81–90 of 93 posts
* A in-depth, conceptual explaination of HTML/CSS layout and common UI idioms, so that I don't have to google something every now and then when making a website
* Back-end security related topics in one place. Various type of attacks and edge cases. (OWASP comes quite close I think.)
* Using Databases efficiently.
I'm continuously surprised by the ad-hoc manner in which devs use frameworks not understanding what the syntax they wrote means to the database. Many are confused by joins, or vs left-joins, and if a query runs slow have little idea how to index or change their schema to be more appropriate.
While we're here I'd also say data modelling. The DB is not meant to have a row-to-screen/page cardinality matching, unless you're a startup using MongoDB (or other document store).
The third one would be about API design. There are many blog posts that discuss one or two specific aspects of a particular API type (REST, gRPC, GraphQL) but it would be great to pick one of them and have it all lair out.
There may be print books that cover the above, but certain important topics always seem to fall in the gaps, like how exactly does one bound their microservice context? Most books gloss over this with a hand-waving trio of Order, Product/Widget, Customer.
I think an under-served market is "intermediate to advanced programming for people who didn't study computer science but can already write half-decent Python and maybe some SQL, JavaScript or Matlab/Julia/R". People who are fine with control flow, git, unit tests etc, but who would be lost if you start talking about things like state machines or depth-first search. I'm largely talking about myself here, but I've work…
Hacking open source. I would love to see architectural overviews and code tours of major open source projects
What I would find interesting is a page which lists all steps to be performed on the command line to create a web application from scratch. Say we start with a fresh Debian install, the first line might be apt update && apt upgrade The second line might be apt install php Or Python or Node. And then the commands to create the project directory, switching to it, installing a webserver etc would follow. At some point t…
OpSec/Tradecraft for Developers
The metaphysics of CS/stats/DS/ML/etc. (I have a vague impression that the Bayesian vs. frequentist argument is just one tip of a multifaceted iceberg)
Protocol design and File format design
Game Theory as applied to de jure and de facto standards-making (incl. network effects, adversarial interoperability, etc.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“I think an under-served market is "intermediate to advanced programming for people who didn't study computer science…”” I find this too. I’m self taught and have made a lot of good projects with blog tutorials and SO. Python has let me do a lot quickly, but I get stuck on some odd things. Last time it was data structures. For a project I was expanding, the data structure was insufficient. I imagined there must be mo…
>> Right now I’m stuck on an aspect of Django. Django is a Python module. When I want to add another module to modify how Django behaves I need to override in my code. It’s all too complicated to imagine for me. Example, adding wiki pages to django by adding django-wiki module, then adding tags to the wiki pages by adding danio-tagulous. I know this is some kind of class override, but I just can’t imagine it. Can you…
I’m not looking for problem solving, and I’m not going to discuss specifics here. I’m describing for the OP a difficulty I have in programming, which I assume is due to a gap in my education. You’ll have to use your imagination.
The best I can do to explain what I’m struggling with is confusion over levels of abstraction further from the code I’m writing—write some code, then expand it by importing someone else’s code and then import another piece of code to expand the first import—it’s turtles all the way down.
Dealing with APIs isn’t as terrible as that, but I could use some better language to describe these special cases. I’m also bad at reading other people’s code on GitHub and understanding what they’re doing—for example. But of course I understand my code.
Being a fan of minimal, clear languages, Lisps, Forths, Rebol etc, I've somewhat unexpectedly found myself immersed in the stuff by Perl community (perlmonks.org). I seem to like the free-form madness that surrounds this language (and the Monks), and Perl's linguistic roots and Larry Wall's thoughts on this are very interesting. Sigils and the verbosity strangely make sense to me, etc.
But, installed Perl is Big, at least compared to Picolisp, Rebol, or Lua.
I read about Microperl [1], but seems like it hasn't found (didn't find, in its day) wider usage. This philosophy -- deliberately writing Perl with a minimal amount of external dependencies -- doesn't seem very popular, aside of one-liners, which is a different thing imo. I wonder why. I've found a few contemplations [2, 3], but not much. Are people who have loved Perl first and foremost because of its syntax, semantics, TIMTOWDY etc, a tiny minority as compared to those who were dug in primarily because of CPAN?
And I wonder if Perl 6 (Raku) will be any different in this regard -- will its design encourage or favor minimal uses or systems a little more?
1: https://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol5_3/tpj0503-0003.html
2: From 2018, "I want Circuit Perl now!": https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1210076
3: From 2003, on Microperl: https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=228040
I think an under-served market is "intermediate to advanced programming for people who didn't study computer science but can already write half-decent Python and maybe some SQL, JavaScript or Matlab/Julia/R". People who are fine with control flow, git, unit tests etc, but who would be lost if you start talking about things like state machines or depth-first search. I'm largely talking about myself here, but I've work…
How's that saying go? Show me a programmer with 20 years experience, and I'll show you a programmer that did the same thing twenty years in a row.