351–360 of 455 posts
The edited title does not have the same meaning. Why was the done? How often is this being done? What else is being changed?
If I write a title on my blog saying, I like Java, what is to prevent you from changing it to I hate puppies.
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> If they do know, and you tell them, then you've only really confirmed what they already knew. Not necessarily. This opens you up to accusations of engaging in "mansplaining" which has broadened in definition over the years. In addition to this, it opens you up to being thought of as a "know it all". It's far safer, as far as office politics are concerned, to put on your coworkers the burden of asking you to clarify…
Would asking them if they already know or would like something explained be the best thing to do (rather than assuming one way or the other)?
A paper in a cancer journal and a Web MD blog can discuss the same disease, and both will seem like a foreign language to the wrong audience.
And now we have LLMs, most of the "trade words" and jargon can easily be translated into a kindergarten reading level if that's the reader's background.
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C# is amazing. Decisions at the education level were made well before it went cross-platform though (FWIW, I've been using it since before v1.1). Would be interesting in what confusing syntax you're referring to. I think one of the beauties of it is that it's additive. You can program plenty of simple stuff in it with conventional style code, but there's a lot of syntactic sugar available that makes things so easy wh…
I agree, C# is my language of choice and I've been using it professionally for over 5 years. I use it for personal projects as well. I'm referring to all the stuff C# has that Java doesn't. Async, ref/in/out keywords, extension methods, linq, lots of stuff. Maybe it's not a big deal, like I said I wouldn't really mind it. I just think Java is a bit simpler in this regard which is an advantage for beginners. Some diff…
You probably already know, but I'll opine a little bit about extension methods. I use them a lot.
Entities > Repositories > Functionality. All split out.
- Entities (pretty much just gets and sets, nothing more than necessary).
- Repositories via extensions to determine where the data comes and goes from (some data comes from SQL, some from Redis, some from Postgres, doesn't matter since it's split out) and any particular queries you need for optimizing things.
- Functionality via more extensions without adding additional code to the entities.
Separation of purpose/use.
I may or may not have completely replaced our data layer in the middle of the height of our season with no interruption. Little bit passionate about this one.
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I seem to have this problem a lot with Apple’s docs. So much of it is like Nargflargler: Flargles the narg You need to do something besides repeat the name in the definition.
This is just one example of how metrics can distort things, of course. Someone in management said "We want 100% documentation coverage of every method," so the staff dutifully wasted everyone's time by writing "setDefaultOptions: sets the default options". It's the kind of thing an LLM could have done better , and if you know my opinion of LLM's, you'll know that's damning with faint praise. My own bete noire here is…
It's better for maintenance (of the documentation) if the default options are only described in one place. (If the defaults change in a new version, this ensures the documentation doesn't have inconsistent, wrong descriptions. The analogous reasoning, applied to the code, is probably part of why the FooOptions class exists in the first place, after all.) But they should do you the courtesy of linking there.
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Not quite what you're talking about but this Apple doc page has always amused me: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/contacts/cnlabelco... I have to assume that there exists some language where that relationship is described in one word, but it hurts my English-oriented brain.
There are indeed languages that don't have the word "cousin" -- or "uncle" or "aunt".
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I seem to have this problem a lot with Apple’s docs. So much of it is like Nargflargler: Flargles the narg You need to do something besides repeat the name in the definition.
This is just one example of how metrics can distort things, of course. Someone in management said "We want 100% documentation coverage of every method," so the staff dutifully wasted everyone's time by writing "setDefaultOptions: sets the default options". It's the kind of thing an LLM could have done better , and if you know my opinion of LLM's, you'll know that's damning with faint praise. My own bete noire here is…
I've basically resigned myself to "it makes sense in Redmond somehow, even if it makes no sense to me."
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This is hilarious to me, because for me it is exactly the other way around. Just last Friday, some coworker showed me her mermaid diagrams about workflows at work. I am still not comfortable with needing to login to some website to convert some format into a useful format. If I cannot run it locally on my computer it doesn't exist for me. So I tried to install their official looking cli client. The protocol from my m…
Ok, my turn now. Let's build the project 'msdfgen' using cmake. First step is cloning the 'msdfgen' repo. Done. Next step is reading the readme, which states "to build the project from source, you may use the included CMake script. In its default configuration, it requires vcpkg as the provider for third-party library dependencies. If you set the environment variable VCPKG_ROOT to the vcpkg directory, the CMake confi…
The problem was that 'cargo install cargo-show' wanted access to an OpenSSL installation (under Windows). The long error spew did mention vcpkg once or twice so I googled it and got very confused by the readme.
So I tried to install OpenSSL without vcpkg. That worked ('winget install openssl') but 'cargo install cargo-show' still didn't. Perhaps I had set up some environment variables wrong.
Yesterday, I finally figured out how to install vcpkg and it was indeed very simple, despite its readme. 'cargo install cargo-show' still didn't work -- it couldn't find openssl installed with the right "triplet" even though it was clearly installed in a way that should work for all 64-bit x86 Windows.
Setting OPENSSL_DIR and then running 'cargo install cargo-show' worked perfectly.
Apparently, there are different ways the directory structure for a vcpkg installed package can look and the vcpkg/openssl gave me one and the build script for one of the dependencies of cargo-show expected another.
Very, very confusing.
I think you can get away with just using 'winget install cmake' and then invoking cmake with the right command line to make it play nice with vcpkg (and that command line is listed in several places). I haven't tried it, though.
'vcpkg integrate install' sets up some sort of secret integration with Visual Studio -- maybe vcpkg learns where VS libraries and binaries (compilers/linkers) are hidden and maybe Visual Studio learns how to invoke vcpkg.
If you run it, it will also tell you to how to integrate more explicitly with cmake:
$ vcpkg integrate install
Applied user-wide integration for this vcpkg root.
CMake projects should use: "-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=/workspaces/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake"
Can't recommend this approach highly enough: have someone with minimal expertise go through your docs with the goal of achieving the goal of the docs. Sit next to them or screenshare. Do not speak to them, certainly do not help, just watch. Watch them fumble. Watch them not know what to do. Watch them experience things you (the author) didn't, because you already had xyz configured on your machine and you forgot user…
> Do not speak to them, certainly do not help, just watch. Sounds simple, right? I ran usability tests at a past company and have seen people who were incapable of blurting out explanations, pointing at the screen, even audibly grunting or whining to themselves when the participant made an incorrect guess about what something meant. One even grabbed the mouse. Having a neutral moderator can help as it allows the peop…
"Shut up Morty, you just don't unders-*buuurp*-tand what it takes to be a software engineer."
"Are you sure? What's a 'hoob-tunnel' and how does it get clogged with 'gramelions?' That just sounds like an improvised line from that sci-fi cartoon show..."