Updates and inquiries · 9:57pm Sep 6th, 2016
First of all, I'd like to apologize to Topaz, Eckaji, and Snuffy. I look at their stories, they look at mine, and we help out each other. How's it going for them and their stories? I have no idea, since I haven't checked in with them in ages. Sorry, guys.
Why haven't I checked in? Because I've been busy with school-work. Really busy. And here's a little story about that:
So, we get a project. We are to code an add-in that can insert data into a table, update the data, and delete the data. Standard beginner-stuff, not a big project, and we only have a week. You can make one yourself with just a few presses of your mouse in the interface, but we're to do this with code, for practice, learning the limits and behind-the-scene-things about this particular kind of application-development, -providing and -hosting.
Teach places us into groups of two, and I end up working with... let's call him 'Rails', then there's another guy we can call 'Beard'. There're plenty of people in class, of course, but the only relevant people in this story are me, Rails, and Beard.
So me and Rails sit down and plan, then we get to coding, and we get stuck. We're working on Rails' computer, so he's the one with the actual project. I convince him to send me a version of the project pretty early, but the plan is still to develop it on his machine.
The days drag on, and every problem we solve reveals on or several new ones. We research online, read books, look back on previous courses, try out pieces of logic in seperate projects. We check with other people in class, and finally, the afternoon two days before it's time to turn in, we realize that it's a bum plan, and we need to scuttle the project and start over.
Today was lecture-day, finals are on Friday, so we sit in rows and listen to Teach. It goes on and on and on. Rails asked me to take notes and share them with him later, because he sits himself down some ways away from me, together with this pretty cool guy, Beard, who I mentioned earlier. I take notes, and Rails and Beard sit with their computers up, looking back and forth between their screens, and Rails is typing furiously.
So after the lecture, I send Rails my notes, and ask him what he was doing. He says that he was figuring out how to make the project work, and that he's got a fully functional app now. 'That's great,' I say. Then, however, he says that he started over and finished the whole thing during this lecture, and since I didn't contribute anything, I can't take and credit, and I'm gonna have to make my own solution to show Teach. Last chance to turn in the project is in... 13 hours and 15 minutes. I don't have a project to turn in.
I'm very proud to say that my face was devoid of reaction. No indignant outcry, no stunned expression, no raised eyebrows. Just a casual, 'alright.'
As I'm walking towards the bus five minutes later, I internally ask myself, 'why in pluperfect hell am I giving myself ulcers for this?'
It's true that I haven't made a functioning, app to show teach, but neither have Rails. When Rails shows Teach the project tomorrow, he's not showing him his work, he's showing him Beard's work. I know that, and I know why he was typing so furiously while looking at Beard's screen today.
I so hope Teach notices. I'm not gonna tattle, but I don't see why I should keep it a secret if anyone asks.
So, a bit of a bummer today, but it's also freeing to know that no amount of hard work can save my grades now 
So let's move on to happier topics 
I've been psyching myself up for a writing-session for a while now. No idea when It's actually gonna take place, but I was listening and reading about writing-tips. Anyone who has have probably heard that tip about writing the ending and aim your story towards that. Not just the ending, either, points in the story that you really want it to go towards.
I've never done that. I've never dismissed the idea, but those parts have always been so clear in my head, and I have lots of notes that points to how the story should go in any case that I've never felt the need to do this.
But now I figure that it might be a good warm-up for when I get to writing again. So my question is this: would anyone like to see them? The middle-points that I want my story to hit, I mean. If anyone's interested, I could make a blog-post with a few of them.
They're just gonna be scenes, or parts of scenes, taken out of context, but it would be pretty flattering if anyone wants to see them, and it would be an excuse for me to go all Mac Walters. 'Lot's of speculation from everyone 
'
What do you say, would you like glimpses of where I want MLAABQ Part 3, chapter 30 or something, to look like?
Reminds me of back when I made my compsci bachelor's. I actually found a bug in the Java 4 engine that way once. I wonder if they ever fixed that.
