I really like this book on the basis of the philosophy overall, no this doesn’t solve all problems but it’s a good baseline of “guidelines/rules” to program by. Good metrics or goals to architect and design software projects high and low level projects.

Fight Software Rot
Avoid duplicate code
Write Flexible, dynamic, adaptable code
Not cargo cult programming and programming by coincidence.
Make robust code, contracts/asserts/exceptions
Test, Test, and TEST again and Continue testing.. this is a big one.. not so much meaning TDD.. but just testing in general never stop trying to break your software.. FIND the bugs.. you should want to find your bugs. Even after releasing code the field continue testing.

Im a software developer, and make games as hobby and sometimes as actual job. Recently I started looking into game design, through my work I can can do a study for free.

The main thing I would like to learn is Character development and using GDD's

Would you recommend doing such a course or is the quality of these things way to low to actually be of use?

Is there reading material I should read?

I do own a digital copy of "A theory of fun" already which Im gonna read the coming days.

I'M BACK TO MY WEBDEV ADVENTURES GUYS! IT TOOK ME LIKE 4 MONTHS TO STOP BEING SO FUCKING DEPRESSED SO I CAN ACTUALLY STAND TO WORK ON IT AGAIN

I learned that the linear gradient looks cool as FUCK. Honestly not too fond of the colors I have right now, but I just wanted to have something there cause I can change it later. The page has evolved a bunch from my original concept.

My original concept was the bar in the middle just being a URL bar and having links on the sides. If I had kept that, it would have taken me a few hours to get done. But as time went on when I was working on it, my idea kept changing. Added the weather (had a forecast for a while but the code was gross and I never looked at the next days anyways, so I got rid of it and kept the current data). I wanted to attempt an RSS reader, but yesterday I was about to start writing the JavaScript to parse the feeds, then decided "nah", ended up making the space into a todo list.

The URL bar changed into a full command bar (writing the functions for the commands now, also used to config smaller things, such as the user@hostname part, maybe colors, weather data for city and API key, etc)....also it can open URLs and subreddits (that part works flawlessly). The bar uses a regex to detect if it's a legit URL (even added shit so I don't need http:// or https://), and if it's not, just search using duckduckgo (maybe I'll add a config option there too for search engines).

At this very moment it doesn't even take a second to fully load. It fetches weather data from openweathermap, parses it, and displays it, then displays the "user" name grabbing a localstorage value.

I'm considering adding a sidebar with links (configurable obviously, I want everything to be dynamic, so someone else could use my page if they wanted), but I'm not too sure about it.

It's not on git yet because I was waiting until I get some shit finished today before I commit. From the picture, I want to know if anyone has any suggestions for it. Also note that I am NOT a designer. I can't design for shit.

Still not learning git properly. I still find it very hard to grasp how this works and although I'm starting to use it more and more, I just can't wrap my hear around it so I often reside to scp for upload and no version control at all.

:'(

trying to get into gamedev is usually a shitty experience to me...

being a web dev OTOH feels like the opposite. There are css libraries that can make your site beautiful for you (albeit kinda generic).

so when you look at the screen when working on something, you can see something pretty, and it feels like progress.

you can show this to people and they'll be like "wow, look at you and your fancy site".

Show an expertly coded but cssless site to people and they will ask you if you did it with digital crayons.

That's how it feels when I try to get into gamedev, shockingly embarassing.

If I do my own assets, it looks like shit and takes forever. If I use other people's assets, it feels unoriginal.

I used to believe that gameplay is everything, graphics are nothing. But I'm not certain about that right now.

A very common advice to get into gamedev is to start with games that are already made. Like doing a tetris.
Great, that's exactly what I need. Doing a game that looks like shit, with a gameplay I'm not dying to program.

Another thing that makes me feel incompatible with games is the possible reality of that saying that goes "art is never finished, only abandoned", and games being art in a sense.

I'm not sure if I have that mentality. I think I am more of a results type of person, and doing games feels a bit opposite to that.

