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Search - "how do these programs even work?"
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dear anyone looking to teach kids programming (especially organizations):
- please be realistic. teach things your students can use. how to debug, how to solve realistic, real-world problems. not how to make a turtle draw a circle, that's not programming.
- please don't have blocks. just don't. they hurt.
- focus on your content instead of putting up posters on the wall with celebrities talking about the importance of programming
- don't call it 'code,' call it 'program.' do you know how different muggles think they are?
- please teach in a logical order. too many times have I seen commands --> functions --> variables/variable types --> then back to functions and return types.
- don't set an appropriate "age" to do it. please. its enough for people to learn to program, but to be told they're too "old" for a course? I can't tell you how many forgetful seniors and special needs students have been insulted. and don't even get me started on being too young. knowledge is knowledge, skill is skill, ability is ability.
- teach concepts with programming. don't separate them. they work better when they're taught together.
- understanding is more important than style. for beginners, fuck style. all of your program could be all on one line for fucks sake. I've had teachers chose style > functionality, because, fuck working programs, right?
- let your content speak for itself. this is not the place for celebrity endorsements.
- give resources for after a lesson is complete. when a beginner is finished, recommend more resources. you're never done learning.
most of these were things code.org did wrong. fuck them. I was in a constructive criticism mood today…5 -
College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.
I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.
This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.
Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.
Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.
The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.
Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.
Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.
And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.
And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!
But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.
My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.
If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.
Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.15 -
Did a bunch more cowboy coding today as I call it (coding in vi on production). Gather 'round kiddies, uncle Logan's got a story fer ya…
First things first, disclaimer: I'm no sysadmin. I respect sysadmins and the work they do, but I'm the first to admit my strengths definitely lie more in writing programs rather than running servers.
Anyhow, I recently inherited someone else's codebase (the story of my profession career, but I digress) and let me tell you this thing has amateur hour written all over it. It's written in PHP and JavaScript by a self-taught programmer who apparently discovered procedural programming and decided there was nothing left to learn and stopped there (no disrespect to self-taught programmers).
I could rant for days about the various problems this codebase has, but today I have a very specific story to tell. A story about errors and logs.
And it all started when I noticed the disk space on our server was gradually decreasing.
So today I logged onto our API server (Ubuntu running Apache/PHP) and did a df -h to check the disk space, and was surprised to see that it had noticeably decreased since the last time I'd checked when everything was running smoothly. But seeing as this server does not store any persistent customer data (we have a separate db server) and purely hosts the stateless API, it should NOT be consuming disk space over time at all.
The only thing I could think of was the logs, but the logs were very quiet, just the odd benign message that was fully expected. Just to be sure I did an ls -Sh to check the size of the logs, and while some of them were a little big, nothing over a few megs. Nothing to account for gigabytes of disk space gradually disappearing.
What could it be? I wondered.
cd ../..
du . | sort --sort=numeric
What's this? 2671132 K in some log folder buried in the api source code? I cd into it and it turns out there are separate PHP log files in there, split up by customer, so that each customer of ours (we have 120) has their own respective error log! (Why??)
Armed with this newfound piece of (still rather unbelievable) evidence I perform a mad scramble to search the codebase for where this extra logging is happening and sure enough I find a custom PHP error handler that is capturing (most) errors and redirecting them to these individualized log files.
Conveniently enough, not ALL errors were being absorbed though, so I still knew the main error_log was working (and any time I explicitly error_logged it would go there, so I was none the wiser that this other error-catching was even happening).
Needless to say I removed the code as quickly as I found it, tail -f'd the error_log and to my dismay it was being absolutely flooded with syntax errors, runtime PHP exceptions, warnings galore, and all sorts of other things.
My jaw almost hit the floor. I've been with this company for 6 months and had no idea these errors were even happening!
The sad thing was how easy to fix all the errors ended up being. Most of them were "undefined index" errors that could have been completely avoided with a simple isset() check, but instead ended up throwing an exception, nullifying any code that came after it.
