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Hi everyone, long time no see.
Today I want to tell you a story about Linux, and its acceptance on the desktop.
Long ago I found myself a girlfriend, a wonderful woman who is an engineer too but who couldn't be further from CS. For those in the know, she absolutely despises architects. She doesn't know the size units of computers, i.e. the multiples of the byte. Breaks cables on the regular, and so on. For all intents and purposes, she's a user. She has written some code for a college project before, but she is by no means a developer.
She has seen me using Linux quite passionately for the last year or so, and a few weeks ago she got so fed up with how Windows refused to work on both her computers (on one of them literally failing to run exe's, go figure), that she allowed me to reinstall both systems, with one of them being dualbooted Windows 10 + Linux.
The computer that runs Linux is not one she uses very often, but for gaming (The Sims) it's her platform to go. On it I installed Debian KDE, for the following reasons:
- It had to be stable as I didn't want another box to maintain.
- It had to be pretty OOTB, as first impressions are crucial.
- It had to be easy to use, given her skill level.
- It had to have a GUI abstraction to apt, the KDE team built Discover which looks gorgeous.
She had the following things to say about Linux, when she went to download The Sims from a torrent (I installed qBittorrent for her iirc).
"Linux is better, there's no need to download anything"
"Still figuring things out, but I'm liking it"
"I'm scared of using Windows again, it's so laggy"
"Linux works fine, I'm becoming a Linux user"
Which you can imagine, it filled me with pride. We've done it boys. We've built a superior system that even regular users can use, if the system is set up to be user-friendly.
There are a few gripes I still have, and pitfalls I want to address. There's still too many options, users can drown in the sheer amount of distro's to choose from. For us that's extremely important but they need to have a guide there. However, don't do remote administration for them! That's even worse than Microsoft's tracking! Whenever you install Linux on someone else's computer, don't be all about efficiency, they are coming from Windows and just want it to be easy to use. I use Mate myself, but it is not the thing I would recommend to others. In other words, put your own preferences aside in favor of objective usability. You're trying to sell people on a product, not to impose your own point of view. Dualboot with Windows is fine, gaming still sucks on Linux for the most part. Lots of people don't have their games on Steam. CAD software and such is still nonexistent (OpenSCAD is very interesting but don't tell me it's user-friendly). People are familiar with Windows. If you were to be swimming for the first time in the deep water, would you go without aids? I don't think so.
So, Linux can be shown and be actually usable by regular people. Just pitch it in the right way.10 -
Shoutout to my recent client who not only referred a friend of theirs to me for an additional project but is first making them define their project with process models before the customer interview to ensure no one’s time is wasted.
I always recommend to my customers that they define their project before taking it to me because otherwise it becomes billable consultation hours if I sit down with them and talk about the project and create the process models on my end.
This is a good customer experience and what I like to see when working 😁5 -
Its all fun and games until your malfunctioning software costs people their lives - if you're just starting out as a dev or in the "ain't nobody got time for writing tests" camp, I highly recommend you to lookup and read about the Therac-25 incidents during the 80s.
Even if you're not working on a life-critical/mission-critical application, the realization of the impact that us devs can have on the society can push you to become a better developer producing quality software...11 -
them: welcome new project members, this is our CI/CD pipeline which is completely different from the rest of the company, there won't be any great knowledge transfer, we just expect you to be able to know and use everything. but also, we expect you to work on your tasks and don't waste any time.
me: okay, so my tasks aren't going as fast as expected, because I need to invest some learning so i can set up my project correctly.
later: some help would be nice, i'm stuck right now
coworker: *helps me to fix my problems, which were partly due to misconfigured build servers* i know it's a lot, and unfortunately, for this topic sources on the web aren't so good. i can really recommend this book, this will give a deeper understanding of the topic.
me: okay, yeah i mean, tbh, i'll read the book if the project invests some time for me so i can learn everything that's required, but this won't happen. also, some initial workshop on the topic or anything would have been nice.
coworker: well, i mean, i am a software developer. for me, it is normal that i learn all that stuff in my free time. and i think that's what the PM expects from us.
me: okay, that's fine for you, i mean, if i'm interested in a topic, i will invest my private time. but in this case, PM would just expect me to do unpaid labor, to gain knowledge and skills that i can use in this specific project. i'm not willing to do that.
coworker: ...
me: ...
it's not that i don't want to learn. the thing is that there isn't any energy left by the end of the day. i'm actually trying to find some work life balance, because i don't feel balanced right now, haven't felt since i started this job.
also, this is only one of several projects i'm working on. it's like they expect me this project has top priority in my life. if it wasn't so annoying on different levels, maybe i'd have a more positive attitude towards it.
also, at the moment i find it fucking annoying that i have to invest so much time in this dev ops bullshit and this keeps me from doing my actual work.
if they are unhappy with my skills, either they can invest in my learning or kick me out. at this point, either is fine for me..10 -
PM was on vacation the whole sprint.
this sprint was so much more... convenient. i really liked what i was working on.
