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People refusing to learn an improved programming language or technology, because it might contradict to what they "already know" and you're just there mastering it and appreciating its advantages that you will never learn if you had a closed mindset.4
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Focus of mastering one language, don't jump around to every web langue out there.
Also don't follow the programming language band wagon. Focus and master the basics first HTML, CSS, Jquery. These aren't going anywhere and a SOLID understanding of JavaScript will go WAY further then you think4 -
Last rant was about games and graphics cards (admittedly not received too well), time for a rant about game development houses.. especially you EA.
So yesterday a friend of mine showed me in one of our Telegram chats that he'd modified some cheats in an old FPS game by editing these scripts (not Lua for some reason) that the game used as a.. configuration language I guess? He called the result a tank cemetery 🙃
Honestly the game looked a lot like Medal of Honor to stoned me at the time, so I figured, well why not fire up that old nx7010 I had laying around for so long, get a new Debian installation on that and rip the Medal of Honor: Allied Assault war chest that I still had, and play it on one of my more modern laptops? Those CD's are now very old anyway, maybe time to archive those before they rot away.
So I installed Debian on it again, looked up how to rip CD's from the command line, and it seemed that dd could do it - just give /dev/cdrom as the input file, and wherever you want to store your copy as the output file. Brilliant! Except.. uh, yeah. It wasn't that easy. So after checking the CD and finding that it was still pristine, and seeing another CD in that war chest fail just the same, I tried burning and then ripping a copy of Debian onto another CD.. checksummed them and yes, it ripped just fine, bit for bit equal. So what the fuck EA, why is your game such a special snowflake that it's apparently too difficult to even spin up the drive to be copied?
So I looked around on plebbit and found this: https://reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/... - the top comment of that post shattered all my hopes for this disc to be possible to rip. Turns out that DRM schemes intentionally screw up the protocols that make up a functioning disc, and detecting those fuck-ups is part of the actual DRM.
"I also remember some forms of DRM will even include disc mastering errors/physical corruption on the actual disc and use those as a sort of fingerprint for the DRM. The copied ISO has to include them at the exact same place in the ISO as on the IRL disc and the ISO emulator has to emulate the disc drive read errors they cause."
So yeah. Never mind that I already own this goddamn game, and that it's allowed by law to make one copy for personal use, AND that intentionally breaking something is very shady indeed.. apparently I don't really own this game after all. So I went onto the almighty search engines, and instantly found a copy of this game for download. You know EA.. I wanted to play nice. You didn't let me. Still wondering why people do piracy now? Might take your top suits that suggested these fucked up DRM schemes another decade to figure out maybe.. even given the obvious now.
But hey I wouldn't even care that much if the medium these games are stored on wouldn't be so volatile (remember these discs are now close to 20 years old, and data rot sets in after 30 years or so). You company decided to publish these on CD. We've had cartridges in many forms before, those are pretty much indestructible and inherently near impossible to duplicate. And why would you want to? But CD is what you chose because you company were too cheap to go to China, get someone to make some plastic molds and put your board and a memory chip in that. Oh and don't even get me started on the working conditions for game devs.. EA and co, aren't you ashamed of yourselves? No wonder that people hate game development houses so much.
Yay, almost finished downloading that copy of Medal of Honor! Whatever you say EA.. I've done everything I could to do it legally. You are the ones who fucked it up.9 -
After playing et and wow a few year it all started when I hosted my own ts2 server with npo license. Rented a server for 90 bucks as a highschool student (13) with no job. (Who the fuck rented to me? I had my own bank account and lied about my age. Had a credit card at 14 but that's another story)
*Shit is expensive*
How does one get some value out of a server? Oh right, let's host Webspace and ftp accounts.
That got me into server administration and bash.
After dropping wow in bc i started playing on private servers.
*Shit is buggy*
How do you fix wow server? Let's learn c++ and push patches to arcemu. Why is this part crashing on this one server? Let's look at the binary. Wtf is this? Oh assembler?!? Ok let's try to read this. Ok I get it now. Let's fix the code.
Ok let's host my own wow private server. We need a website for account creation.
Let's learn php. Wait php is easy compared to mastering c++? I need an app for my first smartphone (iPhone 3g) to manage the server on the go. Let's learn how to do that. Why is this so easy? Switching to Android: wait java is even easier?
And that's how I learned that if you start with the hard part and grasp the concept, everything more abstract is significantly easier. If you start to read code to learn any language it's easier then following books (for me at least). If you get an error, track it down, you might learn amazing things in the way.
And if you want to get into reverse engineering, start by being passionate for the thing you want the reverse. It will be hard before it gets easier and you will need all the willpower you can muster not the just stop.
Programming for me is not a job but my passion. It's like I'm on vacation every day of the year (expect meetings, fuck meetings)2 -
Ok, so I need some clarity from you good folk, please.
My lead developer is also my main mentor, as I am still very much a junior. He carved out most of his career in PHP, but due to his curious/hands-on personality, he has become proficient with Golang, Docker, Javascript, HTML/CSS.
We have had a number of chats about what I am best focusing on, both personally and related to work, and he makes quite a compelling case for the "learn as many things as possible; this is what makes you truly valuable" school of thought. Trouble is, this is in direct contrast to what I was taught by my previously esteemed mentor, Gordon Zhu from watchandcode.com. "Watch and Code is about the core skills that all great developers possess. These skills are incredibly important but sound boring and forgettable. They’re things like reading code, consistency and style, debugging, refactoring, and test-driven development. If I could distill Watch and Code to one skill, it would be the ability to take any codebase and rip it apart. And the most important component of that ability is being able to read code."
As you can see, Gordon always emphasised language neutrality, mastering the fundamentals, and going deep rather than wide. He has a ruthlessly high barrier of entry for learning new skills, which is basically "learn something when you have no other option but to learn it".
His approach served me well for my deep dive into Javascript, my first language. It is still the one I know the best and enjoy using the most, despite having written programs in PHP, Ruby, Golang and C# since then. I have picked up quite a lot about different build pipelines, development environments and general web development as a result of exposure to these other things, so it isn't a waste of time.
But I am starting to go a bit mad. I focus almost exclusively on quite data intensive UI development with Vue.js in my day job, although there is an expectation I will help with porting an app to .NET Core 3 in a few months. .NET is rather huge from what I have seen so far, and I am seriously craving a sense of focus. My intuition says I am happiest on the front end, and that focusing on becoming a skilled Javascript engineer is where I will get the biggest returns in mastery, pay and also LIFE BALANCE/WELLBEING...
Any thoughts, people? I would be interested to hear peoples experiences regarding depth vs breadth when it comes to the real world.8 -
I made a serious mistake that is to start directly a programming language without mastering the algorithms, because finally, without a good knowledge of Algorithms we will never be innovative in this field, that's why I reinitialize myself and I take a step backwards to start the algorithms right and master them well.
Your advices please. -
Hey DevRanters.
I'm currently a PHP Developer and I want to learn a new language soon.
I have thought about learning .Net or C# or something third?
At the moment I'm also working with NodeJS and have a basic knowledge about that, should I just continue mastering that?
What should I go with? I don't really care much about how much money it can give and so on, just wanting to learn more :D15
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