I'd have to say government. I had a government contact through my job and one day he just stopped responding. I asked other people he worked with and they didn't know where he was either. The guy just dropped off the face of the Earth for about 4 months. When he came back the only consequence was that his projects had been reassigned so he had to wait to be assigned new projects.

You forgot UX designer and Tester

I'll sleep when my tests pass!

I believe the correct answer is "initial" on "initial".

Hey, at least they paid you. I mean, I feel for you, but at least you didn't get stiffed.

See, my dad was a Unix sysadmin. He taught me to use vi because it is the one file editor that is absolutely guaranteed to always be in every distribution of Unix ever. It's certainly not my editor of choice, but I keep the skill dusted off as a fallback.

@bkwilliams I THINK that if it's already tracked and part of the repo, then you add .gitignore to it, then it will still update because it's already tracked.

@nibor That's exactly what's going to happen. This is a React app. At least I'm only here for 2 more months

I have fallen into the practice of only capitalizing the first letter of acronyms in camelcase.
userId
parsedJson
I think it preserves the flow of camelcase much better.

Write it down. Don't try to log on and implement it, just write yourself a note about what the solution is. That way your brain can forget about it and relax and you can pick it up again next time.

I feel your pain. I wanted to be a game programmer too, but when nobody was hiring, I took what was offered. I spent 5 years working in COBOL before heading into frontend and I've been stuck in that career path ever since.

My advice: Follow your dream. Take something that will pay the bills, but never stop looking for that game development position. Make sure that any contract you take has a clause that allows you to quit at any time (with notice). That way, when the opportunity comes, you can take it with no worries.

Best of luck.

I recently started using Fira Code. I don't think it makes anything easier (Hell, it actually makes some things a real bitch) but I like the way it looks.

A is a more "classic" approach. It's how the data would look if you were getting it from a SQL database.

B is probably better if you intend to stick the entire contents of your referenced object into that reference, because "referenced" is always an object instead of sometimes being an ID and sometimes being an object.

If it is strictly for reference, and the referenced object isn't going to be expanded inside the referencing object, I prefer A, but I can see the appeal of B.

I particularly like #3

I my personal experience, learning C first gave me a much deeper understanding of how computers and their languages work than I would probably have gotten had my first applications been developed in JavaScript. By the time I got into JavaScript, I already had a foundational knowledge of how memory addressing, pointers, arrays, and such things worked behind the scenes. I think it really helped me.

On the other hand, I learned Assembler and, while it did give me a better understanding of logic gates and low-level computer functionality, I don't really think it made me a better programmer.

Will learning lower-level languages give you a better understanding of how the machine processes your instructions? Probably. Will it make you a better programmer? Maybe not.

@Krokoklemme Yes, but if you're accepting input from the keyboard, isn't that what you're reading? Like I said, it's been a while, but I clearly remember periodically having to clear that buffer to prevent programs from acting upon character that had already been input instead of waiting for new input.

It's been a LONG time for me since I've done C, but I'm pretty sure after you exit the first while loop, you need to flush your buffer before you get to the second loop.

example:
{
while( getchar() != EOF)
printf("a");
fflush(stdin);
while( getchat() != EOF)
printf("b");
}

@obsecurity I should add that I have purchased a few phone games up-front. They have all been on the recommendation of others. The Room series comes to mind as games that I bought for my phone before playing them.

@obsecurity I understand that developers need to be compensated for their work. I am a developer after all. I think there should be a balance, some games can be ad-supported, some games can be pay up-front. I really like it when a game that has ads also has an in-game purchase that allows me to remove the ads for a few dollars.

If we can get to the point where we can get games of the quality of a 3DS or Vita game, but on a phone, I would be willing to pay up-front for that just like I would for those systems. But I don't know if the market would bear that. The idea of what a phone game should be is pretty well ingrained.

Too many reskinned games that have been done a thousand times. Too many overbearing ads.

I think there is a place to marry phone gaming with portable console gaming, but I don't know if it will ever be profitable enough for companies to pursue. I really liked the idea of the Xperia Play, but it just didn't prove out.

It will be interesting to see if streaming services like Stadia are able to bring more action-oriented gaming experiences to mobile hardware.

<1 day.

I started the project, worked on it for about 5 hours, remembered why I hate working in Angular so much, and threw the whole thing out.

(Note: I'm not trying to say that Angular is empirically bad, necessarily, just that I personally don't like working in it.)

You had me up until splitting the address book in half. That doesn't sound like anything I have ever done.

@LOLjustCoding the research doesn't support that on a number of levels. Let's just explore 1 of them.

The current population of the Earth is roughly 7.3B people. Half of that is 3.65B.

How long ago do you think it was that the population of the Earth was last at 3.65B? The year was 1970. 50 years ago.

Even if it took twice that time to recover, the population of the Earth would still be back to 7.3B in just 100 years. Hardly seems like a permanent solution.

A little tidbit that I picked up from a guy who taught TDD:

Have a test that asserts true == true.

He called it the Canary Test. It's purpose is to prove that your testing suite is properly configured. If it fails, then you know the problem is not with your code or with your tests, it is your testing configuration.

The backend is the foundation of the app. No matter how well designed the frontend is, it is impossible to have a good UX if the application doesn't work on a fundamental level.

However, beyond simply working as expected, there's really no other input that the backend has on UX.

Most of my work is front-end. I mainly use VS Code. I use it because I tried out a bunch of other stuff and that was the one that I liked the best.

If you work on a Unix-based system, then you should know how to use vi. Vi is the one editor that is virtually guaranteed to be in every single distribution of Unix-based operating systems.

Other stuff I have used: Atom, Sublime, Notepad++, emacs, Notepad, probably other stuff that I don't remember.

Short version: Get some recommendations, try a few different things, use whatever works for you.

Had to make a custom WordPress theme. Coded it in PHP.

@andrewmc147 It's been 3 or 4 years, but yes.

I don't have any specific resources to point you toward, but if you want to customize WordPress to that degree, that will all be done in PHP.

I use the "standard" finger positioning, but I on't think I reach for all the keys the way that I was taught in keyboarding class. I almost never use the right SHIFT key. I have a friend who doesn't use SHIFT at all unless she needs symbols, she toggles CAPS LOCK every time she wants to use a capital letter.