Also, team lost some of its bureaucratic discipline along the way.
colleague replacing him, in today's daily: since the sprint is basically almost over, i can really recommend to the whole team to wrap up your work of this sprint, so you have something *done* that you can deliver or show in next week's sprint review.
team: ...
oooohhh boy, let me get a shitload of popcorn for the sprint review when PM is back 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿1 -
If you have a new Alienware, I highly recommend not to try installing Ubuntu on it. I can't even describe how many levels of hell I went through to get stuff working, and how every Ubuntu base update gives me a panic attack.
From Ubuntu not installing with RAID settings, then not being able to boot in GUI mode because Nvidia drivers, to built-in keyboard, speaker and mic not working.
Praise the Ubuntu lord, now everything is working, but I still can't adjust the rgb keyboard colors :(25 -
My boss thinks database = table
I hope it doesn't bring problems in the long run.
Any "web dev for CEOs" material you recommend?5 -
Here we are, three years later. Our system breaks down at the slightest load. An architecture is hardly recognizable anymore. The code consists of methods that have been refactored beyond recognition. The so-called architects came and went, leaving behind an ever-growing fiasco. Wrong decisions are concealed, criticism of them dismissed as ignorance. Our clients are on the verge of having us all killed. Daily crisis meetings are the norm. The remaining developers skulk around the unmaintainable code like emaciated ghosts. Everyone who has even the slightest chance to escape takes a parachute. Our dailies are made up of lies to cover up yesterday's lies. Our Mondays have become days of dread, because that's when the weekend disaster news has to be analyzed. Yet there are still developers who turn a blind eye. Who recommend this and that workaround in a good-humored tone. The code consists only of workarounds. Sarcasm has replaced any normal discussion. Reasonable suggestions on how to basically refactor the whole thing are rejected for cost reasons. In the process, our entire budget is eaten up by maintenance costs. Middle management should be put up against the wall. Why am I still here? This deceptive feeling that one could still turn the tide. This is eating me up.2
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I want to replace Windows with Linux on a very old Notebook. It‘s for my father who uses it only for web browsing and Skype.
Can you recommend me a distro?
I think Ubuntu should be fine but I don‘t know.25 -
Since roughly 1 year ago I have been making "leftoff" comments in my code, whenever a work day ended or so, with a few notes on what I was doing and what I was about to work on next.
And I recommend it, I think that's good practice. Because I forgot to do it on friday and I have no GOD DAMN CLUE what I was working on :|3 -
They say to learn a language you need to watch movies or cartoons in it, recommend something in C++ pleaseee?9
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📚What book would you recommend to software developers and why? 1 book per reply so people can ++ them.15
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Fuck YouTube and their sponsored content!
You can clearly see they get paid to promote certain videos as they pop out of nowhere, regardless of your interests, and no matter how many time you click "I don't like this" or "don't recommend channel".
It can be simple stuff like Warthunder vids (which I don't play and never searched for),
Or complex like the Amber Heard trial - vids that make her look foolish. Feels like Depp dropped some serious cash on YouTube to make him look like a victim! (regardless if he really is or not)
Isn't there a law that sponsored content must be marked as such?14 -
If some of you front-end devs haven't used CSS-Grid yet and are still annoyed by using nasty position and JS hacks to place stuff, I strongly recommend you to take 1-2 hours and read this incredibly useful guide for CSS-Grid:
https://css-tricks.com/snippets/...
and this one for Flex:
https://css-tricks.com/snippets/...
These two links have saved me PLENTY of hours struggling with all kinds of responsiveness and placement/sizing issues.1 -
Can anyone recommend some good Linux user group?? I wanna learn more and connect to people who like it.14
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I'm thinking on getting keypass as my password manager, since it's open source, can use csv files and works on a bunch of platforms.
