at a spot to just get practical experience.
Any opinions of you pros ?

Big thanks in advance :)

I think I'll regret choosing Computer Vision with machine learning for my final project ...
Well ! Just need to find a practical application responding to customer needs and start working !

I'm interning at a mech eng company. Our products have many possible permutations that customers can choose from a spec sheet.

The backend for us mechanical designers is equivalent to copying and pasting the same code (with slight changes) into a massive switch statement depending on the program's options. So many near duplicate drawings. Each with individual settings that need to be tweaked and linked to other new duplicates every time a new order comes in.

As a programmer it drives me absolute bonkers! I've talked to them about automating it but "we've just always done it this way, so it probably won't change". Well, as soon as I'm done grinding this current project, I'm hoping to put together a practical demo to change their minds.

Even though I'm learning Node.js, I'm still a little confused about the distinction between Node and frontend JavaScript.

Where does frontend JavaScript end, and Node begin? What are the practical distinctions between the two?

!rant

I see a lot of people complain about uni degrees and stuff because they don't learn how to code etc. Is this really the standard?

I mean I'm only in fourth semester bachelor and had coding knowledge before starting uni. But we had basic to intermediate java in the first two semester, now learning how to write secure code and OS-Level stuff in C++, we had a module with practical Assembly coding all while still learning all the theory.

At the end of the first semester we had to write a terminal game in Java. I mean of course that's not "real experience" but if you dive in you definitely learn the basics you need to get started in real life.

Or am I wrong completely / just in a weird uni?

Hello, I am preparing a Docker's workshop, it's almost done but I need some help with the close, I wanna show a practical use case of Docker.
Please give me some ideas.

I don’t understand blockchain enthusiasts. I even spent some time studying the concept and application examples. Most of the time they use private networks removing the concept of distribution, many other times regular database and signature techniques would be cheaper and more practical and anyway these ready made solutions are actually black boxes for the final users because messing around with blockchain would require too much skills… But if you have to trust these black boxes, you could actually just trust any centralized service… I really can’t understand…

After waiting 3+ years, I finally found custom firmware for my netgear wndr4700.
LEDE project(based on openwrt), you are amazing.

Now just to figure out the 10000 options i have now.

Anyone that can help me?
Per example, my router should be capable of 300 mbit theory and 200 mbit practical.
But the custom firmware says max 150mbit.

I am a programming teacher in a local university, I started five years ago, but in this semester I feel very tired, the students don't want to learn. I tray many methodologies and practical protects but the interest show by they is very low. the worst thing is that in anonymous evaluation I get good score but my objective is that students become in a great programmers ¿any advice?

If you ever need a good example for bad API design, just use IndexedDB. While it might still be far above absolute zero, it should definitely be low enough for any practical purpose.

And as a bonus, it wouldn't actually have been needed if the SQLite status quo would just have been adopted as the standard back then. We could have a complete RDBMS with almost full SQL support in the browser...

I've been reading about quantum computing in finance and other applications (fascinating read, althought really dense), but one question now won't stop bugging me.

Context:
1) Blockchain applications are based on NP-Hard asymmetric cryptographic problems, and how hard it is to solve such problems in a really short time.
2) So called "Web3.0" is based mostly on Blockchain applications, but would still need significant advances in order to be practical.
3) Affordable and practical cloud-based quantum computing is not so far in the future, and could be used to crack most NP-Hard problems in short (polynomial) time.
Thus, my question: Is Web3.0 obsolete before it even begun?

I mean, if quantum computing takes on fast enough, it could snuff out Blockchain applications by giving those a shelf life so short it wouldn't be worth to delevolp for it. It would be like announcing the iPhone 14 and the 15 on the same breath, saying the 15 is only a quarter away - why would anyone bother with the born-obsolete tech?

Has ANYONE ever seen an example of a clean, usable LCARS-style user interface for anything practical or everyday use? It was always so cool to look at on ST:TNG but every time I see it put into practice, it falls apart. I don’t know why I want it so bad, but I do.

I don't know how it's out there, but where I'm from, we don't get a lot of practical classes. The curriculum has tried to include practical alongside theory but its just not working. All we do is theory and more theory. Maybe include a major portion of marks for practicals rather than theory. And yes, please no coding in paper.

Another major thing we lack is teaching logical thinking. I have met final year under grads who find using a (!foo) to invert the value of foo mind blowing. They would rather use a full blown if-then statement to do the same. I think we need to incorporate chapters that motivates students into logical thinking to make better programmers.

Another essential part CS education around here lacks is in relevant examples and chances for internship. If you're studying something, I believe you would understand it much better if you see and experience it. Curriculum should include a real world project that you would use in a daily basis. Maybe break down and analyse a successful application and its component.

I'm quite confused about job market here in germany. Beside studies I'm working in a data center and have already some practical knowledge about programming stuff and managing applications. Although many companies I apply for say I need more experience. How the hell should I collect it if I don't get the chance to do so. Do you have seen this in other countries as well?

Hi Guys, I so confused. I'm giving interviews and constantly failing them. I'm not able to clear the practical round. In most interviews, I was able to achieve the goal which the interviewer gave me.

But somehow I didn't get selected. i'm applying for Android Developer positions. just to give you
guys an idea.

I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Right now I just am so depressed that I don't even want to give no interviews anymore.

Any suggestions or advice is much appreciated

Apprenticeship instead of higher education might be a better mode of 1) learning practical skills rather than academic theory, 2) keeping those learned skills modern rather than stale and outdated, 3) skipping all the hippy-dippy college requirements that don’t actually add value to your career.

To the people who so blindly hate apple: Name my other choices...

Winblows is a bloated system with no real package manager, i can't stop their endless updates, it gets viruses so easily, that you have to install an antivirus, and i hate their flat design, and linux is for haX0r kids who wanna look cool, it's just not practical for personal use.

OK, not so much of a rant, but here it goes. As a JS developer having only used JavaScript and the jquery library I am having a hard time figuring out Angular, and some practical use cases.

All the guides I have Bern looking at have had Angular control the routes and load content (as a one page application) but can it be used in another way, eg having Laravel control the routes and load PHP pages using different Angular controllers depending on page loades, or would that eliminate the benefits of Angular altogether?

Modern computer technology seems, to give an enormous edge to arrays. Elements of an array can be shifted and copied at insane speeds. As a result arrays and ArrayList will, in most practical situations, outperform LinkedList on inserts and deletes, often dramatically. In other words, ArrayList will beat LinkedList at its own game.

- Copied as is from a stackoverflow answer. The last sentence is savage.

1) Simple, secure and powerful technology for website user interface design which will replace HTML, CSS and JS.

2) Simple and practical technology to be able to utilize HTML for all kinds of documents which will replace paper page based document formats like PDF and Word.

3) One technology for native mobile app development to rule them all. So that it's not necessary to use HTML and JS.

Apprenticeship end exams were incredibly easy. In parts...
Glad that I'm through it. Now for the practical things. Project and presentation (freeradius on a mesh network from watchguard)

EVER THOUGHT OF BEING USELESS,
think of practical files😂

Learned almost entirely from online tutorials, and this was starting 12+ years ago.

What little official education I had was barely any practical programming.

Currently I am taking a cs college degree but I would like to start working/freelancing wtv to earn some practical experience, but no one will hire a first year for anything at all and I dont seem to find any part time jobs that ask for programmers.
Any advice?