PHP arrays.

The built-in array is also an hashmap. Actually, it's always a hashmap, but you can append to it without specifying indexes and PHP will use consecutive integers. Its performance characteristics? Who knows. Oh, and only strings, ints and null are valid keys.

What's the iteration order for arrays if you use them as hashmaps (string keys)? Well, they have their internal order. So it's actually an ordered hashmap that's being called an array. And you can produce an array which has only integer keys starting with 0, but with non-sequential internal (iteration) order.

This array weirdness has some non-trivial implications. `json_encode` (serializes argument to JSON) assumes an array corresponds to a JSON array if its keys are consecutive integers in increasing order starting with 0, otherwise the array becomes a JSON object. `array_filter` (filters arrays/hashmaps using callback predicate) preserves keys, so it will punch holes in the int key sequence if non-last items are removed, thus turning arrays into hashmaps and changing your JSON structure if you forget to discard keys before serialization.

You may wonder how JSON deserialization works, then? There's a special class for deserialized JSON objects, `stdClass`. It's basically a hashmap too, but it's an object, not an array, and all functions that would normally accept arrays won't work with it. So basically its only use is JSON (de)serialization. You can even cast arrays to objects, producing `stdClass`.

Bonus PHP trivia:

Many functions return nonsensical values. `preg_match`, the regex matching function, returns 1 for success, 0 for no matches and false for malformed regular expression. PHP supports exceptions, so it could just throw one on errors. It would even make more sense to return true, false and null for these three cases. But no, 1, 0 and false. And actual matches are returned by output arg.

`array_walk_recursive`, a function supposed to recursively apply callback to each element of an array. That's what docs say. It actually applies it to leafs only. It will also silently accept object instead of array and "walk" it, but without recursing into deeper objects.

Runtime type enforcing is supported for function arguments and returned values. You can use scalar types, classes, array, null and a few special keywords. There's also a `mixed` keyword, which is used in docs and means "anything". It's syntactically valid, the parser will accept it, but it matches no values in runtime. Calling such function will always cause a runtime error.

Strings can be indexed with negative integers. Arrays can't.

ReflectionClass::newInstanceWithoutConstructor: "Creates a new class instance without invoking the constructor". This one needs no commentary.

`array_map` is pretty self-explanatory if you call it with a callback and an array. Or if you provide more arrays of equal length via varargs, callback will be called with more arguments, one from each array. Makes sense so far. Now, you can also call `array_map` with null instead of callback. In that case it treats provided arrays as rows of a matrix and returns that matrix, transposed.

This is more just a note for younger and less experienced devs out there...

I've been doing this for around 25 years professionally, and about 15 years more generally beyond that. I've seen a lot and done a lot, many things most developers never will: built my own OS (nothing especially amazing, but still), created my own language and compiler for it, created multiple web frameworks and UI toolkits from scratch before those things were common like they are today. I've had eleven technical books published, along with some articles. I've done interviews and speaking engagements at various user groups, meetups and conferences. I've taught classes on programming. On the job, I'm the guy that others often come to when they have a difficult problem they are having trouble solving because I seem to them to usually have the answer, or at least a gut feel that gets them on the right track. To be blunt, I've probably forgotten more about CS than a lot of devs will ever know and it's all just a natural consequence of doing this for so long.

I don't say any of this to try and impress anyone, I really don't... I say it only so that there's some weight behind what I say next:

Almost every day I feel like I'm not good enough. Sometimes, I face a challenge that feels like it might be the one that finally breaks me. I often feel like I don't have a clue what to do next. My head bangs against the wall as much as anyone and I do my fair share of yelling and screaming out of frustration. I beat myself up for every little mistake, and I make plenty.

Imposter syndrome is very real and it never truly goes away no matter what successes you've had and you have to fight the urge to feel shame when things aren't going well because you're not alone in those feelings and they can destroy even the best of us. I suppose the Torvald's and Carmack's of the world possibly don't experience it, but us mere mortals do and we probably always will - at least, I'm still waiting for it to go away!

Remember that what we do is intrinsically hard. What we do is something not everyone can do, contrary to all the "anyone can code" things people do. In some ways, it's unnatural even! Therefore, we shouldn't expect to not face tough days, and being human, the stress of those days gets to us all and causes us to doubt ourselves in a very insidious way.

But, it's okay. You're not alone. Hang in there and go easy on yourself! You'll only ever truly fail if you give up.

