Yeaaaaah. And now we all know where my day has gone. (Work is usually not nearly so ugly, this is a gross cleanup problem we've been kicking down the road for a few months. We're up to our eyeballs in technical debt right now because we had a massive project with massive scope creep all last year.) There is indeed a consistently unique ID kind of thing, but it's a human-edited name, which means lots of regexes to parse because spacing is not always consistent. And there are some cases where multiple names are jammed together in ways that may or may not be programmatically predictable. And it may change arbitrarily if people decide to change it, and has indeed changed arbitrarily in the past. :D
And yeah, canonicity is a big problem, we are strongly expected to be reliable. This is getting parsed out onto a public-facing website. Thankfully, broken stuff is more likely to be 'oops, something didn't show up' than 'something WRONG showed up', which is infinitely better. :\
Yeah, I'll be glad when it's sorted out. Hopefully in a few months we'll be done putting out fires for a while and I can go play with low-priority-but-fun tickets. (There's a lot of error types that we have in the logs but which we only care about when the error frequency spikes, because it may imply that part of the site is down or laggy. So I want to build a dashboard / graphing system for our various error loggers that will notify developers/back-end folks when error frequency of [type] goes above [set percentage] of average. It's going to be awesome. :D)
I found this on facebook and thought y'all might enjoy it =D If Programming Languages Were Harry Potter Characters Uh, as for my history with Programming... In high school I did a week long pre-college thing at NC State where I did a little baby program with Alice. Then nothing until college when I tried to major in CS =P They started us out with Python, but I couldn't handle the work load first semester, so I did the previous class which was in Ruby, which just covered some basics. Then I took the Python class. Well, it was just supposed to teach us the "Fundamentals of Programming" and it happened to be taught in Python. Then the next class ("Principles of Imperative Computation") was taught in C0, which is basically baby-C so that we couldn't screw anything up too badly until we got a handle on things. Functional Programming was taught in SML. Intro to Computer Systems was taught in C. Then a theory class which was terrible. All I've got left for the minor is another SML class about Parallel Programming and Data Structures (I think that's a name), and a design class. Since I haven't really done much outside of class, I always feel like I'm pretty crappy. But then I remember that I've made games, shells, and vms (really basic but still) for assignments and generally got A-Bs on them, so I couldn't have been all bad! I haven't had the chance to see how I'd fair in an environment where the problem wasn't spelled out for me. (Systems got pretty close. I did a lot of stuff from scratch, but there was also sample code in the book to get started with, so...)
"Java is Dolores Umbridge, and you know, deep down… you deserve this implementation of generics." ... I'm dying. Data structures are likely to be actually useful in real life; you'll never have to build them from scratch in real life, but it's useful to know the pros and cons of say, linked lists. I'm not sure about parallel programming; depends on what's in it. But hey, don't be down on yourself. Coding is really a state of mind more than a set of skills; if you like solving puzzles and you're getting through your classes, you're probably doing well. :) I think all professional programmers have known people who've been coding for a decade and don't know what they're doing, and people who're fresh out of college who're great.
Yeah, I don't really know what's up with the class other than it's Hard. xD Thanks! I appreciate it :) At this point I'm just looking for a job that's clock in and clock out. I almost don't care what it is (I mean I don't want to do retail, but I'll take whatever). If I manage to get something programming and enjoy it, that'd be neat. Something with languages even better. But that's for Future Me to deal with. xD
Oh, great, one of THOSE classes. Those always suck! Tip on programming jobs, if you want regular hours: Look for government jobs, avoid startups and "hip" tech companies. The former are almost always 40 hours / week, on regular shifts; civil service really hates overtime, in my experience. The latter tend to be made up of young programmers who haven't learned about burnout yet.
Established software companies can be OK too. The one I'm at these days has been around for 20+ years; this is the newer online division, which is nice because it combines some of those big-company attitudes (little compulsory overtime, a sense of your job not being your life) with being a bit more laid-back and less stuffy.
I'm in a start up that was started by guys from the FiDi, so we seem to have a healthier work/life balance than most I've heard about.
Oh, yeah, sorry, Yorker slang. I've only been here a year, I swear. (I can also see FiDi from my office window. Work in hipsterville, though.) And we actually don't work bankers hours, but if I'm done with something, leaving on time is normal. (We might hit crunch in the next few weeks, but that's no big deal, we have a sports season to release in front of.)
Holy shit two solid hours working on this one function and it FINALLY works. (I am not admitting that I forgot to subtract old point from new point to get the right vector. Nope, not at all.) Now I can start figuring out how to slow down the swingyness of the AI.
It's always the silly errors that take forever to fix, isn't it? Indentation is the bane of my existence; F# is whitespace-sensitive.
All I know is that I tried getting into LUA programming, and my HTML knowledge is rudimentary at best. I mean, I understand the basics of programming, but I don't really know any of the syntax and languages. Personally, I don't know where to start, since I want to develop many, many things (website, games, general use programs... games) and I can't seem to get focused on a single thing to work on. Meanwhile here I am hacking Girlfriend Construction Set and going through the torture of manually reprogramming the image files in hexidecimal because there is literally no program that exists for current operating systems that can edit pictures in this particular format.
I don't have whitespace issues (My native coding tongue is Python though so. . . ) In other news, dependencies fucking suck. I'm currently installing most of the libraries at the base of our code (I didn't have local copies), but I'm tired of living without unit tests, so fuck it, I'm jumping down the rabbit hole. (We have some ridiculous dependencies. Give me Flask or give me death.)
Dependencies fixed, new function passes the first set of test cases, in business again. Now back to templating.
I now have 40 bucks of credit on Digital Ocean. This means I REALLY need to get my blog plan in order. And finish Blogkit. I totally just found a markdown Lorem Ipsum generator. So I have a test file!
