This week I'm doing construction work -- renovating my balcony. Just now I've finished with HTML - hanging drywall ceiling. Tomorrow will start on CSS - putty.

Damn, it's so gooood no not think about computers!

Sounds weird without context:

Can someone tell me how a mid level developer with a PhD from EU country is unable to work independently, conduct investigation by himself without too much hand-holding?
Is he too allergic to use google search?

Or is it me that have too much expectation? He's been in our team for 3 months, he should be able to search docs/procedure/files by himself now. Is it me that are too workaholic nerdy and he's just a normal person?
🤔
Thankfully he's the nicest person in our team, but I am getting fed up having to answer his questions many times.

The internet says "containers are the holy grail, it's cross-platform and you can run your images and get the same result everywhere"

The practice says: nope... it doesn't do that

Floating point math abridged

Woohooo, I'm going to Tokyo!
Our paper was accepted to a robotics conference. We have the pleasure of playing with tiny drones, and we get paid and rewarded for it!

(The girl in the video is my amazing collaborator, Hanna)
https://youtube.com/watch/...

Currently working on a game for developers.
Two players compete on a randomly generated arena by sending instructions via a REST API such as "unit x move in the up direction and shoot to the right". So units can be controlled by manual user interaction but the idea is that the players create a smart program that controls the units automatically. So it’s about who can implement the best "bot".

The game is turn based and the units can move one grid cell per turn and shoot in one of the four directions. Shots require energy which regenerates a certain amount per turn.
Units can also look in a direction to spot enemy units which are not visible by default.
The winner is who manages to destroy all enemy units or the main stationary enemy unit "the gem" (diamond shape in the screenshot).
There are walls which block the movement, the line of sight and the shots (green cells).

Everything is randomized. The size of the arena, the number of units, max hp, max energy, etc. But it can be replayed by providing a seed.

There will be a website which lists all games, so that players can watch them.
Alternatively a player can also implement an own viewer. Everything necessary is provided by the REST API.

I’m curious about what you think 😄

My cat!

My wife and I rescued her from under a car. She’s absolutely adorable. We named her Trinity because she liked to wall-run.

Accidentally sharing confidential notes for job negotiation on a team wide meeting: Check

I'm not usually a believer in anything paranormal, and I know there's no rational basis for this, but I reckon threatening to beat the computer with a shovel genuinely seems to work quite a lot of the time.

There's a lil tool someone wrote that runs as a post build event for one of our projects. I got bored of watching that tool hog a single CPU thread for like half a minute each time I had to build, so I tried making the thing multi-threaded...

...and it worked! Shit runs on all threads for just a few seconds now 💪🏻

Customer demands some complicated shit be done within a few hours to align with their schedule.
Me: this is not aligned with reality.
Customer: ...

Think I am going to try out my first stuff for my game engine in 2D. The games I have the most fond memories of were 2D. Sure I like what has happened on the 3D side. But it would be fun to recreate some of my favorite 2D games. Except with one caveat: procedural generation. Never play the same game twice. For testing purposes I will have a seed system to regenerate the same worlds. I would have played these games so much longer if they had been based on a seed for generation of content.

I also like the idea of weapons and armor never being exactly the same. Sure they can look similar, but on close inspection you could see differences. It will be fun to start with base models and then add imperfections and differences.

Another issue I have with fantasy games is always leveling up the weapon by buying something better. Sure we have improvement systems though smithing and magic, but some weapons are always better than others. I wanted to have a game where weapons could be improved by usage and upgrades. Kill 1000 trolls and the weapon gets imbued with trollbane. Kill a dragon and the blood infuses and it deals fire damage. So a player could start out with the family sword and end up with a god tier weapon at the end of the game. Make weapons become legendary. Not because it has more power, but because trolls recognize the blade and the wielder and are scared shitless.

Terrain in 2D should be a lot easier to generate. Weapons, armor, etc should be easier to modify and generate. This should give me the grounding I need to develop the algorithms for a future 3D system. Godot is currently stronger in 2D than 3D. That will change in the next couple of years as more focus is put on the engine. There is no reason I cannot experiment with mixing 2D and 3D as well.

Holy shit, I was just thinking I cannot imagine the amazing shit they could have done with the games I played as a kid with 2D physics!

Haha, something they had in the older games was actual gambling. You could bet on monster fights and slot machines in game. I wonder if that takes a hard hit with ESRB now?

Currently stuck in tutorial hell. Learning how the engine works and seeing what features are available. I get more excited each video I watch. The engine is packed with goodies and the addons are crazy good.

tldr: First project will be short game in 2D. Will explore procedural content.

docker documentation is terrible. Mf'ers seem allergic to giving actual functional examples.

