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Small programming tricks

will-keleher.com

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Re: Small programming tricks

#11

Post by NegativeLatency »

> At a previous company, I shared a trick on slack every day with the engineering team, both technical and company-specific, and folks found them pretty useful.

I would find that annoying, however to not be seen as a jerk I wouldn't say anything.

Re: Small programming tricks

#12

Post by adzm »

My favorite is generating a sequential resultset of the numbers 1-4096 in SQL Server with this simple query:

;with [[[]][[[](_)as(select 1 union select 0),[[]][]][](_)as(select 1 from [[[]][[[] []]]][]]],[[[]][[[] _),[]][]][[](_)as(select 1 from [[]][]][] []]]][]]],[[]][]][] _),[[[[[]][](_)as(select 1 from []][]][[] []]]][]]],[]][]][[] _),[[[]][]]](_)as(select 1 from [[[[[]][] []]]][]]],[[[[[]][] _)select _ from(select row_number()over (order by _)from [[[]][]]])[[[]][[[](_);

/s

Re: Small programming tricks

#14

Post by catlifeonmars »

behnamoh wrote: post #2

This reminded me to ask: To what extent are people still coding by hand these days? In my profession (academia), literally no one codes anymore. On one hand, it sucks because the joy and fun of programming has been replaced by constant agent orchestration tasks, but on the other hand, it's hard to go back to the way things were before because the productivity gain is so good. I remember learning a lot of these progra…

I hand code entirely at work still, while almost all of my colleagues do not and I am still able to keep up. I do use coding agents on personal projects, but have not felt the impetus to switch to agent based coding at work.

I don’t mean this to brag, mostly to point out that in my line of work, actually writing the code is not the biggest bottleneck.

For context I work on greenfield network security appliances

Re: Small programming tricks

#15

Post by huurtehoog »

dgacmu wrote: post #5
behnamoh wrote: post #2

This reminded me to ask: To what extent are people still coding by hand these days? In my profession (academia), literally no one codes anymore. On one hand, it sucks because the joy and fun of programming has been replaced by constant agent orchestration tasks, but on the other hand, it's hard to go back to the way things were before because the productivity gain is so good. I remember learning a lot of these progra…

Also in academia but I'm old and my real work is done withy students. I'm coding by hand much less than I used to (boo) but solving more problems with code myself than I used to (yay). Having an llm do things turns out to be similar to having a student do them but with fast turnaround and it's fine to have them work on your home automation system. ;)

Another academic. LLMs are great for opening searches. I state what I would like to get into and let it get some initial paper recommendations. It seems to solves a hard problem: discoverability. Maybe I'm just getting subjected to more subtle bias but it is extremely easy and fast now to get a nice selection of relevant literature to review.

Analysis and any artifacts are all handcrafted by me. I mean, that is the work. I have never seen papers or code as an outcome. What I want is to learn and enable other to learn. That I can only get from doing the work myself.

Re: Small programming tricks

#16

Post by skydhash »

behnamoh wrote: post #2

This reminded me to ask: To what extent are people still coding by hand these days? In my profession (academia), literally no one codes anymore. On one hand, it sucks because the joy and fun of programming has been replaced by constant agent orchestration tasks, but on the other hand, it's hard to go back to the way things were before because the productivity gain is so good. I remember learning a lot of these progra…

My coding by hand is always exploratory. Either I’m getting familiar with a new library/platform or I’m sizing up the architecture of the software. Then it’s a heavy dose of copy/pasting, snippets, and emacs-fu. What I spend most time on is reading docs. Apart from that, it’s thinking (mostly away from the computer).

Re: Small programming tricks

#17

Post by bradly »

behnamoh wrote: post #2

This reminded me to ask: To what extent are people still coding by hand these days? In my profession (academia), literally no one codes anymore. On one hand, it sucks because the joy and fun of programming has been replaced by constant agent orchestration tasks, but on the other hand, it's hard to go back to the way things were before because the productivity gain is so good. I remember learning a lot of these progra…

I still hand code backends and frontends. I also review code by reading it manually, and ideally running it and then screenshot'ing receipts of it working and attaching those in my PR approval.

Re: Small programming tricks

#19

Post by blooalien »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #11

> At a previous company, I shared a trick on slack every day with the engineering team, both technical and company-specific, and folks found them pretty useful. I would find that annoying, however to not be seen as a jerk I wouldn't say anything.

I think I would prefer an optional separate channel specifically for people to share such things with each other who wanted to see that exact sorta thing. Then nobody gets bothered by it who's not interested in such things, and people who are have a place that's dedicated to exactly that.
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