All of this is making me a bit sad, because video games have been and still are my number one interest, and there has been countless times where I wished I had the role of game designer so I could define in actual projects what a game would be. Like all those "wouldn't it be cool if you could remove X and add Y to this fame" feelings.

@Fast-Nop This one's for you, buddy. Took me all freaking day to figure out how to avoid unsafe-inline when registering a service worker. XD

Not something I would usually do but just want to give GarryExplains a shout out to any dev's wanting to learn some theory of a variety of topics, mostly want to shout out the bellow video, not because of the actually programming behind it but just what I think is a bloody great explanation of how CPU instruction sets actually behave and function...

https://youtube.com/watch/...

Alright people could do with some help here!

Got a friend who is interested in learning how to code but I can't think of anything to point him in the right direction, he wants to learn it just so he has something to keep his mind active and give him something he can sit and spend time on...

Anyone know of anyone tutorials/articles/anything that could point him in the right direction?

Is the competition high for web development? Is it hard to get a job as a web developer?

has anyone here done a proper refactoring? i mean, documenting, following some rules, etc.

i need to know the process and guidelines for refactoring, what & how to document, where to start, etc.

i am assigned to a project for a short term and my job is to do refactoring of Reactjs code. and i need to do it in a really good way.

any help would be highly appreciated.
thank you.

After seeing @Gregozor2121 share, I searched around in my bookmarks for similar stuff. Here are a couple of links that I feel is useful for everyone:

A massive list of Free programming books.
https://ebookfoundation.github.io/f...
(Also do explore anything marked as "awesome", cause it literally is awesome!! They have got tons of lists of resources for most programming languages, free software lists, famous stackoverflow answers, quotes & even Pokemon!!)

I also had this bookmarked:
https://github.com/chubin/cheat.sh
Basically cheat sheets at your command line. Pretty neat utility.

So I'm about to finish The Design of Everyday things by Don Norman and I have Clean Code coming up next.

But what are some good programming books that are tech agnostic?

The inevitable happened, the user that I've answered tons of questions about freelancing deleted his account, thankfully I took backups and will recreate it [together with a killed joke] in the comments below (should've just webarchived it, meh)

I'll keep adding questions & answers I come across to make this a useful resource for people that want to get into freelancing, want to ask me something in the comments, you name it.

Might compile it into a better searchable resource eventually (some sort of blog with TOC), but right now neither do I have the time nor will to do that.

Wish I could have taken over the link that has been now posted a lot, but every post has an ID and I doubt it's possible, will tag dfox to clarify though and also floydian and devtea, that have been so nice to always post a link to that one rant.

Someone on here, a while ago, posted a link to a github repo having a huge ass list of open source projects for about anything you can imagine.

I lost the link 😥 anyone an idea? (can't find it either)

Travelled for some hours today.
While i was on it i remembered a PDF "The Pragmatic Programmer" resting in my phone.
Opened it and read it until the bus reached the destination.
I entered the bus a complete idiot and upon exit i was half Socrates of programming habits.
Had read some chapters though.

Why didn't i know about it before ?

I was at my uncle's village.
Where getting internet is big thing,very far from main city.
I was talking with one shopkeeper.
I told him ,I am software developer.

He ask me questions that
"How can I improve my business using software?"

To help me figure out situation.
He told me problems he is facing right now.
Accounting/inventory management/contact's with big retailers.

He was so genuinely explaining it.

He don't want next billion dollar startup.

He want to solved his problem.

I am really impressed after that conversation because person who don't know what is excel is talking about ERP software.

I am going to develop that software.

#respect

I'd say Linux but seen that around a lot so I'll go with another favourite:

OsmAnd(+)

It's basically an offline navigation app which works with downloading maps offline and then you can use navigation without Internet (gps though of course).

It's very easy to use, looks okay enough and no fucking tracking at all. I was in Switzerland recently without any service (my friends didn't have service either and their navigation relies on Internet) and this fucker saves us big time.
Not saying that there aren't any other offline navigation apps but this one is awesome imo.

