Programmer's Den

[Hephaestus]

I'm relearning C++, and it's a bit different than I remember in some ways. For clarity: my use of C++ is C plus classes, namespaces, and operator overloading--never delved into templates, or multiple inheritance.

Consequently, it took me a minute to work out why I could do the following and get what I wanted rather than what I expected:

//I've got a couple little questions to throw in here while I'm at it.
//This first include statement baffles me--I get the idea from looking it up.
//What baffles me is my compiler behavior regarding it.
//If I don't use it, the compiler throws an error and won't compile.
//If I do use it, a mouseover tells me it can't find/open the file
//but it does compile.
//The cleanest solution to me is to track down whatever setting is throwing the error
//and change it, then stop calling it--but it's fucking weird that Visual Studio
//has it on as a default but doesn't have the file it needs to do it.

#include  <stdafx.h>
#include  <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
//auto is new feature that coming from Python I find amusing and dangerous. I used it to figure out
//how to invoke a cleaner string I didn't have to typecast to get into cout. Thus I discovered
//const char * var--which is what auto selected for me.
	auto message = "Hello.\n\nTest\n\n";
	
	cout << message;
	
	message = "A new String\n\n";

	cout << message;

	
    return 0;
}

The interesting thing in this is being able to change the value of 'message'. I call it Pointer Trick #1. Your pointer is constant, the value it points to is not.

What I'm trying to do is Pointer Trick #2. You instantiate a const. Then, you assign it's address to another pointer, and change the value at the address of the pointer, thereby also changing the value of the original const. Presently I'm trying to do it with a const char var[], but can't get the compiler to play ball. I don't know if I'm butting against the compiler or the language, though I'm planning to try the experiment again tonight with Notepad++ and GCC--unless someone can explain what my screwup is.

const char mark[] = "Test message 1\n\n";
const char * sneak = mark;

cout << mark;

sneak = "New message!\n\n"

cout << mark;

I'm probably overlooking something simple and stupid, but it's part of the basic pointer hat-trick.

[notdavidlynch]

Dear God, why?

I'm talking about myself. I posted once that I had transitioned from hipster JS dev to hipster Swift dev. I was about to post that I recently transitioned from that to a hipster sys-admin and ruby/rails developer, because that's my current gig, but I think that once you cross into any kind of sys-admin shit you may as well drop the "hipster" part.

Sys-admin is fine, but dear lord does rails suck ass, and it sucks extra ass when the codebase you're working to get running was written by a large firm dependent on hella-automated deployment processes that break when you're not one of their employees.

[scarydoor]

So many people don't know what the fuck they're talking about. It would be okay if they just were aware of it.

Had this problem with a http POST controller not working when called from the browser. "OPTIONS method not supported" whatever. Slightly more superior guys says "why is angular turning it into an OPTIONS request?" I didn't really know what the fuck he was asking. I sent him away while I fixed it.

Later, I let him know "it works!" I made the controller thing handle the OPTIONS thing. Just a "options() { return null }" sort of thing. (could be a better way to do this, but fuck it. I'm outside my normal sphere)

He says "that's really not a good solution."

"did you read the discussion [link] I sent you?"

I ask him why. Turns out he thinks I've just renamed "post() [whatever]" to "options() [whatever]" to fix this "weird" angular thing, and instead I should stop angular from "turning post into options". Like wtf mate?!

So one of our slightly more senior developers, who works on APIs, is not aware that requests made between different servers send the options request sometimes. wtf.

It's not too bad. But I am reluctant to let anyone know when I'm unsure of a particular error, as it may open me up to someone advising I do something stupid because they have no idea.

[Hephaestus]

@scarydoor, I just wanted to thank you for making me aware of pluralsight. I haven't delved too deeply yet, but so far all the courses seem top notch--as in they give me that "I got the good teacher at uni" feeling. The interface has a klunk or two I plan on giving feedback on, but the content is so much better than say, Udemy.

