Did you pull it before checkout?

Ah, sorry.

Don’t forget rustaceans for rust!

If you don’t already, use version control (git or otherwise) and try to write useful messages for yourself. 99% of the time, you won’t need them, but you’ll be thankful that 1% of the time. I’ve seen database engineers hack something together without version control and, honestly, they’d have looked far more professional if we could see recent changes when something goes wrong. It’s also great to be able to revert back to a known good state.

Also, consider writing unit tests to prove your code does what you think it does. This is sometimes more useful for code you’ll use over and over, but you might find it helpful in complicated sections where your understanding isn’t great. Does the function output what it should or not? Start from some trivial cases and go from there.

Lastly, what’s the nature of the code? As a developer, I have to live with my decisions for years (unless I switch jobs.) I need it to be maintainable and reusable. I also need to demonstrate this consideration to colleagues. That makes classes and modules extremely useful. If you’re frequently writing throwaway code for one-off analyses, those concepts might not be useful for you at all. I’d then focus more on correctness (tests) and efficiency. You might find your analyses can be performed far quicker if you have good knowledge about data structures and algorithms and apply them well. I’ve personally reworked code written by coworkers to be 10x more efficient with clever usage of data structures. It might be a better use of your time than learning abstractions we use for large, long-term applications.

I really liked how coupling is described as “knowing.” I find we talk about “does x need to know about y?” more than we do “is x overly coupled to y?” because the former is a relatable indicator of the latter.

Interesting though as it shows what “hard Brexit” was. Not in the customs union, economic area or council; just yeeted all the way out.

The best part is the voting slip never defined any of it and, if taken literally, the UK would still be in the EEA.

I use a UK keyboard, | is pretty easy to access and $ is Shift+4.

I’m guessing you mean more exotic keyboards. I’ve used a Swedish keyboard while helping a friend and I had to ask where every key was. You probably just learn the combinations eventually.

https://www.cloudynights.com/ is probably the best astronomy community about, the subreddit never compared.

This isn’t acceptable. If it’s important to the government, then all the more reason to hold them to account. This whole scandal makes a mockery of software engineering as if there is no way to ensure quality.

I work on software arguably less critical than this, in that it’s never been used to prosecute anyone, yet any discrepancy in numbers is found by QA, understood and duly fixed. Why can’t we demand the same from software which the outputs of can and are used as evidence in court? Why is it acceptable for them to say “it was too costly?”

obscure corporate jargon like KPIs (key performance indicators), KRIs (key risk indicators) which, after having thrown them at me during an interview for a college intern position, made the interviewer wonder why i got so flustered. i would hesitate to throw any acronyms around in any interview, let alone for a college student.

by the way, i got the internship. the acronyms weren’t even used in my position.

Ah, it might be a regional thing. In the UK, the cheapest Vitamix is almost £400 where the Magimix was about £200 at the time. They might be pretty comparable but the prices don’t quite work out the same here.

Totally agree though, I was getting through a £50-75 blender each year for really silly breakages with no spares available.

A decent blender. Not anything industrial like a Vitamix, it’s a Magimix which was about half as much but still durable and has replaceable parts. It’s fine for what I need and is lasting much longer than the pile of crap I had before.

Vacuum pack bags for clothes is another one. I like to keep my wardrobe seasonal but I don’t have much space, so packing it down helps.

Also anything reusable: PTFE/silicone baking sheets, rechargeable batteries, reloadable floss handles. All of these have saved recurring purchases, money over time and reduced waste (which made me feel good.)

Nice try, boss.

Yeah, this is one of those things which sounds great on paper but also introduces problems. I’ve seen people get really annoyed when exception messages are translated because it makes them harder to search for online. That would need to be solved too.

I’ve had huge issues collaborating on a spreadsheet with a Spanish client. It tries to open the sheet in your locale and then can’t find the functions. Insane that Microsoft didn’t even add some metadata to allow me to work on it in Spanish.

Bottom left is when I make a kubernetes cluster to serve up a mock weather API for practice.

Exactly. I used PHP for years, I haven’t “not used it.” It was the first programming language I seriously learned. Writing good code was tedious if not impossible and that became even more obvious as I expanded to C#, Java, Python and C++; none of which tolerated any of the bad and unconventional practices I’d inevitably picked up. Keep in mind, I was actively trying to avoid bad practices and pay close attention to types but still got kicked to the curb hard when I tried other languages. I haven’t had that since.

I appreciate it’s changed since, I’m happy to see it’s not the same dumpster fire it once was, I also don’t care. I don’t actively trash it, I just think there’s usually a better option.

Ruby on rails is alive, just not as popular. ASP.NET is popular but looks nothing like it did then; probably for the best.

Yeah, plus PHP was very popular circa 2011-2016 and laravel was loved by many around that time and beyond. It’s always been a useful language.

Yep, it’s usually an existing idea with progression in a few areas. You could definitely achieve serverless with a cluster of servers hosting the same scripts in cgi-bin and I think that context helps to put it into perspective.

I think it’s a maturity thing. You eventually see so many trends come and go, peaks and troughs of hype cycles and some developers (probably including yourself at least once!) overusing certain new tech.

You eventually discover what works with current tech and then you can become healthily critical of anything new. You see it more for where it can fit and where it can’t.

If you have something small and stateless then serverless is easy and, more importantly, scalable. It was a little easier to see its role once the hype fog had lifted and I had a problem to solve with it.