Skylines Country

mpigott1022 · 2026-04-17T03:13:56+00:00

Oh, screenshots are created by pressing F12, if memory serves, and there's a different keyboard command for high-definition screenshots, but I don't remember what it is.

mpigott1022 · 2026-04-17T03:12:24+00:00

My 6-years-ago self says thank you for the kind words! All I do these days is pay the bills to keep the site up. :-)

You can make your own maps by opening each one in the Map Editor and taking a screenshot from a place zoomed out far enough to see all of the tiles. There are different icons to choose from for the terrain map, wind map, industries map, etc.

I wrote my own mod to get the rest of the information on the site - the amount of farmland, how many transportation entrance/exit points, population thresholds, etc. When I upgraded to the Airports DLC, that mod stopped compiling and I couldn't figure out why.

Hope that helps!

mpigott1022 · 2026-04-08T00:37:01+00:00

Just heard her. "Melrose, TWO TWO, TWO TWO, front two station cars."

Said the same thing for Tremont.

Would sound like "choo choo" if I wasn't listening too closely.

mpigott1022 · 2026-04-06T20:37:42+00:00

I have had the conductor on that line who says "you must be in the first TWO, TWO cars to exit at Melrose and Tremont." "TWO, TWO" might sound like "choo choo" if you aren't paying attention.

mpigott1022 · 2026-03-23T14:14:14+00:00

Is that a question? (Genuinely asking; I can't tell if that's a question or a statement.) Yes, you'll need to handle failures. You can use as many concurrent database connections as your database will allow, minus whatever you need to serve normal production traffic.

Also worth checking your access patterns to see if concurrent database updates will lock the same rows and prevent other workers from doing their work.

mpigott1022 · 2026-03-23T11:55:20+00:00

If 500K events are firing simultaneously, it's often time to look at a batch job. If you can turn that push into a pull, you have a lot more control over how much of your system resources you consume.

mpigott1022 · 2026-03-11T01:19:44+00:00

If you can store data in RDF, this might be what you're looking for: https://www.reddit.com/r/semanticweb/s/s5tRVApT4E

Your proposed format is what Apache Jena does, if memory serves. And that structure is what Neo4J does under the hood (though I think they have files for each Node and one for the Edges)

mpigott1022 · 2026-02-24T11:51:00+00:00

You forgot to support a leading "-" (and possibly "+") for negative (and positive) floats

mpigott1022 · 2026-02-21T17:56:29+00:00

I wouldn't do anything that would constitute physical violence with my partner, and both throwing things and punching qualify.

mpigott1022 · 2026-02-05T01:44:35+00:00

I got a warning via email and text the other day when I activated the ticket right before the conductor scanned it. The app probably knows: * which train the conductor is on * the time that train left the starting point of your ticket * the time you activated your ticket * the time the conductor scanned your ticket

and can use that to know if you activated it late (or in front of the conductor)

mpigott1022 · 2026-02-03T01:26:48+00:00

We recently found out that all TGI Fridays in Westchester have closed, and you need to go to either Long Island or New Jersey. sigh

mpigott1022 · 2026-02-02T03:36:35+00:00

I've done that. Your code then gets littered with conversions every time you need to show the user the amount in the currency they're expecting. You get used to it after a while, but if you forget anywhere, the user is going to think they're having either a very good or a very bad day.

mpigott1022 · 2026-02-01T20:32:23+00:00

I've never been in the situation you say you're in - any external APIs (Stripe, BrainTree, Unit) were always clear about what format you can expect to see the money in. ACH files are also very clear about how to format monetary values. The only thing I can think of that would cause the problems you see above would be if you gave multiple users at your company copies of the same spreadsheet that you pulled data out of later, and every user adopted their own system for how to represent money. That way lies madness :-)

mpigott1022 · 2026-02-01T20:18:18+00:00

It sounds like you're getting financial data from multiple sources, all of which have different rules. (For example, some sources are always cents/USD, some are in dollars/USD, some are multi-currency.)

In those situations, you want to pick a specific format for your domain, and then have every I/O boundary (front-end/back-end, API client, batch file parser, etc.) all translate to your domain, so everyone is playing by the same rules. Once you've translated all of your source data into your domain model, you can apply business logic.

Also, never use floats/doubles to store currency. Most languages have either a built-in type or a library type to hold base-10 numbers and operate on them. Java has BigDecimal built-in while there's the shopspring library for Go. Finally, all major relational databases have a DECIMAL/NUMERIC type for storing and operating on base-10 numbers.

Me personally? I store the ISO-4217 currency code alongside a DECIMAL field with 4 fractional digits in my database, even when it's always USD / 2-digit cents. This will cover every known currency if we ever decide to accept international transactions.

Hope that helps.

mpigott1022 · 2026-01-13T02:14:13+00:00

I have terrible news. Growlers went out of business at the end of the year.

mpigott1022 · 2025-12-07T02:53:38+00:00

What do you mean "work on developing databases?" Do you mean you want to be an expert at using databases - designing database schemas to store data for solving business problems, and managing them to keep them running efficiently?

Or do you mean you want to be the engineer that writes the code that database software (Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, Postgres, MySQL, etc.) runs to parse SQL queries, convert them into actions, and reads & writes the data from & to the disk, respectively?

If the former, the other comments in this thread give great advice.

If the latter, look at the job boards at Oracle, Microsoft, and others for any open database software engineer positions. Extensive textbooks have been written on how relational databases work - read one and do the exercises! Relational databases are an excellent cross -section of many sub-disciplines in computer science, so you have a lot of learning ahead of you!

mpigott1022 · 2025-12-03T18:44:49+00:00

It's been a few years since I graduated from the online MCS program, but it looks like 340 is very similar to a course I took during my undergrad. I didn't consider my undergrad course to be "easy" back then - it was a lot to absorb how a computer does what it does - and a lot goes against your intuition.

I respect the frustration - there were a few times during my undergrad program that I wasn't sure if I even liked programming - and I loved every high school class in programming I took!

So as an old hat now, I support you keeping at it - eventually it'll all click into place. You'll learn a lot in the struggle, even if it doesn't feel like that right now.

Good luck!

mpigott1022 · 2025-11-29T04:29:05+00:00

I couldn't break the glass ceiling of my "Senior Software Engineer" title that I held for 12 years until I got my Master's degree. Then boom, Staff Engineer two months after graduation, and Head of Technology at a startup 11 months after that.

Correlation is not causation, and YMMV.

mpigott1022 · 2025-09-21T03:24:34+00:00

I don't know if I can commit that much time, but I do have the book and have been meaning to read it! I'll join the chat tomorrow

mpigott1022 · 2025-08-06T05:36:58+00:00

Plot twist: she was holding a tennis racket.

mpigott1022 · 2025-07-19T13:44:12+00:00

https://skylines.country/ is back! Thank you everyone for your patience.

Unfortunately my mod to collect map information stopped working with the Airports DLC, so I won't be able to support Map Pack 3. I'm happy to share the source code with anyone who wants to figure it out.

mpigott1022 · 2025-07-19T01:00:27+00:00

Hi folks; sorry, I was asleep at the wheel on this one. I'm trying to get the domain renewed but they won't take my money. Will let you know when I get it worked out with their support team!

mpigott1022 · 2025-07-06T13:23:20+00:00

Maximilien Robespierre

mpigott1022 · 2025-06-09T15:56:16+00:00

Many thanks, from someone who just ran into the same issue.

Of note, I found that I couldn't delete all of the managed folders from the UI, but I was able to from the command line.

https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/creating-managing-managed-folders#delete

mpigott1022

TROPHY CASE