So long as it doesn't spoil too much of what plot you've been planning for Maylaybok, I'd be interested in seeing that posted as a separate blog maybe. That it feels a little aimless is one of the problems I've always been having with it. It'd be interesting to get an idea of what it's developing towards.
While you may not have a functioning app to show, not having one is a good learning tool as well. You can show the teacher all your work and you initial plan and just tell him that it was a bum plan, but still a learning experience on how things do and don't work together when making an app. "Failure" teaches you more than first time success will. Because now you know how not to do something that was it will be better in the future. Just my take on it.
Heck yeah, get those scenes in your head out wher we can see em!
Seriously? That's not how engineering works. Goddamn greenhorn. It's like you weren't involved in the design and disproving of previous efforts. Pretty rich of him to pretend that he "contributed" anything; even if he did "allow" you to share in the credit, would you, knowing the truth?
So the lesson I'd admonish you to take away from this: use source control! Never let there be only a single copy of the project. Work on your own computers, make commits, pull and push regularly. Setting up a bitbucket account is free and lets you make private repos, so there's no excuse.
4195749
Silly wlam, you can't "fix" a feature! Java doesn't have bugs, no siree~
It's alright. You just have your priorities straight. Something I'm still trying to do, or really obtain at all.
Not much has been going on all around really. I hope to get my next chapter out before two months has passed since my last chapter release. Haven't helped Snuffy out with his english grammar problem, though even I'll admit it isn't a horrendous one, and most will probably ignore said issue.
Looking forward to chatting with you again soon.
Sucks about the school stuff. As it was a GROUP project and you were assigned by the teacher, well... the entire group should be getting credit. The fact that they finished is in the middle of class without you is irrelevant since you had been participating. If it boils down to it, fuck them and throw their asses under the bus for there bullshittery.
Hope its one of those teachers that hates people in groups that did the shit they tried to pull and gives them a very less favorable grade. Its one thing to be a non-participating group member, its completely different when they did what they did.
As for my story and the side story... not much has happened, I've only been poking at it a little. Been busy with other things. I do plan to get working on it more in the near future though. It's kinda a lot longer of a gap than I like.
Heh, you haven't missed much, since I've also done very little since my vacation ended.
Just work, eat, and sleep.
Not sure giving out spoilers is such a good idea, even if they seem fairly minor and the person's wants to know. You could easily get people to lose some of the interest in the story if you take away the mystery.
4196578
The comma splice is a lie.
I guess I'll address the school-topic first.
Quick update: I turned in my stuff today, and it didn't pass, but I'm gonna have a chance to complete it at a later date. Rails turned in his, and it didn't pass either
<- that's the closest we have to a spiteful emoticon, I think.
4195749 Imbrium is right, it's a feature
4195786 There's merit to that. I just wish I knew how important a grade is. Although, I just need some experience as a professional to put on my curriculum. I'm pretty sure that school-grades fades into the background if you have that to gloat with.
4196344 We decided not to use source control since the whole class have had problem with GitHub before, and we haven't checked out Team Foundation. Since it was a small project, we felt it was best to just skip out on GitHub so that one didn't have to mess around with the manifest-xml and product-IDs and whatever problems might pop up with the project being aimed at someone else's Office365-domain, or tenant or whatever. We got the -aspx-stuff done in a flash, or, you know, a jiffy, and then the focus was all on one .js-file that it was easier to just post the code for back-and-forth on Facebook.
The fact that he's like, 19, doesn't make it easier. Or, it would've been really tough to swallow if I didn't see him fail with his project today, too
4196666 Just the one guy. We were in groups of two, Beard was just nice enough to show Rails his code.
Didn't help him, though
Alright, it seems like this little preview-collection might be a thing.
4195749
Well, in my defence it sounds like that maybe could a good thing, if it gives less the impression that MLAABQ is a planned story and more the chronicles of how Gabe just goes about her business, and life happens to her.
One voice in favor.
4195830 I very much appreciate your enthusiasm
One eager-sounding voice in favor.
4196578
Likewise
4196666
I both sympathize and understand
4196840 Seems like no one's been making much progress
That's one voice against the idea. A voice that I feel maybe should have a bit more weight. It's true that I should probably be careful with how much I reveal.