[notdavidlynch]

The worst thing about being a freelancer is that I essentially turn into Johnny Mnemonic when taking on new jobs, stepping way beyond my reasonable limits and risking brain seepage and death. I got sick last night getting this server stack running -- dozens of substantially complex components working together in a way I'm sure the original development team of a dozen Polish dudes didn't entirely understand or bother to clean up. It's like one whimsical decision of (unnecessarily) adding elasticsearch starts a snowball effect of extra libraries and services to get it and keep it running (redis, sidekiq, etc) and even more complexity added just to manage the established complexity during deployments with Capistrano and Docker and custom Capistrano/Docker integration packages that were conveniently left out of what my client won from the "developers" (who outsourced to Poland) in a lawsuit.

[scarydoor]

@scarydoor, I just wanted to thank you for making me aware of pluralsight. I haven't delved too deeply yet, but so far all the courses seem top notch--as in they give me that "I got the good teacher at uni" feeling. The interface has a klunk or two I plan on giving feedback on, but the content is so much better than say, Udemy.

Awesome. Glad you enjoyed it too. Yeah the quality is great hey. Unfortunately, my three month free trial (from the microsoft developer subscription) runs out in just a few days. I think I will take a break from it for a month or two and then actually buy a year subscription.

Which courses are you working through?

----

So many interesting things to learn.
- firebase. Dived in today. seems excellent. Real-time db syncing -- wow. Easy integration with all that authentication stuff, seo (I assume), other google stuff (I assume), just makes sense.
- ng-content content projection in angular2+.
- ngrx/store / redux pattern for ng 2. Got to learn it properly.
- on Monday my boss said "hey can you figure out this Flutter thing" so I just dived in and made my first simple android app with that. It's like an abstraction on top of normal android apps, so you worry less about the ui, tell it what to do, and it'll pretty much do the google material design ui. Seems pretty good if you just want to pump out okay looking stuff without worrying about a bespoke thing.
- dove into this nx workspaces angular 2+ thing. Hacked angular 2 so I can whip up multitudes of UIs with no fuss. Still need to work out details.
- mozilla documentation / guides for all the web stuff is great.
- all those random web APIs.

I've got too much to do, but I like it.

[scarydoor]

Friends, I need your opinions/suggestions on this one.

While chatting with my boss I accidentally said that the different dev teams should interact a little more about what they do. Apparently we have a "culture problem" at our workplace. It's not that bad, but it is true that different teams don't really have a clue what anyone else is doing.

My belief is (I may be wrong/alone in this thinking), that it would be interesting to know what other teams are doing. At least a little bit.

My boss set up this presentation. Kind of thrust it upon us. The format was all wrong, in my opinion, but it was alright. I mean, we survived. (it was just us talking to a few people about we built, for like 40 minutes. Too long. Dragged out. No one cares that much)

I gave him some feedback, and specified that (if it were to be a thing), would be better if:
- each person/group only talks for 3-5 minutes about what they did
- it's really low effort. Just a few pictures/screenshots/whatever
- it's a variety of people
- it can just be a fragment of something. Some cool programming thing someone found.

What I'm fairly anxious about is that I'm just some random new-ish dev, who doesn't know a real lot just yet. I don't really want to be pushing this thing. Also I'm a god damned introvert. I'm not a crowd motivator. No public speaking charisma (I don't really want to have that).

Also, I'm not really sure if other people at the company would be that interested in this. Would it just be some annoying/weird thing? Personally I think I would be reasonably interested in these things. But I don't want to make people feel awkward about maybe feeling pressured to do some weird thing.

I was chatting with my boss again today and he brought it up again. I think he really wants me to do it. He also kind of said "it's got to be handled by developers, not managers, so you're in charge!" right before I was about to say "I'm not in charge!"

Probably the main thing would be getting a variety of people wanting to show something, and have them somewhat comfortable doing that. I probably could randomly get together about 5-7 ish things, and I probably could muster some resemblance of public speaking confidence from my past life to go first into the thing.

