The Steam Community forums for the Planet Zoo beta have really reinforced my decision to stay far away from game development.

A third of the posts are people who clearly have no idea what a beta is - "don't buy, too buggy". Sorry, were you expecting a finished game? You wasted your money, then.

Another third of the posts are people making decisions for the developers. A very common discussion is "Should they delay launch?" which makes my blood boil a bit. First of all, you have no fucking clue what kind of manpower this development team has. You don't manage them, and neither do I. So, neither you nor I should be making assumptions about how fast they can fix the issues, and definitely shouldn't make decisions about if the game should delay launch.

Second of all, neither you nor I know how the game is built. These fixes could mean a line of code, or they could mean a re-write of multiple core systems. We don't know, and I'm guessing you've probably never even written a line of code in your life so you REALLY shouldn't be telling these guys how to do their job.

The last third is benign discussion - people reporting bugs (even though there's an issue tracker, but that thing is fucking jam packed with 250 pages of reported issues), asking how to do xyz, posting feature requests, etc.

But if roughly 60% of the community is behaving poorly and actively working against development by pissing off the devs and drowning out constructive discussion, then yeah; I won't be going near game dev any time soon. Sure, developing business software means dealing with REALLY dumb people but at the very least they are in a business environment and not in a toxic forum of bullshit.

Oh, and as a closing remark, I love this game!

I have noticed that C/C++ developers that deal with backend server technologies are very much likely to resort to PHP for some reason. I have noticed it from serveral developer friends of mine or simply by noticing how the topic comes along sometimes on web discussion forums.

I believe this is the reason why certain extension codebases that deal with php are(for the most part) exclusively done in C++, take Phalcon, written as an extension in C or PHP Swoole, which is written in cpp iirc.

I wonder what attributes does the language, or the tech stack as a whole has that would make this particular kind of developers feel attracted to the platform. Is it that is easy and widely available and they just say "fuck it, I don't wanna spend too much time in this shit" <--- which is a very valid point really.

Or them just having an innate preference towards it?

The Psychology Behind Developers: By Dr AleCx04

My programming paradigms unit has decided to explore different teaching/learning environments by creating lecture/workshops. Imagine a massive room with big projector screens at the front and smaller screens lined up against the wall at the back. The lecture room seats are designed around tables that are gradually elevated so it’s similar to a lecture hall but you’re sitting at discussion tables.

There’s the usual lecture with all the slides up around everywhere, there’s nice wheelie chairs and dimmer lighting... can’t tell if we’re at a conference or some awards night. Then all of a sudden, we’re coding in teams (tables) and uploading our work on to forums to discuss with the rest of the lecture hall. WHAAAAAAAT

Really different and quite enjoyable experience, there’s more than one tutor walking around to help, there’s mics for people to present.

Just sharing my new experience of forward learning environments that didn’t cause feelings of anxiousness for once or boredom. It was kind of mind blowing, wish it was always like this.

Discussion forum software: what is the most stable and secure as well as regularly updated package out there?