Does anyone has experience with using it or can recommend, in their view, some better solutions?9 -
!rant
For all of youse that ever wanted to try out Common Lisp and do not know where to start (but are interested in getting some knowledge of Common Lisp) I recommend two things:
As an introductory tutorial:
https://lisperati.com/casting.html/
And as your dev environment:
https://portacle.github.io/
Notice that the dev environment in question is Emacs, regardless of how you might feel about it as a text editor, i can recommend just going through the portacle help that gives you some basic starting points regarding editing. Learn about splitting buffers, evaluating the code you are typing in order for it to appear in the Common Lisp REPL (this one comes with an environment known as SLIME which is very popular in the Lisp world) as well as saving and editing your files.
Portacle is self contained inside of one single directory, so if you by any chance already have an Emacs environment then do not worry, Portacle will not touch any of that. I will admit that as far as I am concerned, Emacs will probably be the biggest hurdle for most people not used to it.
Can I use VS Code? Yes, yes you can, but I am not familiar with setting up a VSCode dev environment for Emacs, or any other environment hat comes close to the live environment that emacs provides for this?
Why the fuck should I try Common Lisp or any Lisp for that matter? You do not have to, I happen to like it a lot and have built applications at work with a different dialect of Lisp known as Clojure which runs in the JVM, do I recommend it? Yeah I do, I love functional programming, Clojure is pretty pure on that (not haskell level imo though, but I am not using Haskell for anything other than academic purposes) and with clojure you get the entire repertoire of Java libraries at your disposal. Moving to Clojure was cake coming from Common Lisp.
Why Common Lisp then if you used Clojure in prod? Mostly historical reasons, I want to just let people know that ANSI Common Lisp has a lot of good things going for it, I selected Clojure since I already knew what I needed from the JVM, and parallelism and concurrency are baked into Clojure, which was a priority. While I could have done the same thing in Common Lisp, I wanted to turn in a deliverable as quickly as possible rather than building the entire thing by myself which would have taken longer (had one week)
Am I getting something out of learning Common Lisp? Depends on you, I am not bringing about the whole "it opens your mind" deal with Lisp dialects as most other people do inside of the community, although I did experience new perspectives as to what programming and a programming language could do, and had fun doing it, maybe you will as well.
Does Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses or Los in stupid parentheses? Yes, also for Lost of Insidious Silly Parentheses and Lisp is Perfect, use paredit (comes with Portacle) also, Lisp stands for Lisp Is Perfect. None of that List Processing bs, any other definition will do.
Are there any other books? Yes, the famous online text Practical Common Lisp can be easily read online for free, I would recommend the Lisperati tutorial first to get a feel for it since PCL demands more tedious study. There is also Common Lisp a gentle introduction. If you want to go the Clojure route try Clojure for the brave and true.
What about Scheme and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Too academic for my taste, and if in Common Lisp you have to do a lot of things on your own, Scheme is a whole other beast. Simple and beautiful really, but I go for practical in terms of Lisp, thus I prefer Common Lisp.
how did you start with Lisp?
I was stupid and thought I should start with it after a failed attempt at learning C++, then Java, and then Javascript when I started programming years ago. I was overwhelmed, but I continued. Then I moved to other things. But always kept Common Lisp close to heart. I am also heavy into A.I, Lisp has a history there and it is used in a lot of new and sort of unknown projects dealing with Knowledge Reasoning and representation. It is also Alien tech that contains many things that just seem super interesting to me such as treating code as data and data as code (back-quoting, macros etc)
I need some inspiration man......show me something? Sure, look for a game called Kandria in youtube, the creator, Shimera (Nicolas Hafner) is an absolute genius in the world of Lisp and a true inspiration. He coded the game in Common Lisp, he is also the person behind portacle. If that were not enough, he might very well also be Shirakumo, another prominent member of the Common Lisp Community.
Ok, you got me, what is the first thing in common lisp that I should try after I install the portacle environment? go to the repl and evaluate this:
(+ 0.1 0.2)
Watch in awe at what you get.
In the truest and original sense of the phrase (MIT based) "happy hacking!"10 -
Fuck HttpClient
Once upon a time there was WebClient and WebRequest, everything was simple and life back then was just 3 lines of code. But Microsoft came and decided to ruin everything with HttpClient. WHY IS HTTPCLIENT AN ASS TO DISPOSE? why cant you just close the connection and not fucking leave us with a TIME_WAIT. oh yes it doesn't support ftp and you'll recommend us to use a third party lib? fuck it if you want us to move to something better don't leave us with a half-assed HttpClient. but what about if you have 1000 proxies? oh boy I do love to initialize 1000 HttpClients with different HttpClientHandlers, want only to use HttpClient each request? goodluck filling your ports with TIME_WAIT seriously microsoft3 -
I got a very low power Netbook lately for basically no money.