My girlfriend is amazing:

After a long uphill battle trying to finish a huge open source project I started months ago. She noticed I was getting a little deflated.
So she donated a small amount to the donation page to lift my spirits.
She wanted to do it secretly but didn't know that it wasnt anonymous.

The little things spur us on.

Funny programmer fantasy porn titles.

Add your 2 cents.

I'll start with.

Naive user needs hot reloading for her frontend.

Boss GF wants you to fix her backend.

Go!

Yesterday and today I finally had some time to work on my server. And I learned/did so much.

Gitlab is now moved to a docker container.
Kanboard is now moved to a docker container.
TeamSpeak is now moved to a docker container.
Dnsdock is set up.
Access now via nginx and sub domains instead of different ports.
Nginx is now running in a docker container.
Every http service got a let's encrypt certificate.

Damn productive Saturday.

Explain js promises, async/await like i am 5.

I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...

#1 - Most expensive lesson learned

Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.

This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...

After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.

Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.

#2 - Hardest to find

This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.

Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.

#3 - Most elegant fix

Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.

My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.

So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.

Rant to discuss Domain Driven Design (DDD) architecture.

Did anyone implemented on production?
How scalable and easy to use?
Do you recommend it? if yes in which environment? in which business types?

Not sure if someone posted this already, but on https://stickermule.com/unixsticker... there's currently a deal for 10 laptop stickers for one dollar.

I hacked this mini-project yesterday night, Computer generated photo-montage by scenes extracted from the movie.
It's an end to end python script which will work for any video and a high res poster.

Any good book i should read, fellows?

Blockchain

So I started researching on Hyperledger and it's associated tools today. Looks really promising. There is so much to read and understand.

Have you started it yet?

GF: Did you watch a movie while you were sleeping?
ME: (Syntax Error): How could i watch a movie while sleeping?
GF: No, the name of the movie is "while you were sleeping"
ME: oh, you forgot quotes for string

I have been a team leader for about 2-3 years. My boss announced that the company will be accepting WordPress Development services and it will be fucking assigned to me and I will be given a new team. Don't get me wrong but WordPress has been my bread & butter when I'm still a college student for I have to fund my own tuition and apply for free-lance and part time jobs. But those days have been a pain in the ass and I don't want to experience those days anymore. Well, I will definitely going to look for a new job. Bye

Continued from pervious Rant.

The Drone sends out a signal to the Headquarters. A "Rare Entity Found" alert shows up on the screen. "Quick, load the map", says the General. Map shows the current location of the Drone. "Dispatch the Team", signals the General while his forehead show signs of tension.

Further down the room, a man quickly types on his phone and hides it.

Far from all this, in a quite city where the street lights have faded away. Old buildings which look like they are about to fall and crumble. The sound of wind can be heard for miles as there is silence all around. A light from one of building's room is turned on and quickly turned off. A man, checks his phone in sleep. Awakens and pours a glass of water to drink. Quenching his thirst, he opens his laptop. Laptop's light is the only light illuminating his room. He again gives a second look at his phone. The message is still there.
"It has been found"

Is anyone here living Google free?

I've switched to using DuckDuckGo and ProtonMail for a while now, but I still find YouTube to be unreplaceable.

And also all the Google stuff on Android, like the play store and other integrations.

I know there's F-Droid and ROMs I might be able to install that wouldn't use any google service; just curious if some have done this successfully.

I am very drunk and in the zone right now for innovation.

And I just wanna ask if what can y'all imply for blockchain being integrated in agritech.

And yes I can still type like a sober mofo. Cheers

Hi, I am a Javascript apprentice. Can you help me with my project?

- Sure! What do you need?

Oh, it’s very simple, I just want to make a static webpage that shows a clock with the real time.

- Wait, why static? Why not dynamic?

I don’t know, I guess it’ll be easier.

- Well, maybe, but that’s boring, and if that’s boring you are not going to put in time, and if you’re not going to put in time, it’s going to be harder; so it’s better to start with something harder in order to make it easier.

You know that doesn’t make sense right?

- When you learn Javascript you’ll get it.

Okay, so I want to parse this date first to make the clock be universal for all the regions.

- You’re not going to do that by yourself right? You know what they say, don’t repeat yourself!

But it’s just two lines.

- Don’t reinvent the wheel!

Literally, Javascript has a built in library for t...

- One component per file!

I’m lost.

- It happens, and you’ll get lost managing your files as well. You should use Webpack or Browserify for managing your modules.

