Number one thing I never expected, when moving networking equipment...
Some idiot wired a 230v socket in a mildly terrifying and dangerous way... Yes, that is 400v and all my equipment has now let out the magic white smoke...
Fuck some electricians!

Slowly getting there :-)

Just applied to a new job with this as my cover letter.
Wish me luck!

!rant
!!git

Who here uses `master` for development?

My boss (api guy) tried to convince me that was normal practice. I gently told him that it sounded crazy and very very bad.

Here's the dev path I'm enforcing on my repos:

(feature branches) -> dev -> qa* -> master -> production*

*: the build server auto-pulls from these branches, and pushes any passing builds to staging/production.

Everyone works on their own feature branches, and when they're happy with their work, they merge it into `dev`. `dev`, therefore, is for feature integration testing. After everything is working well on `dev`, it gets merged into `qa` for the testers to fawn over and beat with sticks. Anything that passes QA gets merged into `master`, where it sits until we're ready to release it. When that time comes (it's usually right away, but not always), `master` gets merged into `production`.

This way, `master` is always stable and contains the newest code, so it's perfect for forking/etc. Is this standard practice, or should I be doing something different?

Also, api guy encourages something he calls "running a racetrack" -- each dev has their own branch (their initials) and they push to that throughout the day. everyone else pulls from it regularly and pushes to their own branch. When anyone's happy with their code, they push from their (updated) branch to `qa` (I insisted on `dev` instead.)

Supposedly this drastically reduces the number of merge conflicts when pushing to an upstream branch due to having a more recent ancestor node?

I don't quite follow that, but it seems to me that merging/pushing throughout the day would just make them happen sooner? idk.

What are your thoughts?

Today I discovered MIT OpenCourseWare.

I hate university, and I usually doze off during lectures, but my god, I've been listening to "Introduction to Algorithms" for about 6 hours now, and I'm hanging on to every word.

A super creepy webcrawler I built with a friend in Haskell. It uses social media, various reverse image searches from images and strategically picked video/gif frames, image EXIF data, user names, location data, etc to cross reference everything there is to know about someone. It builds weighted graphs in a database over time, trying to verify information through multiple pathways — although most searches are completed in seconds.

I originally built it for two reasons: Manager walks into the office for a meeting, and during the meeting I could ask him how his ski holiday with his wife and kids was, or casually mention how much I would like to learn his favorite hobby.

The other reason was porn of course.

I put further development in the freezer because it's already too creepy. I'd run it on some porn gif, and after a long search it had built a graph pointing to a residence in rural Russia with pictures of a local volleyball club.

To imagine that intelligence agencies probably have much better gathering tools is so insane to think about.

If Programming Languages Were Girls:

Java: Your current girlfriend, you've been going steady for a while now. Things are okay.

Kotlin: The girl Java finds you cheating on, she's just amazing, and you wish you'd met her sooner.

Visual Basic: The girl you accidentally started a relationship with because you didn't know how to say no. But quickly realised your mistake and regretted it.

JavaScript: A childhood friend you occasionally hook up with. But you could never settle for a relationship with them.

Python: A bossy, manipulative girl who quickly turned things sour. But everyone else loves her because of her huge libraries.
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My and a co worker were joking the other day about what programming languages would be like if they were girls. This is what we came up with (Original inspiration: the Distracted Boyfriend meme (Feel free to add your own!)).

Desktop Client to Teach Programming [more details]