Watch me generate a 1-to-1 copy of the docker compose docs (real & true):

`docker compose --help > docs.html`

Pull-to-refresh is useless.

If you are a mobile app developer, please get rid of pull-to-refresh. Your users will thank you.

I have the impression that mobile app developers choose to implement the pull-to-refresh gimmick just in order to make their app comply with a design trend. It seems like a desperate attempt to appear "modern" and "fancy", not because of the actual usefulness of the gesture.

Pull-to-refresh is one of those things that are well-intended but backfire. It appears helpful on first sight, but turns out to be a burden.

It takes effort and cognitive strain to avoid triggering a pull-to-refresh. The user can't use the app relaxed but has to walk on eggshells.

Every unwanted refresh wastes battery power, mobile data (if it is an Internet-connected app), and can lead to the loss of form data.

To avoid pull-to-refresh, the user has to resort to finger gymnastics like a shorter swipe for scrolling up or swiping slightly up before down. Pull-to-refresh could even be triggered while pinch-zooming in or out near the top of a page, if the touchscreen does not recognize one of the two fingers.

Pull-to-refresh also interferes with the double-tap-swipe zoom gesture. If one of the two taps are not recognized, a swipe-down to zoom in can trigger a pull-to-refresh instead.

To argue "if you don't like pull-to-refresh, just don't use it" is like blaming a person who stepped on a mine, since the person moved and the mine was stationary.

A refresh button can be half a second away in the menu bar, URL bar, or a submenu, where it is unlikely to be pressed accidentally. There is no need for a gesture that does more harm than good.

Using a mobile app with pull-to-refresh feels like having Windows StickyKeys forcibly enabled at all times. The refresh circle animation sticks to the finger.

If the user actually wants to refresh, pull-to-refresh is slower than a refresh button in a menu if the page is not at the top, meaning pull-to-refresh is useless as a shortcut anyway if the page is in any other position than the top.

An alternative to pull-to-refresh is pull-for-details. Samsung did it in some of their apps. Pulling down against the top reveals additional information such as the count and total size of selected items.

If you own a website, add this CSS to make browsing your website on the pre-installed Android web browser not a headache:

html,body { overscroll-behavior: none; }

Why is this necessary? In 2019, Google took the ability to deactivate the pull-to-refresh gesture on their Chrome browser for Android OS away from users. On Chrome for Android, pull-to-refresh can only be disabled on the server side, not the user side. The avalanche of complaints? Neglected.

Good thing several third-party browsers let the user turn off this severe headache.

Honestly I frankly do not care for your title, I care for what you've done and can do.

You may be "more qualified" in research, but if you have no idea how to write software, you're not qualified in software engineering, and frankly, you shouldn't be telling me how to write my code if you don't even understand the use case.

And then don't pretend you own it??????????? The fuck man. I'll sink you.

HR: you didn’t write in your job experience that you know kubernetes and we need people who know it.

Me: I wrote k8s

HR: What’s that ?

…
Do you know docker ?
Do you know what docker is ?
Do you use cloud ?
Can you read and write ?
Are you able to open the door with your left hand ?
What if we cut your hands and tell you to open the doors, how would you do that ?
What are your salary expectations?
Do you have questions, I can’t answer but I can forward them. Ask question, ask question, questions are important.
What is minimal wage you will agree to work ?
You wrote you worked with xy, are you comfortable with yx ?
We have fast hiring process consisting of 10 interviews, 5 coding assessments, 3 talks and finally you will meet the team and they will decide if you fit.
Why do you want to work … here ?
Why you want to work ?
How dare you want to work ?
Just find work, we’re happy you’re looking for it.
What databases you know ?
Do you know nosql databases ?
We need someone that knows a,b,c,d….x,y,z cause we use 1,2,3 … 9,10.
We need someone more senior in this technology cause we have more junior people.
Are you comfortable with big data?
We need someone who spoke on conference cause that’s how we validate that people can speak.
I see you haven’t used xy for a while ( have 5 years experience with xy ) we need someone who is more expert in xy.
How many years of experience you have in yz ??? (you need to guess how many we want cause we look for a fortune teller )

Not much changed in job hunting, taking my time to prepare to leetcode questions about graphs to get a job in which they will tell me to move button 1px to the left.

Need to make up some stories about how I was bad person at work and my boss was angry and told me to be better so I become better and we lived happy ever after. How I argued with coworkers but now I’m not arguing cause I can explain. How bad I was before and how good I am now. Cause you need to be a better person if you want to work in our happy creepy company.

Because you know… the tree of DOOM… The DOMs day.

Random. Related to WFH.

How do you deal with all this waste sorting/recycling business?