Doesn’t Javascript include that already?

- Yes, but some people still have previous versions of ECMAScript, so it wouldn’t be compatible.

What’s ECMAScript?

- Javascript

Why is it called ECMAScript then?

- It’s called both ways. Anyways, after you install Webpack to manage your modules, you still need a module and dependency manager, such as bower, or node package manager or yarn.

What does that have to do with my page?

- So you can install AngularJS.

What’s AngularJS?

- A Javascript framework that allows you to do complex stuff easily, such as two way data binding!

Oh, that’s great, so if I modify one sentence on a part of the page, it will automatically refresh the other part of the page which is related to the first one and viceversa?

- Exactly! Except two way data binding is not recommended, since you don’t want child components to edit the parent components of your app.

Then why make two way data binding in the first place?

- It’s backed up by Google. You just don’t get it do you?

I have installed AngularJS now, but it seems I have to redefine something called a... directive?

- AngularJS is old now, you should start using Angular, aka Angular 2.

But it’s the same name... wtf! Only 3 minutes have passed since we started talking, how are they in Angular 2 already?

- You mean 3.

2.

- 3.

4?

- 5.

6?

- Exactly.

Okay, I now know Angular 6.0, and use a component based architecture using only a one way data binding, I have read and started using the Design Patterns already described to solve my problem without reinventing the wheel using libraries such as lodash and D3 for a world map visualization of my clock as well as moment to parse the dates correctly. I also used ECMAScript 6 with Babel to secure backwards compatibility.

- That’s good.

Really?

- Yes, except you didn’t concatenate your html into templates that can be under a super Javascript file which can, then, be concatenated along all your Javascript files and finally be minimized in order to reduce latency. And automate all that process using Gulp while testing every single unit of your code using Jasmine or protractor or just the Angular built in unit tester.

I did.

- But did you use TypeScript?

I've been wanting a thing where you can upload a file through a post request (api style), get a download link which allows for one download only (after the file gets downloaded it is removed) and be done.

Couldn't find one so quicky, decided to write one myself.

Two hours later I've got a functioning first version, this is the first time ever where I genuinely wrote a system I needed quickly within a few fucking hours and it actually works O_o

Have y'all heard that some dude made Windows 95 into an electron app?

For those keeping track of what inwas doing here: https://devrant.com/rants/1641742/...

Inhave been playing around woth fractals and making trees (although it wasnt 3 dementional) i have been taking time to learn things there regardless and had an attempt at making a landscape using Perlin noise procedurally generated by the computer

I am planning on releasing the code as soon as i figure out making these trees geberate at certain points of the land and firstly, make it branch in a 3 dementional space

Update of the land

Although i dont have the most time to so this and had to learn java in the process to move away from the limitations i had in the browser. It is a fun experiance and good break away from my actual job.

Ill see how it goes while working on this

✌

The DNS server I'm writing in PHP (largely taken from another project) is starting to work!

Next to just blocking queries it logs every blocked query so I can have stats :3

A little terminal output:

Wrote some codes that uses your photos to compose an input image. Will post code later. Written in Python though. Also this is my dad. Also I wrote this in Yellowstone cuz I didn't like the view lol.

Frameworks for Mobile Hybrid Apps.

So we are considering to migrate our native Android app to a Hybrid because the app almost entirely consists of webviews.

what do you think will be the best choice to try.
in terms of performance, documentation, community, ease of writing and maintaining code

Found this site today and want to share it. Algorithms explained Ikea style.

https://idea-instructions.com

Is devrant GDPR compliant? 😏

My son came from kindergarten with a picture he painted. And that's what I found on the backside of the paper.

Woke up this morning feeling more devrant-y. Made a wallpaper. Download and Edit at will - https://goo.gl/44ju7N

So many developer that does not know how to generate a simple .csr file. Here you go:

$DOMAIN=www.yourdomain.com
$STATE=State
$CITY=The city
$COMPANY=Company Name Gmbh
openssl req -utf8 -nameopt multiline,utf8 -new -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -sha256 -out $DOMAIN.csr -keyout $DOMAIN.key -subj "/C=Your CountryCode/ST=$STATE/L=$CITY/O=${ORG:-$COMPANY}/OU=${ORG:-IT}/CN=$DOMAIN"

A trading bot for cryptos. At first, I just want it to do arbitrage trading. When that's working, I want to implement more complex trading strategies. [more details]