The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years
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@Tsaukpaetra It was a cool computer for the time. I will find a pic of me (proper photo that had to be developed) programming on it. I was programming and playing games we I was maybe 8 or 9.
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@lucas1 said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
I was programming and playing games we I was maybe 8 or 9.
Yeah, I destroyed my first bootsector around that age.
Oh what fun it was, since the BIOS didn't really say anything if it couldn't read the boot sector.Perhaps an "Advanced DOS Programming" book was not the best choice for starting out with my first PC...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@lucas1 said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
I was programming and playing games we I was maybe 8 or 9.
Yeah, I destroyed my first bootsector around that age.
Ah, you always remember your first.
Do you destroy them often?
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@cartman82 said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@mikeTheLiar said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
C:\Users\MIKE>python
I like how your user name is just MIKE, in capital letters.
I am MIKE. There are many Mikes, but only one MIKE. And that is ME. MIKE!
TIL that @mikeTheLiar is (according to @cartman82) a Sovereign Citizen.
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@Tsaukpaetra I had these Tatung Einstein Manuals:
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@ScholRLEA AM I BEING DETAINED?! :P
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@error said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@lucas1 said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
I was programming and playing games we I was maybe 8 or 9.
Yeah, I destroyed my first bootsector around that age.
Ah, you always remember your first.
Do you destroy them often?
I think the count is currently at 3. The Tandy, the HP Pavilio e2000 laptop, and a Gateway M2 tablet I was trying to get Linux to dual-boot on.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@dcon said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@mikeTheLiar said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
Dear person who has to maintain this code: I am truly sorry.
There's an apology thread in the lounge...
Except it's degenerated from the original purpose quite nicely.
"degenerated" Yes, that's certainly the right word.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@dcon said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@mikeTheLiar said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
Dear person who has to maintain this code: I am truly sorry.
There's an apology thread in the lounge...
Except it's degenerated from the original purpose quite nicely.
"degenerated" Yes, that's certainly the right word.
It's one of the site rules, no?
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@ScholRLEA said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
TIL that @mikeTheLiar is (according to @cartman82) a Sovereign Citizen.
No, no, you got it wrong. You can't be a sovereign citizen with your name in all caps, you'll create joinder and everything goes to shit.
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@mikeTheLiar said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@lucas1 Actual quote from my team lead: "we can acquire a budget down the road"
At a place I used to work, if you were on a project without an approved budget, you didn't get paid. Actually, that's not quite true, but your pay did get docked. That's a place I'll have some words about in the lounge someday, when I think enough time has passed to talk about it without doxxing myself.
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@pydsigner said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
Dive into Python tutorial which is quite good
Cool. I've been wanting something better than Learning Python the Hard Way, which I really don't like.
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@HardwareGeek I think they are all a bit shit in regards to python if you come from another language.
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@lucas1 Maybe. All the ones I've seen so far do present it as if it's your first exposure to programming.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@HardwareGeek said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@dcon said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@mikeTheLiar said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
Dear person who has to maintain this code: I am truly sorry.
There's an apology thread in the lounge...
Except it's degenerated from the original purpose quite nicely.
"degenerated" Yes, that's certainly the right word.
It's one of the site rules, no?
I think the rule is actually that all WTDWTF members must be degenerates.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
Perhaps an "Advanced DOS Programming" book was not the best choice for starting out with my first PC...
Heh. I remember a big MS-DOS 5 or 6 book I had... must have been around 8 as well -- with all sorts of fun programs to assemble in debug.com.
Come to think of it, now I miss that old book and wish I remembered what book it was so I could get an e-book. Unless seeing it jogged those good memories, it's possible it was discarded in one of my father's last three moves.
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@ScholRLEA said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@HardwareGeek said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@dcon said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@mikeTheLiar said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
Dear person who has to maintain this code: I am truly sorry.
There's an apology thread in the lounge...
Except it's degenerated from the original purpose quite nicely.
"degenerated" Yes, that's certainly the right word.
It's one of the site rules, no?
I think the rule is actually that all WTDWTF members must be degenerates.
Oh. Well. I guess I'll be seeing you, uh, around. Or something.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
Cool. I've been wanting something better than Learning Python the Hard Way, which I really don't like.
That book is really for people who are just beginning to program.
It's always more difficult to find books that don't waste your time explaining "what is a variable?", but get right into the specifics. Hopefully, only covering the differences compared to the stuff you already know.
I had better luck with tutorials on that front.
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@mikeTheLiar said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
That seems insanely inefficient for such a common operation. Big picture, not that big a deal because we're talking about bytes worth of memory but seriously, why?
You don't want modifiable
int
values. Imagine just how much shit hits the fan if you modify the semantic value of1
. (This used to be something that could happen in some versions of FORTRAN when things were called in the wrong way and assigned wrongly, and it would cause chaos.)Modifiable variables aren't so bad though. Unless you're really going in for the immutable language aesthetic, of course…
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@dkf it's possible to do it in Java with enough abuse of reflection. I think I've seen it done in a code gold challenge
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@Jaloopa said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
it's possible to do it in Java with enough abuse of reflection.
You can change an
Integer
value, but not anint
value. That's because what you're really changing is theint
field boxed inside theInteger
.
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@Jaloopa said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
it's possible to do it in Java with enough abuse of reflection.