I'm pretty sure I can make it work, and pique people's curiosity, without building the anticipation too high, or simply revealing everything. Some things might be a bit spoilerish than others, but I think what would be revealed would be mostly parts from the slice-of-life-focused part 2, while the parts about the adventure-focused part 3 would be a lot more vague.
Alright, with Snuffy's and wlam's words in mind (why don't you have a capital letter in your name, wlam?) I now bounce off to start thinking up ideas of how to make this while thing look like a trailer.
... *BLAAAAAAAAARE!*
4196344
4196996
I recommend never using remote method invocation for anything ever, then. Jesus Christ that stuff was a bitch to work with.
'cause it's not actually a name.
4196996
) anywhere; no need for a service to host it. You should do this regardless of the (alleged) scope of your project or past difficulties. Deeply entrain that habit and exercise it often; it's an essential skill (even, I would argue, if you're "just a designer").
I don't generally advocate GitHub for class work because it's public unless you pay them and that's not cool. But the where and how of your repo isn't as important as the fact that exists. You can make a git (or mercurial, if you're into that
Team Foundation is trash and you can safely ignore it unless you start working somewhere very unfortunate.
4196999
Is it onomatopoeia?
4197015 That GitHub is public doesn't bother me. At least not yet. I haven't made anything that feels worthy of a trade-secret. I guess I should look into mercurial, though.
Oh, also:
I'm not above learning from someone else's code, and I've found that dissecting someone else's project after the fact can be good way to learn. I kinda do that all the time when I read blogs. In another course I ended up working with the class' ace, who had worked professionally with this for around 4 years, so it was a similar deal there. He was cool enough to go through the project 'we' made pretty thoroughly, however, which was also really helpful
Blatantly copying someone else's project and patting yourself on the back is lame, though, and this wasn't even any form of competition. He had nothing to gain from not letting me be a part of it. Oh well, I've seen before how life catches up with you when you pull that shit, and today was just another demonstration
4197089
Yes, actually. It's the sound of a face hitting a keyboard. I like to think of it as the unsound effect for 'sheer disgust'
"For fuck's sake, what is wrong with people? *wlam*"
I hit the keyboard randomly and then removed letters until it was pronouncable. I like the other explanation better, though.
It's also plagiarism and something you can get failed or exmatriculated for. I've seen people get their doctorate revoked for that.
4197104 Not sure where the line is drawn for that in this education, though. This is a... 'qualified-profession-education', so we're not getting any letters with our names. If one of our teachers gives us an assignment, we're expected find any knowledge we're lacking on our own, whether that means pooling knowledge between members in the class, or reading development-blogs, or whatever. If someone finds a code on the internet which does exactly what the project is going to make, it's totally legit to just use that. In the end, the only one who loses is the one who doesn't learn anything. By that reasoning, Rails has a leg to stand on when it comes to justifying his project, should this ever come out.
It's still a bit of an asshole thing to do, though
4197173
You are only ever to hand in material that you have written yourself, unless the source is appropriately cited and sourced. That is a basic academic standard that, to the best my knowledge, applies to all types of accredited learning institution. You can use someone else's work as reference material, but you can never outright copy. Handing in someone else's project is academic fraud.
4196840
derpicdn.net/img/view/2014/10/8/738888.png
We will have words later.
XD
4197174 Eh, never been an issue for me. I just meant that I'm guessing it can just be a bit of a grey area when it comes to coding. The code of programs which are supposed to accomplish the same thing can look very similar to each other, especially at beginner-levels.
Anyway, I can't prove that Rails didn't make alterations, or that he didn't just look at Beard's code to learn key-parts of the logic he used, and I wouldn't tattle even if I could prove anything. I hold to my opinion about who loses in a situation like this. The turtle won the race, after all
4197175 Only for part 2, though, I think, and I sympathize. Slice-of-life-fics can be very relaxing. I'm gonna make sure to include something that I think you're gonna like in the next blog-post
4197227 Man, you guys on the other side of the puddle gotta learn to speak like real people
4197089
BitBucket can host git repositories and their approach is similar to GitHub's except that their free tier gives you 5 private users. That, combined with their release hosting is how I submitted my degree project in defiance of GMail's overzealous attachment rules.