I thought about using it for some server monitoring / server access via ssh console.
Which Linux distros would you recommend for such a use case. Tried Something like core-os and Debian(lxde) yet but wasn't very satisfied with both options. Both could not display the battery capacity and Debian didn't detect the Intel WiFi.
The Netbook has 512mb of ram which should be fine for a lightweight gui and more than enough for a ssh connection 😅
Thanks a lot for the recommendations :)12 -
I started using qutebrowser at the begining of this year and I havent looked back . Especially all this userscripts the help me skip youtube ads and a nicely done shortcut driven UI, would highly recommend it.2
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Any backend devs here working with TypeScript? What are the best framework choices right now? I've been looking at Nest.js, but there seems to be a steep learning curve that might hamper onboarding of my (literally fresh graduate) new hires. There's also Ts.ED, which seems like the fat has been trimmed from it.
I know people will recommend something like, just using express / koa / hapi but I don't think we have the time to work with something super lightweight 😬😬😬. And besides, opinionated frameworks will speed things up for now (we have a lot of crap we want to do this incoming 2022)12 -
OK, I've got a foot pedal I've used for transcription work and other projects on and off for years. In order to be able to use it outside of the context of my transcription software, I used ControllerMate for the better part of a decade.
Unfortunately, having moved my work over to an M1 Mac it seems that it's no longer compatible, even in the hobbled state it's been in with the past couple versions of OS X.
Been trying to find an alternative for a while and not finding much. Does anyone have anything they can recommend for programming the behaviors of USB peripherals?3 -
Can anyone recommend a good vps/dedicated server hoster for east us? I looking for a machine with 8 cores, 32gb memory and 2x 1,9tb nvme ssds. AWS, Azure and Google are way too expencive. In Germany we use the ax61-nvme instance of hetzner which costs around 100$.
Thanks for any advises✌️5 -
!rant
I'll be the first to admit that my web dev skills are average. Where I work we don't get pushed much since we work off of a very limited (custom to us) platform, which doesn't leave one very well rounded. I am very good with CSS/HTML/FLEXBOX/RESPONSIVE DESIGN and have minimal skills in PHP and JAVASCRIPT. In school I've dabbled with SQL, but hell if I remember much (beside key, the whole key and nothing but the key). What other languages or codes do you recommend learning; what's hot right now? Or should I focus on putting higher emphasis on the ones mentioned above first? I am a front end developer and don't plan on ever doing back end so not looking for the toughest of the tough - just something that will help me grow and land a better job. If there's any cool learning sites you know of too, or other tools, please let me know.3 -
What monitor do you recommend for programming? I currently have a company DELL P2417H, but I have to replace it with a private one.9
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Back in the day when I was a student, I travelled for almost 3 hours by train multiple times per month... I played Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 on my laptop all the way. Surprisingly, even while wearing large headphones, I connected with many people who saw me playing a game that they loved.
RCT2 remains a brilliant game today. The OpenRCT2 project is very well maintained and I can highly recommend it if you want to play it on your modern computer. -
On Friday, 2 of my coworkers asked for help on a concourse issue, it wasn't building correctly, and they had been trying to figure it out all day. It was an old VB project, which was built very weirdly. We made some progress, but didn't get passed the error. I recommend asking in slack if anyone had gotten the error before, but the refused, saying that they could fix it.
Monday morning, and at standup they mentioned that they still haven't solved the issue and were going to work on it today. I once again mentioned that (blank) could help them.
Monday afternoon, and they are still stuck the same issue they had friday morning. I give up and contact (blank) myself, who mentioned they have seen this error before and shows them how to fix it. Five minutes later and they are back on track, past the issue.
Why are people so adverse to help, it should not have taken 2 days and me introducing them to accept help... 🙃1 -
Anyone able to recommend the best place to get courses from for working towards an Azure dev cert (or possibly AWS) ?
I’m thinking udemy etc but only ones I’ve ever used are Linkedin Learning and Pluralsight.
I’m going to be paying for these personally so hopefully not too expensive but quality comes before price.3 -
Can anyone recommend resources on learning/revising big O and big Theta notation?
It’s the one thing that never seems to stick in my head, and the course material provided by university isn’t particularly useful.7 -
Been using python for a couple years now. I've had brief ventures into Java and C# but they weren't for me. I've been looking into Cpp recently (watching cherno tutorials etc). Can anyone recommend a good written resource for learning?
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Can you recommend me some simple php+mysql based backend framework in order to build a simple rest api (with login, signup, scope data) ?6