Anyway kids, the moral of the story is don't split up your log files. It makes absolutely no sense and can end up obscuring easily fixable bugs for half a year or more!
Happy coding.6 -
So, I'm living in a completely computer illiterate family and I was called to help my father with something on a Laptop where he wanted to stream his favorite Soccer-Club.
So I walk up to him, ask what's wrong, and he says (roughly translated from German) "That thing doesn't work!"
And I'm just like ((Wat u mean))
So I ask him to explain the problem in detail.
Apparently his streaming service wasn't loading his stream.
Well damn I say, try searching for the problem on Google and find a solution.
((But no no no imma just call my son for everything that's freaking wrong with tech, he sure knows what to do))
As I'm not that experienced with Webservices as of yet, I had no idea what to do.
He was fucking furious!
"You always act like you know everything about tech and programs and stuff and can't even help me with fixing this Stream-Thing?!"
I responded simply by saying "It's not my area of work!"
Seems like he didn't know the difference between TECH-JESUS and hobbyist software engineer.
So I stand there and he just goes on one of these typical boomer tech illiterate rants, of which I'm sure you can imagine enough being on this platform.
tl;Dr; It pisses me of big time how people are not even trying to understand technology, nor attempting to help themselves by eG. Googling some simple problem, but rather just ask around and then being pissed off if the asked person just doesn't know the answer or can't help!5 -
When I was in college OOP was emerging. A lot of the professors were against teaching it as the core. Some younger professors were adamant about it, and also Java fanatics. So after the bell rang, they'd sometimes teach people that wanted to learn it. I stayed after and the professor said that object oriented programming treated things like reality.
My first thought to this was hold up, modeling reality is hard and complicated, why would you want to add that to your programming that's utter madness.
Then he started with a ball example and how some balls in reality are blue, and they can have a bounce action we can express with a method.
My first thought was that this seems a very niche example. It has very little to do with any problems I have yet solved and I felt thinking about it this way would complicate my programs rather than make them simpler.
I looked around the at remnants of my classmates and saw several sitting forward, their eyes lit up and I felt like I was in a cult meeting where the head is trying to make everyone enamored of their personality. Except he wasn't selling himself, he was selling an idea.
I patiently waited it out, wanting there to be something of value in the after the bell lesson. Something I could use to better my own programming ability. It never came.
This same professor would tell us all to read and buy gang of four it would change our lives. It was an expensive hard cover book with a ribbon attached for a bookmark. It was made to look important. I didn't have much money in college but I gave it a shot I bought the book. I remember wrinkling my nose often, reading at it. Feeling like I was still being sold something. But where was the proof. It was all an argument from authority and I didn't think the argument was very good.
I left college thinking the whole thing was silly and would surely go away with time. And then it grew, and grew. It started to be impossible to avoid it. So I'd just use it when I had to and that became more and more often.
I began to doubt myself. Perhaps I was wrong, surely all these people using and loving this paradigm could not be wrong. I took on a 3 year project to dive deep into OOP later in my career. I was already intimately aware of OOP having to have done so much of it. But I caught up on all the latest ideas and practiced them for a the first year. I thought if OOP is so good I should be able to be more productive in years 2 and 3.
It was the most miserable I had ever been as a programmer. Everything took forever to do. There was boilerplate code everywhere. You didn't so much solve problems as stuff abstract ideas that had nothing to do with the problem everywhere and THEN code the actual part of the code that does a task. Even though I was working with an interpreted language they had added a need to compile, for dependency injection. What's next taking the benefit of dynamic typing and forcing typing into it? Oh I see they managed to do that too. At this point why not just use C or C++. It's going to do everything you wanted if you add compiling and typing and do it way faster at run time.
