Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
Every time I look at code that obviously looks copied-and-pasted from the web, I cringe. They didn't even bother to update the variables to make sense in their own code. Why are people still using deprecated functions, SQL injection vulnerable code, or freely opening up their computer to the whole world?
After a few years I have forgotten something as fundamental as bread and butter.
Have you ever thought about getting into this programming thing? Heard a few things about code camp and now want to join the wagon? Obviously if you want to work with code, you need to have a computer. Not just any computer of course, but the best money can buy. Note that every programmer use their own suitable tools, so all I can help you with is share my own arsenal.
One of the recurring tasks as a software developer is to fix bugs on tools that have been designed for an earlier time. You may get a project that was written in PHP 4, or a JavaScript tool that still tries to sniff for Netscape. It is easy to see how outdated the tools are and try to upgrade them. Most often than not, the task turns into a complete redesign rather than a bug fix and it ends up costing much more time than originally planned.
If you struggled for a while trying to figure out why apache or nginx crops the content of your CSS files or it adds a bunch of gibberish at the end of the files, fear no more. The problem can be solved by simply turning off sendfile?
In software development, there is no such thing as an application that doesn't fail. Do you remember the Blue screen of death? When it happened, there was nothing you could do but restart your machine and hope it doesn't happen again. But how about the latest Windows OS? How come you don't see those errors as often as before? The answer is, Microsoft spent more time on error handling.
Imagine a world where things just work the way they are supposed to. The application never crashes, the deployment is always successful, every team member follow the rules, and the FedEx guy is always on time. This is what we expect from our day to day work and fortunately it never happens. What we call ordinary is out of the ordinary.
One of the simple yet impactful struggles I have is to shut down an idea. As a developer, and I often try to tell people what I do, many people often try to validate their ideas with me. Some are friends, some are family, some are clients, the moment they hear programmer they think apps, VR, games, and what not. And then they tell me their ideas with the eagerness to impress.
In order to test a project locally I needed access to the production website database. Unfortunately copying billions of records to my small development VM was not an option. I needed only the latest records but doing a sqldump would get me data from as far back as 2004. The cool thing however is that mysql allows you to add a condition on your mysqldump command to extract whatever you see fit. Let's break it down.
Have you ever wanted to build a website and were not sure what skills you needed to get started? Most people know that in the process, a computer has to be involved, therefore a good knowledge of computers would be important. This is not entirely true, it is akin to saying that in order to learn to drive you need roads therefor you need a good knowledge of roads... No you don't need to know how roads are built to drive a car, and you sure don't need to know how computers are built to build a website.
