201–210 of 376 posts
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Working with beginning programming students, "Yay, now we have an error message that makes sense" has become my catchphrase.
"Read the error message, no wait don't close that go back" when helping people is a definite feeling. Take a deep breath. Take off your headset. Go outside. Never look at a computer again. Start driving a bulldozer. Life is good.
If your code has side effects, it only ever seems to be working. ---- > the newbie says "aww, why isn't it working?" > the intermediate says "yay, it's working!" > the expert goes "hmm, why is it working?" I've also seen this as My thing isn't working and I change X and now I get error J instead of error K, so now I have to change X back because it's still not working. Where K is a "better" error than J, such as K =…
I don’t like code that compiles cleanly or runs cleanly on the first try. The worst is when I know that code isn’t close to done yet. Without errors my list of actionable tasks is low. I know there are a certain number of problems, and if I can’t see any it’s because they’re invisible, not because I don’t have any.
If your code has side effects, it only ever seems to be working. ---- > the newbie says "aww, why isn't it working?" > the intermediate says "yay, it's working!" > the expert goes "hmm, why is it working?" I've also seen this as My thing isn't working and I change X and now I get error J instead of error K, so now I have to change X back because it's still not working. Where K is a "better" error than J, such as K =…
Similarly, the joke that the engineer’s second worst nightmare is, “it doesn’t work but it should”, while their worst nightmare is, “it works but it shouldn’t”.
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Quoted post unavailable.
Go around your office using "she" to refer to your male co-workers and see how long before someone gets cross.
* In Factorio (game) you can have space stations that send supplies to your ground base
* If the supplies are not caught, then they cause damage to your base
* To avoid sending supplies that cannot be caught, you can use logic controls
* A common approach is to have the station say "if (ground supply * This fails if the ground supply loses power, as no signal is interpreted as 0 and 0 * Thus, the system will appear to work until your ground base loses power, at which point it will be destroyed
* A better system is to have the ground base use logic to say "if supply With a fun callout to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress
If your code has side effects, it only ever seems to be working. ---- > the newbie says "aww, why isn't it working?" > the intermediate says "yay, it's working!" > the expert goes "hmm, why is it working?" I've also seen this as My thing isn't working and I change X and now I get error J instead of error K, so now I have to change X back because it's still not working. Where K is a "better" error than J, such as K =…
Similarly, the joke that the engineer’s second worst nightmare is, “it doesn’t work but it should”, while their worst nightmare is, “it works but it shouldn’t”.
A bit of an off-topic: I only ever saw white traffic lights in the US and Canada (specifically, pedestrian traffic lights) and they confused me a lot at first - the rest of the world uses green. The icons displayed (hands) are confusing too: the rest of the world uses an icon of a man walking or standing.
While I have not really played SE (past initial launch, it was too daunting to build the ship in space, etc) I have run into these kind of "issues" in Factorio. While they can have disastrous effects, I often really enjoy finding the core problem and finding a solution to make it "fail-safe". Sometimes I wish I could go back and wipe all my Factorio knowledge and start from scratch again, most importantly refusing to…
Once comparing my own work to the best online it took a lot of joy out of the game. But I found that the memory was short lived, once I cut myself off from those online communities it was easy to fall back into the "let me pull out my sketchbook and solve this problem" mindset. I think half the fun is that design process.
I'm well north of 1000 hours now, and still discovering new ways to play and solve problems. I've come full circle and now build spaghetti bases because they are so visually fun.