I talked to the client extensively about everything. We both agreed the project was untenable. We moved everything over another 3 years. His business is doing better than ever before now by several metrics. And I can be productive again. My self doubt was over. OOP is a complicated mess that drags down the software industry, little better than snake oil and full of empty promises. Unfortunately it is all some people know.
Now there is a functional movement, a data oriented movement, and things are looking a little brighter. However, no one seems to care for procedural. Functional and procedural are not that different. Functional just tries to put more constraints on the developer. Data oriented is also a lot more sensible, and again pretty close to procedural a lot of the time. It's just odd to me this need to separate from procedural at all. Procedural was very honest. If you're a bad programmer you make bad code. If you're a good programmer you make good code. It seems a lot of this was meant to enforce bad programmers to make good code. I'll tell you what I think though. I think that has never worked. It's just hidden it away in some abstraction and made identifying it harder. Much like the code methodologies themselves do to the code.
Now I'm left with a choice, keep my own business going to work on what I love, shift gears and do what I hate for more money, or pivot careers entirely. I decided after all this to go into data science because what you all are doing to the software industry sickens me. And that's my story. It's one that makes a lot of people defensive or even passive aggressive, to those people I say, try more things. At least then you can be less defensive about your opinion.53 -
I know its been quite a while since ive posted last but it is safe to say that i am back! And boy do i have some stuff to bitch about.
This semester, Im taking mobile app development as a class. I chose to take this class over the introductory c# class, so that i wouldn't need to work with Windows or really do anything else to touch Windows. Well the joke is on me. Here i was thinking that we would be using a bit of Java from time to time while only really learning best practices and concepts.
Never did i think that this class's curriculum would be entirely based off of Xamarin.
Seeing as I need either this class or the two c# classes to graduate, I had to bite the bullet and just accept that my semester would be full of irritation during this class.
Its been about seven weeks in, and i have turned in 8 assignments.
All 8 of those assignments have been Windows Form Applications doing simple shit like dividing two numbers.
We have not made anything for multiple devices. We have not made anything for even one mobile device. We have not even discussed how to do this in the class.
This wouldnt bother me so much since these are typically easy programs that take about 30 minutes to make and test and submit for grading. It does insanely bother me, however, that it takes Windows so FUCKING LONG to boot, or when it freezes every 2 minutes because i clicked into another program, or it just HANGS ON THE UPDATING SCREEN AT 36% FOR THREE DAYS, or when it took 4 different reinstallations of Visual Studio 2017 before i could actually open without an error code.
College, Ive learned, tests my patience way more than it has ever tested my knowledge.2 -
These ignorant comments about arch are starting to get on my nerves.
You ranted or asked help about something exclusive to windows and someone pointed out they don't have that problem in arch and now you're annoyed?
Well maybe it's for good.
Next comes a very rough analogy, but imagine if someone posts "hey guys, I did a kg of coke and feeling bad, how do I detox?"
It takes one honest asshole to be like "well what if you didn't do coke?".
Replace the coke with windows.
Windows is a (mostly) closed source operating system owned by a for profit company with a very shady legal and ethical history.
What on earth could possibly go wrong?
Oh you get bsod's?
The system takes hours to update whenever the hell it wants, forces reboot and you can't stop it?
oh you got hacked because it has thousands of vulnerabilities?
wannacry on outdated windows versions paralyzed the uk health system?
oh no one can truly scrutinize it because it's closed source?
yet you wonder why people are assholes when you mention it? This thing is fucking cancer, it's hundreds of steps backwards in terms of human progress.
and one of the causes for its widespread usage are the savage marketing tactics they practiced early on. just google that shit up.
but no, linux users are assholes out to get you.
and how do people react to these honest comments? "let's make a meme out of it. let's deligitimize linux, linux users and devs are a bunch of neckbeards, end of story, watch this video of rms eating skin off his foot on a live conference"
short minded idiots.
I'm not gonna deny the challenges or limitations linux represents for the end user.
It does take time to learn how to use it properly.
Nvidia sometimes works like shit.