(The only major downside to BitBucket is that they don't offer a GitHub Pages equivalent)
GitLab.com also offers unlimited private repositories and users. According to their site, their enterprise support tier makes them enough money that they want to get ahead of the "competition will eventually force everyone to offer unlimited private users" curve.
4198448 Ooh, I'm gonna make notes of those. Thanks for the tip
4198503
Glad I could help.
I maintain a list of free development resources for myself but haven't had time to tidy it up for public use so, if there's anything you need (offer open to anyone who reads this), feel free to shoot a PM my way.
(Especially stuff that can be set up to run automatically every time you push an update to GitHub or BitBucket, like documentation hosting, code quality analysis, dependency staleness checks, etc.)
4198511 Oh? Neat.
Thanks for the offer
What languages do you use?
4198942
These days, mostly Python, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, Bourne shell script, and either Markdown or reStructuredText for documentation.
I used to use PHP a lot and I've been trying to find time to learn Rust.
I've also dabbled in other languages like C and C++.
4198946 Still nothing but a novice in everything, although I guess I got plain HTML down pretty well, maybe journeyman in that and plain CSS. Man, this education scratches the surface of a lot of things.
Gonna learn some more jQuery and JavaScript, then try my hand at Angular and KnockOut, maybe TypeScript as well. I've heard that frontend-developers are in high demand right now, at least around here, and those are the things that frontenders should learn.
So, you have some material that might be helpful for learning JavaScript?
4199222
I actually lumped all that sort of stuff in under "JavaScript".
If you unpack it, I have experience with CoffeeScript, have dabbled in Angular, and intend to learn TypeScript, but what I'm really looking forward to is when WebAssembly makes it possible to use Rust in place of JavaScript.
(I tend to place a very high value on web applications that degrade gracefully when JavaScript is disabled, which Angular isn't really built for. As for TypeScript, I'm looking forward to the day when WebAssembly will let me do as much of my frontend coding as possible in Rust, since it's hard to beat Rust for compile-time verification without going esoteric.)
As for learning materials, my records tend toward tools more than learning materials because I'm to the point where I scrape learning materials together so automatically that I usually don't bother keeping track. I generally just point people at this page:
http://programming-motherfucker.com/become.html
To accompany that, here are some tools you might find useful:
Local tools:
- http://jshint.com/ (static analysis)
- http://yeoman.io/ (system for "new project of type X" wizards)
- https://bower.io/ and https://bower.io/docs/tools/ (package manager for browser-side resources)
- http://www.requirejs.org/ (module loader system)
- http://gruntjs.com/ or http://gulpjs.com/ (task automation)
I believe in "write each test once, re-run them all every time you change something", so here:
- http://casperjs.org/ (System for writing tests using "headless" WebKit and Gecko browser engines)
- http://triflejs.org/ (System for writing tests using a "headless" Trident browser engine)
- https://github.com/tmpvar/jsdom (HTML DOM in JS for testing client-side stuff without a browser)
(Admittedly, I'm still struggling to make time to retrofit my older projects up to my current standards)
Services free for open-source projects:
- https://www.bithound.io/ or https://codeclimate.com/ or https://www.codacy.com/ (static analysis)
- https://gemnasium.com/ or https://david-dm.org/ (Dependency staleness monitoring)
- https://saucelabs.com/open-source (Selenium testing across many different OS/Browser combinations)
Local tools for non-JS-but-related stuff:
- https://github.com/svg/svgo (Compressor/optimizer for SVG files)
- OptiPNG and either AdvanceCOMP or zopfli-png (Optimizer for PNG files)
- `jpegtran -optimize` (Losslessly optimize JPEGs)
- `gifsicle --optimize` (Losslessly optimize animated GIFs)
- AdvanceCOMP or Zopfli (Compression optimizer for Zip and GZip archives)
If you're on Windows, I'd also suggest https://chocolatey.org/
4199406 Ooh. You better not delete that message. I get the feeling that I'm gonna be coming back to it a lot in the future.
