I'm most excited about Smart Contracts & Distributed Applications.

In early January I started learning Solidity thinking it would be super difficult but was pleasantly surprised when I'd completed my first DApp in a couple days. Two months on and I've finished 3 major projects and launched my own Udemy course.

I'm not a big follower of Crypto Currencies at all and haven't become financially invested in anything really. I just love the way development works on a blockchain; it is quite interesting and It feels really fresh solving problems using code that will become immutable.

Java jdk 10 just came out, but I only just started moving my projects over to build under jdk 9.0.4.

Oh Java 11 is out in beta as well?

Version numbers mean nothing to me anymore.

My first gig was with an MSP doing tech support and eventually some proper infrastructure design and mangement.

Regularly myself and colleagues would find reasons why we should be doing things 'this way' and how we're doing wrong by our customers by not following best practices. (Things like firmware upgrades on routers, switches, servers)

We regularly got shutdown, just told 'no, it's not to be touched if it isn't breaking'. This obviously got us pretty worked up and kinda devided us.

The thing is, It wasn't until my next gig that I sorta realised they were kinda right to shut us down. There was clearly a risk to reward equation we weren't thinking about as employees with no financial stake in the company.

In an enterprise setting, sure doing those kinds of upgrades is necessary, and normally you have a team full of experts and tools to help you do those tasks whilst also mitigating as much risk as possible.

So at the time it felt like a bad experience, but looking back now I realise that from a business perspective it wasn't practical for us to constantly risk breaking things just because 'i read somewhere that we should do this'.

I think to be successful as a developer, IT tech, systems engineer, it's really important to get to know the other departments of the business and how the work you do affects them.

Alrighty then, so you can do this and it'll still work...

Like, I suppose technically speaking it makes sense....

I just like bulding silly things, my ideal devjob would be one where I could just make random junk that makes me smile all day...

Like recently I made an NoSQL database using azure AD. They give you 50000 AD objects free, but I found you could encode all sorts of data in the AD objects variables. So basically I setup a framework that uses Security groups as Collections, AD objects as Documents, and object variables as key pairs.

It's really slow, like roughly 50 queries a minute, but hey. It was fun proving it could be done...

Yeah, that would be my ideal devjob :P that kind of stuff all day

SUCK IT, JIN-YANG

Can software exist without a reference claiming that NASA uses it?

ADHD medication

If your room is a bit cold, simply initialize a node project in a Dropbox directory and let the node_modules folder syncing be your personal heater

I was introduced to disassembly/reverse engineering today. It's amazing how many production applications use isLicenseValid() or other helpful function signatures to assist in my practical learning :p I'm looking at you sublime text

Biggest coding distraction? Bugs.

I'm taking part in my first hackerthon tomorrow. Both excited and nervous... Any advice? Do's and Dont's?

I went back and looked at some code I wrote a couple years ago. It made me so sad... I well and truely did not understand a lot of core concept yet at the time, and I was stubborn and thought what I was writing was good and refused to start over or delete code.

This try block had 4 FileInputStream objects and I even have a defined branching statement which I never use.

Whoever marked this assignment probably needed a lot of alcohol.

I learnt a lot of my java background from Minecraft modding. I even went back a couple years ago when I was learning python and used the Minecraft python api to make my learning a little more interactive.

I'm​ always trying to find cool ways to apply programming to my hobbies, and hacking / modding / breaking the games I play it's a hell of a lot of fun and drives me to learn more

I forget to commit changes when I get something working. Then regret it when I monumentally screw something up and have nothing to fall back on

How do you switch off after a day of technical thinking? What hobbies do you enjoy that don't have you sitting in front of a monitor?

I'm been hacking together software for the last year or so now and I've never considered myself to be a good programmer.

Today however I had to implement an A* search from scratch and with only the knowledge of how the algorithm should function I put together some code that looked correct.

I went to run my code expecting one of the typical "Index out of bound", "null reference", "something has not be initialised" BUT I was shocked to find that the code worked flawlessly.

I went into a weird state of shock and disbelief. I'm not naturally gifted at this stuff, so it was just really hard for me to accept that I might actually be getting better to the point where I might be able to say "I am a programmer"

Does anyone else get bad imposter syndrome?

My ideal Saturday night is a few (or a lot of) beers and a room full of comp sci majors arguing about hypothetical sorting methods and their theoretical complexities.

For nearly 2 years I've been referring to Jetbrains 'Darcula' as Dracula.

Final year of my Comp Sci degree and mum still says I shouldn't study on the computer so much.

Last time I checked a sheet of paper doesn't compile C very well

I am still astounded by how vCenter is able to vMotion itself between hosts while still remaining in control.