... I don't know ...

[RDF]

Friends, I need your opinions/suggestions on this one. [...]

Sounds like you're basically just re-inventing the Weekly Staff Meeting (or bi-weekly or monthly or whatever). Maybe I'm wrong; I don't know anything about what programmers do. So maybe you're thinking of something entirely different. But I was a bureaucrat in another life (pre-retirement), so I'll just go ahead and provide a couple notes on how to run a Weekly Staff Meeting, and you can see if there's anything there you can use.

Basically the key to running a successful Weekly Staff Meeting is in constructing and enforcing a formal agenda. The agenda should dictate the structure, who attends, time limits, and discussion subjects ahead of time, and then during the meeting itself you just focus on enforcing the agenda: Keeping everyone on-subject and on-time.

Easiest way to set up an agenda is to have a couple different stages played out fairly quickly. For example:
1) A "tour de table" where everyone gets two minutes or five minutes or whatever to discuss what they're working on
2) Then a five-minute presentation from someone on an "old business" topic. The presentation can be more formal and include slides, etc.
3) Then a five-minute discussion period on any critical "new business" that might arise from the previous discussion stages.

The key to the success of this kind of agenda: Set the agenda up to benefit you and what you want to achieve with the meeting, then publicize it so everyone knows the rules, and lock it in stone so that you can enforce it. That way, if someone starts trying to drone on at length about their project during the "tour de table," you can cut them short and tell them it's nothing personal; it's just the rules of the agenda. If they want more time, allot them the five-minute slot for "old business" at the following meeting or something.

Of course, the agenda can be changed up if changes are needed. But basically you want to treat the agenda as some kind of Star Trekian "Prime Directive." Weekly Staff Meetings that are structured and driven by an agenda can be productive, fast-moving, and informative; whereas Weekly Staff Meetings that are unstructured and impromptu quickly turn into boring dronefests.

Once you set up the agenda to your satisfaction, you don't even need to speak at the meetings yourself. You just preside over the meetings and enforce the rules while others make their presentations.

If any of this interests you and you want to pursue such ideas further, get a book on management; there should be a chapter in there somewhere on running Weekly Staff Meetings. Anyway, good luck with that thing...

[scarydoor]

Sounds like you're basically just re-inventing the Weekly Staff Meeting

This is exactly what I don't want to do, actually.

I don't want to do anything that would be an obligation, or formal check-in or anything like that. The only rule I would have is no one talks for longer than 3-5 minutes, so it's less likely to be boring.

I just vaguely expressed some idea to my boss that it would be cool if people could randomly regularly share a few cool things they've learnt. I don't know if that even makes sense.

Maybe I'm applying my own biased interpretation to the phrase "weekly meeting". That conjures up feelings of dread to me. The other thing is I have zero authority in this context (and I don't want any), so I can't really impose any agenda or anything either.

[RDF]

This is exactly what I don't want to do, actually.

I don't want to do anything that would be an obligation, or formal check-in or anything like that. The only rule I would have is no one talks for longer than 3-5 minutes, so it's less likely to be boring.

I just vaguely expressed some idea to my boss that it would be cool if people could randomly regularly share a few cool things they've learnt. I don't know if that even makes sense.

Maybe I'm applying my own biased interpretation to the phrase "weekly meeting". That conjures up feelings of dread to me. The other thing is I have zero authority in this context (and I don't want any), so I can't really impose any agenda or anything either.

Fine, but remember what I said about unstructured meetings turning into boring dronefests. The extraverts are going to hijack the meeting.

"Weekly meetings" suck. They inspire dread in everyone. But the thing is, they're often better than the alternative--the unstructured gabfest.

As for having zero authority: If your boss is tasking you with this assignment, you borrow his authority, at least for the duration of that task. Just get him to sign off on all aspects of the structure ahead of time, and you basically speak with his authority. It's called "delegation of authority."