DON'T

EVER

SHARD

YOUR

DATABASE !

Trust me, don't !

Turns out writing interpreters is just a gateway drug and all I want to do now is build a compiler and custom language runtime...

Recently I've started thinking about how we are always told "No you can't do that" to everything. That feels like a theme in our industry.

I've also been thinking about how often people say well done to each other, or just comment that something is good in a pull request. Everything is always focused on bugs and mistakes - not good bits.

The first point conflicts with the idea that when using languages and frameworks you should follow their philosophy or you're gonna have a bad time - but in all other instances you mostly don't have wrong answers, just answers that can be better so a lot of stuff is opinion based.

I've decided to change my ways and focus just as much on good stuff as bad when I review code and to make sure I'm focusing just as much, if not more, when people do something good.

I think I do a good job, but I don't think I've been told I'm doing a good job or that anything specific is good more than a couple times in the last year - mostly in mandatory reviews. What about you?

#thread
Any Home Assistant fans out there? Got myself a RPi3 a few months ago and got hooked on HA, because of the huge product support and great community. Didn't find any dashboards that I liked so created my own, written in JS, fully customisable and support for most if not all kinds of gadgets. The purpose was to have something easy to use for the whole family, on a wall-mounted tablet. What do you guys think?

Anyways, has anyone done some cool home automations/scripting? Would love to hear about it!

TL;DR: I'm stressed out over choosing a side project because of the commitment and fear of failure :(

I'm a student and summer vacation starts in 3 days (and actually has already started for me, thanks to a "smartly planned" hospital stay), so I'm currently looking for a cool project to start. This will be my third summer vacation during which I want to make complete a project, and I never actually did it. The first year, I couldn't think of any reasonable, doable project which would be interesting and fitting for the time scope (I was quite new to programming back then, so I probably couldn't have done things that would be interesting to me, an any project that I could've done would just take 20 minutes, cause I wouldn't understand anything more complex). The second time, I chose a project too big with too much new things I had to learn on the go. I actually pushed through for nearly a week, but then I realized that I only completed like 25% in that time, so I lost my motivation, thinking I could never finish it, while not wanting to start a complete new project, because that would've felt like wasting the time I put into my first project. It was still a valuable project and I learned a lot by doing it, but this year I want to actually finish a project; so I'm really stressed out right now trying to come up with a good project.
Usually I have millions of vague ideas in my head, but as soon as it comes to choosing, every single one seems to be the wrong one, or I forget about all of them. Everything that kinda interests me seems way to big and complicated to me, but I sometimes feel like I'm just underestimating my abilities, but on the other hand I have ~25 projects on my hard drive, of which 4 or 5 are finished and most will never be finished. :/
And it's just so overwhelming to choose something like that, because on one hand I really want to do a bigger project that I actually finish, and summer vacation is the only time I have so much time to code, and I love coding, but on the other hand choosing such a project that I will work 2-3 weeks on is too much commitment and also I'm anxious about failing it and never finish it, just abandon a buggy mess. Am I the only one to feel that way, or are you too having problems choosing side problems?

And, I guess if you have any ideas for a suitable project (literally anything, so that I might be exposed to some new ideas), just comment it.

Hey devRant people !

How are you ?
I’ve a question, do you know a website like FrontendMaster, CloudAcademy or LinuxAcademy but ... for backend stuff ?

EdX, Udemy and all are very good but I would like to find a platform specialized in this topic.

Our current designer is convinced that 00FF44 bright green fits well with the rest of our soft purple/blue color scheme.

I am not a designer, but have worked in a color laboratory, so I've tried time and time again to explain CIE LAB color space, and how at least HCL is a good way to pick & group colors into palettes by using 2-3 luminances for equidistant hues while keeping chroma constant.

I've tried to tell him that the bright green almost physically makes my eyes bleed, because humans are quite sensitive to greens.

He just keeps using the phrase "but it makes the buttons pop nicely".

I just want to pop his skull open with my keyboard. 😫