I didn't really follow half of what you said (I can make semi-educated guesses, though), but I hope I will sometime soon. I wonder if it's a good sign that half of the time when the teacher is talking, I'm internally going 'man, could we please just wrap this up so I can go ahead and use the much better-seeming learning tools I've found online'?
I guess the stuff that should be high on the list of things I should learn are the ones that are commonly in-use. I want employers to drool when they see my curriculum, so i should probably start by learning things that are common so that I can work with a dev-team.
4200538
If you're willing to invest RealMoney(tm) into it, I can personally recommend the O'Reilly books on basically everything. I've used them as reference for C, CPP, Java, Javascript, Perl, PHP, Python and Matlab. Their entire "Learning XYZ" series is pretty much the best on the market.
4200538
*chuckle* I won't, but you should really keep your own notes, both to play it safe, and so you can organize however you want to organize. (I suggest something which supports collapsible outline lists, so you're not constrained to the limitations of lumping everything into your browser's bookmark store. (I've sort of outgrown that, but I haven't had time to write the "private/offline tag-based bookmarking" system I need to really do things properly.)
I can elaborate if you'd like. For example, Bower is all about making things like "Download and unpack Bootstrap and any other things it depends on, like jQuery" (bower install -S bootstrap) or "Update all of my downloaded CSS and browser-side JS to the newest versions" (bower update) as simple as one command each.
To be fair, they do have to set the pace to fit the students who need the most time and classes are always at least a little out of date because of the lag-time from putting together a course.
4200684 Lots of notes today. I'm gonna check those out as well. I think some of my teachers have mentioned him as well.
4200694 Well, I have my 'autostudies'-folder both for files on my harddrive, and bookmarks on my browser (which is also on the harddrive, I guess). I guess I feel a little better about not following along perfectly when I remember that I'm only learning this stuff in English part of the time
Sure, but the lectures feel really dragged out, which is kinda frustrating with how much we're supposed to learn on our own between the lectures. Which is why I'm mostly sitting in the back so i can sneak in some practice on my own whenever a lecture starts sounding too vacuous
4201014
It's a company, not a person, but yeah, they're pretty much the industry standard when it comes to IT manuals. There are some individual in-depth works that are better for certain languages - you don't get far in high-level C++ without reading Bjarne Stroustrup - but in terms of the sheer breadth of material they cover and how easy they are to understand, those are the ones I keep going back to the most. I work in a different field these days, but I still use them when I'm doing things like making custom tools or messing around with open source software.
4201035 Oh. I guess he must've said 'books by O'Rielly' or something to that effect.
Javascript and C# comes first, though. Game-development would be kinda cool, but I'm gonna focus on the money at the moment, and web-development seems pretty solid right now.
4201302
Web developers are kind of a dime a dozen, so if you want to get into serious commercial programming I'd recommend focusing on database management, C++, Java, Fortran and Cobol. Those are the main industry standards. Well, they were, anyway. The last two were kind of ancient even when I did my degree, but businesses used to use a lot of legacy software in those languages that need to be maintained and adjusted to modern hardwares. Probably hasn't changed much. C# has gotten really popular, though, so that one certainly can't hurt.
4201341 Maybe it depends on where you are, too. Geographically, I mean. From what the industry-people at school (both the teachers [who are consultants hired to be teachers], the headhunters, and the former students), business is booming when it comes to web development around here, and so many people have focused on back-end that JS-experts are kinda running low.
This might be a bit of a leap in logic, but I can see how there's a surplus in developers of things other than web-solutions around here. The game dev-scene is of a pretty respectable size
Bro It sounds like you've had quite a rollercoaster experience with your project. True that It can be frustrating when teamwork doesn't go as planned, especially when time is tight. Many writers find it helpful to visualize key scenes or plot points before diving into writing, and your readers might appreciate getting a glimpse into your creative process. Plus, it could spark interesting discussions and speculation about where your story is headed. I say go for it and share those glimpses with your audience!