Tweaking is almost universally required.
A huge amount of games, or Adobe/Office/X products are not compatible.
The docs can be very obscure sometimes (I for one hate a couple of manpages)
But you get a system that:
* Boots way faster
* Is way more stable
* Is way way way more secure.
* Is accountable, as in, no chance to being forced to get exploited by some evil marketing shit.
In other words, you're fucking free.
You can even create your own version of the system, with total control of it, even profit with it.
I'm not sure the average end user cares about this, but this is a developer forum, so I think in all honesty every developer owes open source OS' (linux, freebsd, etc) major respect for being free and not being corporate horseshit.
Doctors have a hippocratic oath? Well maybe devs should have some form of oath too, some sworn commitment that they will try to improve society.
I do have some sympathy for the people that are forced to use windows, even though they know ideally isn't the ideal moral choice.
As in, their job forces it, or they don't have time or energy to learn an alternative.
At the very least, if you don't know what you're talking about, just stfu and read.
But I don't have one bit of sympathy for the rest.
I didn't even talk about arch itself.
Holy fucking shit, these people that think arch is too complicated.
What in the actual fuck.
I know what the problem is, the arch install instructions aren't copy paste commands.
Or they medium tutorial they found is outdated.
So yeah, the majority of the dev community is either too dumb or has very strong ADD to CAREFULLY and PATIENTLY read through the instructions.
I'll be honest, I wouldn't expect a freshman to follow the arch install guide and not get confused several times.
But this is an intermediate level (not megaexpert like some retards out there imply).
Yet arch is just too much. That's like saying "omg building a small airplane is sooooo complicated". Yeah well it's a fucking aerial vehicle. It's going to be a bit tough. But it's nowhere near as difficult as building a 747.
So because some devs are too dumb and talk shit, they just set the bar too low.
Or "if you try to learn how to build a plane you'll grow an aviator neckbeard". I'll grow a fucking beard if I want too.
I'm so thankful for arch because it has a great compromise between control and ease of install and use.
When I have a fresh install I only get *just* what I fucking need, no extra bullshit, no extra programs I know nothing about or need running on boot time, and that's how I boot way faster that ubuntu (which is way faster than windows already).
Configuring nvidia optimus was a major pain in the ass? Sure was, but I got it work the way I wanted to after some time.
Upgrading is also easy as pie, so really scratching my brain here trying to understand the real difficult of using arch.22 -
This always gets me:
Developers complaining that their 4 year old / cheap ass computer is slow.
Get. A. New. One.
It's not that hard.
Here, let me do one for you:
https://computeruniverse.net/en/...
I just went to a site that delivers across Europe, and selected a cheap laptop with a decent CPU and SSD. Short on RAM, sure, and without a Windows License. But you can buy RAM for an additional 50$, and that brings you to a total of 550€, delivery included. And it will WORK. And it will be fast.
It's too expensive?
No, not exactly. Wherever you are in the world, if you can code decently, good enough to have the right to complain about development tools, you are eligible to at least 10$ per hour income as a freelancer across the globe. I've had such opportunities offered to me by many organizations, especially non-profit ones that need cheap employees. I actually was offered more but let's stick to 10$ per hour.
So that's 1600$ per month. Enough to buy 3 such laptops. Oh, taxes, I forgot. So you get 2 laptops. Wait! You need food and everything else. Well if you're in a country where that offer actually makes sense, then it's likely that you can live off of 400$ per month quite well. Maybe 800$ if you need to pay rent.
So that's roughly 1 month of work for a laptop that will make you not waste time on waiting for stuff.
Sweet! 1 Month! What does it get me?
Well assuming that you have no laptop, it gets you A JOB that pays you 1600$ per month.