I recently had to replace a
private static final
field via reflection for a unit test. I still feel dirty.(It requires double reflection. First you get the
Field
to make it accessible. Then you remove thefinal
modifier from theField
via reflection, since there's no other way to do that. Yo dawg, I heard you like reflection…)
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@asdf said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@mikeTheLiar said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
The CTO goes on a trip to Rackspace. I don't know exactly what happened (I assume a brain slug attached itself or possibly some sort of severe concussion), but when he came back he issued an edict - "NO MORE WINDOWS DEVELOPMENT". Something to do with Docker and containers.
This is the point in the story where you should tell us you updated your resume.
@mikeTheLiar said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:I'm spending most of my time […] re-implementing existing code in new languages, while operating under an insane deadline and creating a ton of technical debt.
Yeah, or you could do that.
Yeaaaaaaaaah. That came up at WtfCorp. I literally said 'No and fuck you for asking.' and continued about my Windowsy business. Congrats on out-WTFing the master.
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@asdf said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@Jaloopa said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
it's possible to do it in Java with enough abuse of reflection.
I recently had to replace a
private static final
field via reflection for a unit test. I still feel dirty.That variable must have been pointing to an object. That wouldn't do anything useful for primitives (including strings). The compiler will inline the primitive value anywhere it is used.
That was a common issue for our new hires when one of our classes stored what was really a configuration setting in a
public static final String
. Rebuild that class only (as in command-line javac) and no other classes see the new value.Now we use IDEs that rebuild dependencies and config files (well, in more places... it could be better).
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@quijibo said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
That variable must have been pointing to an object. That wouldn't do anything useful for primitives (including strings).
Correct.
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@dkf said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
You can change an Integer value, but not an int value. That's because what you're really changing is the int field boxed inside the Integer.
this is what I was remembering. Modifying the internal cache of ints to change 4 to 5
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@Jaloopa I was sure that was possible somehow. It's incredibly evil™, I love it.
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This solves all of your problems with Python:
And provide plenty of entertainment for td in the future, highly recommended if you just started using Python
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
I have no idea how high to start off with, and no reference to how low is too low.
Big companies have a whole bunch of concrete numbers to calculate how much to charge, but it typically ends up as something like 2 - 3 times the salary they pay to the employee. Obviously, that salary will vary a lot based on seniority and what they're actually doing, but if you can't get at least that sort of rate for whatever salary you think you need, then don't do it.
That "extra" covers things like benefits and office space and a computer, plus all of the other support services, including generating some money to pay for marketing and writing proposals, plus hopefully a bit of profit. The cost structures behind those numbers are super secret for competitive purposes.
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@boomzilla Yeah. It just seems like an awful lot of hassle for what is essentially a small web-build project.
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@Tsaukpaetra Well...like I said, if you just multiply your salary, you can come up with a number that's not insane compared to what everyone else charges for a similarly compensated employee.
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@asdf said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
@Jaloopa said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
it's possible to do it in Java with enough abuse of reflection.
I recently had to replace a
private static final
field via reflection for a unit test. I still feel dirty.(It requires double reflection. First you get the
Field
to make it accessible. Then you remove thefinal
modifier from theField
via reflection, since there's no other way to do that. Yo dawg, I heard you like reflection…)It sounds like this predicament has offered a few opportunities for self-reflection.
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@mikeTheLiar said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
Then disaster hits. (This is probably the time to note - we are a pure MS/.NET shop. Hosted in IIS, db is MS SQL Server. Website is written in TypeScript and C#, etc etc).
The CTO goes on a trip to Rackspace. I don't know exactly what happened (I assume a brain slug attached itself or possibly some sort of severe concussion), but when he came back he issued an edict - "NO MORE WINDOWS DEVELOPMENT". Something to do with Docker and containers.
Now, you do realize that we're a Microsoft shop, right? We can pick up new technologies, but not instantaneously, and we won't be able to produce as well as a shop that already has experience in those technologies. You wouldn't ask a French chef to suddenly be an expert in Ethiopian, nor would you expect a JDM shop to work on your big block Chevy. Given that we have an already tight timeline, perhaps it would be prudent to transition in this new policy rather than make it effective immediately?
I didn't ask for your opinion. The policy is policy. If you want to keep working here, I suggest you fall in line and adapt.
Regardless of whether or not you asked for my opinion, it is my responsibility as an engineer to inform you of any technical issues that impact the project as I become aware of them.
Does it look like I give a shit about your special snowflake opinion? This decision is much bigger than you'll ever be, involving amounts of money you'll never be worth. The company is moving away from outdated technology, like Windows. If you won't adapt, tomorrow I'll have someone else in your desk who will.
No, you won't. If you pull off a Hollywood-style dramatic office firing, you'll be throwing away an expert in your systems that will take you months to replace. You'd be cutting off your nose to spite your face, with deadlines looming. Any candidate worth his/her salt would also be able to smell the mess a mile away during interviews and it would become that much more difficult to attract talent. The fact that you're also more interested in treating developers as a disposable commodity rather than building a relationship with them is going to do wonders for your turnover.
WHAARGARBL grumble grumble!
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@lucas1 I know, it was really quite enlightening. Very to the point, no bullshit.
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@Jarry said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
"""Surround each statement with a try/except block to silence errors."""
that's so evil....
Personally, I prefer Vigil.
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@Jarry said in The Story So Far, or what the hell has mikeTheLiar Been Up to for the Past Two Years:
that's so evil....
It should've been called
onerrorresumenext
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