I live in what's considered a small apartment for 4 people and a cat and in our tiny kitchen we have separate trash bags for:
- plastic/paper/metal
- glass
- deposit bottles
- commons/unsorted

- and it's very likely that starting '24 we'll also have an orange 'food waste' bag

I swear to God, sometimes I feel like the Wall-e, the trash prince, living in a recycling centre/dumpster. This kind of taints the pleasure of WFH.

How do you deal with that? Question to those who sort waste and, preferably, live in a small aptmt.

What does a clock do when it's hungry? It goes back four seconds!

well, fuck... how about everything that works in visual studio but feels like garbage in VS Code???

don't get my wrong I use VS Code for every other language... but C# has just always felt better in visual studio than in VS Code. oh well

I've only been here for 1 month for my new position in Ops, and I already miss software development!

All I do everyday is just typing commands on the terminal.
If I am feeling fancy, I may create a script or two (that's the closest thing I have to writing code).

I hope I can get more interesting thing to do in the future. If not I can't see myself doing this in long term. It's OK for occasional tasks or added responsibility but I don't want to do it as my main job.

Never thought i Would have to say this: You see someone saying pedo weird shit, you are supposed to attack them on them, no mercy, no quarter is to be given to these weird fucks. Yet we have people defending them, i am sorry if my southern Texan comes out, but i cant fathom the idea of saying weird pedo shit and not being against it, y'all fucking mental.

-If you see that shit you report it, there is no "lets talk" NO no, you report it, fkning assholes.

This community has gone to shit, and the owners of this site are fucking useless in terms of moderation, this is a disgrace. And you shitbags that agree with shit or try to mend it fucking gross me out.

Touch some grass you fucking neckbeards, maybe then your reality wouldn't be so distorted

My CTO told the COO and CEO i'd be finished SOC2 compliance by the end of December... On December 14th.

It takes 3 months to do the audit, let alone all the actual work. I hadn't even started yet.

He was fired shortly after that.

Found the secret Bethesda HQ. It’s located in Germany and is disguised as an old people’s home.

Conversation I had with a coworker today:

me: When transferring an object from C++ to QML you have to set the parent of the object. If you don't QML thinks it can just delete this object.

coworker: So if you don't set the parent of the object then the orphans get Anakined?

me: Yes

For those of you who still refuse to accept that safety features in languages are useful and important:

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/...

The author of curl himself admits that this security flaw could have been prevented if he had used a memory safe language.

I‘m not blaming the author for making this mistake and I‘m not saying that curl should be rewritten in another language.

I just want to rub this in the faces of people who argue that "bugs are always the developer’s fault, therefore it’s perfectly fine to keep using unsafe languages"

What it feel like

Weirdest morning in a while:
- good morning!

_ good morning

* walk over to colleagues desk to see what he’s working on pure out of interest*

_what do you want?

-nothing just curious

_do you want to fight?

-wtf?

The more i work with fellow developers the more i realize the special kind of people we actually are.

Let me explain a tiny corner of some awful code I read earlier today, in layman’s terms.

It’s a method to see if the user is in a secure session — not to set up the session, just to see if it exists. The method ends with a question mark, so it’s basically a question. It should look up the info (without changing anything) and should always give a clear yes/no answer. Makes sense, right?

Let’s say the question is “am I in school right now?”

The code… well.

If there isn’t a student, the answer it gives is null, not yes or no. Null is a fancy word for no, pretty much, so that’s kinda fine, but it really should be a simple no.

It then checks to see if the school is open today. If it is open, it then checks to see if I made my lunch, if I took my backpack, and if I rode the bus — and makes these things happen if they didn’t. Forgot my backpack? Just ask “am I in school today?” And poof! There’s my backpack! … but only if the school is open.

It then, finally, checks to see if I’m actually in the school, and gives that answer.

It could just see if I’m in the school — I mean, I could be in school without a backpack, or walked there on the weekend, right? Ha! You and your silly logic have no place here.

So, by asking if the user is in a secure session, we change the answer: they weren’t before, but the act of asking makes it so. This isn’t profound or anything: I don’t work with Schrödinger. My coworkers are just idiots.

And no, the rest of the code isn’t any better…

Yesterday I had a questionable pleasure of interviewing a young software engineer who (while answering one of earlier questions) used a principle of polymorphism but made a mistake. So I asked her to explain what polymorphism is.

She couldn't. When she said "let me start from the beginning" for the 3rd time I jestfully noted that if she's more used to virtual communication she can text me the answer, and she not only thought I was being serious but also thought it's a good idea, then texted me a duck emoji, a dog emoji... And got stuck again.

Obviously when we were discussing potential salary she had an answer for every question. Ridiculous answer but no communication issues whatsoever.