I write bugs and sometimes features! I’m also @[email protected].

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Personally, I enjoy the problem solving. Debugging is fun once you’re good at it (and when there isn’t major time pressures).

    Professional software dev is also waaaaay more than just coding, too. And the more you do it, the less coding you’ll do. A junior dev might spend most of their time coding, but senior devs are spending a lot of time doing high level design, helping the juniors, and reviewing various kinds of things.


  • Bash is so bad. I literally use it every day and have written many Bash scripts, yet I’m constantly having to search for how to do things in it because syntax is so bizarre and difficult to remember. Need to do a for loop over lines in a file? You can bet I’m googling the syntax for it. I have a general idea for what it looks like and know what to search for, but no way in hell can I write it correctly in the first few tries.

    String manipulation is the absolute worst. Have fun getting to learn the unreadable syntax of most sed and awk programs (the only thing most people have memorized is find and replace). Stuff like “split a string of comma separated ints and add them up” are way harder in Bash than in Python, despite the fact I often need to do stuff like that in Bash. Well, in the terminal anyway. Sometimes I’ll just use Python, but Python’s weakness is executing programs and getting their output, which is nowhere near as convenient as it is in Bash.

    Side note, isn’t it weird that for a language where flags like --foo bar are so commonly used, there’s no built in or standard tools for accessing flags?


  • The most recent C++ thing I worked on (not that recent, like 5 years or so ago) was a fairly new project and the people working on it were really passionate about C++. But it was C++ code that ran as a Python library and was using the official Python C bindings. Not sure why we didn’t use one of the unofficial C++ libraries, but the usage of that C library (and such a fundamental one) held things back. We wrote was was modern C++ (at the time), but big chunks would be a completely different style.


  • CoderKat@lemm.eetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    9 months ago

    I hate writing code in either language. But at least what C has going for it is that it’s waaaay simpler than C++. Simple can be a really good thing. Sure, all those cool features can save you time, but they can also be gotchas that will cause bugs.

    Though it is a balancing act. Too simple and you’ll make mistakes due to how much you have to repeat yourself or using unsafe equivalents (like using preprocessor directives to mimic features that C++ natively supports).


  • I remember wondering this when I was first trying to self learn. It’s because I needed a map (or list + struct or something) and was such a noob I didn’t know what maps were. Whatever material I was learning from wasn’t good enough, especially for winging things. Plus I was trying to learn C++ and maps aren’t quite so built into the language as they are with a better first language like Python.



  • CoderKat@lemm.eetoTechnology@beehaw.orgThe Man Amazon Erased
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    10 months ago

    You definitely still want locks because most people have no idea how to pick a lock and a lot of crime is crimes of opportunity. But I don’t think there’s that much of a difference in most locks. A slightly better lock might dissuade a thief who learned how to pick cheap masterlocks, but someone who truly wants to get in doesn’t even need to pick a lock. I’d hazard a guess that break-ins happen far more often by breaking the window than picking locks.



  • Yeah, what the fuck is that number? Are we just straight up lying in court now?

    I decided to see how long it would take me to find out how to change it with no help. Took about 30 seconds. In mobile Chrome, it’s basically the first setting on the settings page. So the steps are (1) open chrome, (2) hamburger menu, (3) settings, (4) search engine. Even if I have to count turning my phone on and opening Chrome if it wasn’t on my home page, it still wouldn’t even add up to 10 steps.

    I checked Firefox and it has one extra step. There’s still a search option literally at the top of the settings, just it goes to a page with multiple search related options (default search engine is still at the top). The fact that it worded it as “default” also made me immediately realize you can tap the Google icon in the address bar to choose another option, which must be what you used. 2 steps in that case.



  • CoderKat@lemm.eetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlNew File Format
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    10 months ago

    Totally depends on what the use case is. The biggest problem is that you basically always have to compress and uncompress the file when transferring it. It makes for a good storage format, but a bad format for passing around in ways that need to be constantly read and written.

    Plus often we’re talking plain text files being zipped and those plain text formats need to be parsed as well. I’ve written code for systems where we had to do annoying migrations because the serialized format is just so inefficient that it adds up eventually.