But if you DO have a laptop, you can sell it for cheap, and benefit from the following:
1. Boot-up time from 30-60 seconds to 10 seconds.
2. Installing software - from 1 minute to 10 seconds.
3. Opening a browser - from 10 seconds to 1 second.
4. Opening an advanced text editor (Atom, VS.Code) - from 10 seconds to 1 second.
5. Searching for a file on your entire hard drive - from 1 hour to 2 minutes.
....
You get the point. Waiting is reduced by several times.
So how much do you really wait when coding?
Well are you compiling? Are you opening a new project and the IDE needs to re-index the files? Are you opening programs like a terminal emulator, browser and such? Are you using virtual machines for dev environments?
Well all of these processes become several times faster. Depending on how often you do it, you'll be saving yourself from 1 hour per day to upto 4 hours per day (my case, where a HDD would be just out of the question).
How much is that time worth? At least 10$ per day. If you're working for 20 days per month, 240 days per year, that's a total of 2400$. And for the life time of that crappy laptop of 2 years, that's 4800$ saved. And that's with hugely conservative numbers. Nobody pays 10$ per hour any more, except if you've just started in the industry. I know because I've been there.
Please, for all that's sacred to you, justify right here, right now, HOW THE FUCK can you not afford to get that 8GB of RAM, that cheap ass SSD for 100$, or even a brand new laptop (hey! it's even portable and has FHD graphics on it!) for 550$.
That's why every time I hear someone who is a professional developer complain that they don't have money for a decent machine, I have to ask: why the fuck are you wasting yours and everyone else's time?!10 -
Things that piss me the fuck off about user programs(in this case text editors):
No fucking documentation or signs of it available, a promise from like 3 years ago to post: tutorials/actual docs and yet unfulfilled shit. Yet the author sells the editor, you can get a free version of it, but the extension api is only given in the paid version. It's like $12 bucks, which depending on where you are from is really the cost of a meal.
The editor in question is 4coder, seems like a good stack for building C/C++ based applications with a lot of cool utilities underneath, I see dudes using it to create a lot of cool shit online, but things like moving input, stopping the thing from formatting pasted code etc etc. Shit, even reaching the documentation is fucky, you get the names of the commands......ok...awesome...wtf do I do with these? Why do i need to watch a 20+ minute tutorial from the developer instead of being able to read a retarded ass tutorial regarding how to do the most basic shit? For an editor that is set to replace Emacs and Vim for developers inside of a windows platform....it sure is lacking AF in that regards.
I really want to work with this thing because it seems to be made with a lot of heart, just can't stand the fact that the documentation is lacking like a motherfucker4 -
I'm so frickin' frustrated with school stuff right now. I have to submit all assignments as .doc or .docx files, but nothing hates me more than WYSIWYG text editors. Nothing ever works as it's supposed to and I keep thinking to myself: "If I could just submit an HTML file, this assignment would've been done already..." 😕7
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This is just me throwing out my thoughts from the past few weeks.
edit: this is long
> Working on a C# project. its going well Its teaching me a lot about SQLite and file IO. I'm having a lot of fun with it, even the debugging as much I want to slam my head on the wall but I'm not asking for help so far and I'm very proud of myself because it feels so much better. like I don't mind asking for help but its so much more rewarding and I learn more from it.
> I need portfolio of software I can show off to employers and the current project I'm working on is the first programs in the portfolio. The place I want to apply to uses C#, but I still wanted a few other programs in other languages such as Python or JS just to show what I'm capable of.
> I was looking at what ASP.NET Core offers and it impresses the fuck out of me, and confuses me. The parts that confuse me, like for example the normal asp webapp is a very impressive hello world app. and it has so many different files and such but how or what do they expect me to add? how am I supposed to work with it? and if I delete any files I don't need (the premade js, bootstrap, jquery, html, and css) it produces errors because of the project files are pointing to those. and i know I can use the empty project (I do) but does that question my ability as a dev since I don't want to use it for my projects?
> On that note I love using Intellisense and debuggers and auto complete and I can go without them I just don't want to rely on them. idk I've just been a little more stressed these past few weeks.4