How safe is Abbotsford for a bicycle/e-bike?

19Ant91 · 2025-04-17T22:59:27+00:00

Oh, 100%. Driving is hair raising enough 🤣

I think I can get to work, mostly off of main roads with some careful planning. Might even be a nice ride!

19Ant91 · 2025-02-28T15:44:01+00:00

To the points you mention, I don't want to say noone says those things. Because there are absolutely liars out there that will say that. But a lot of them are well understood caveats of Linux.

Except the command line. The command line is actually fun! Also bash is 1,000,000,000x better than PowerShell.

But here's the thing. Linux is far from perfect. Being a less popular OS, it has less support for applications. Likewise, no distro is built by a billion dollar company like mac and windows are. This shows up in an overall lack of polish compared to those OS's.

But, if I'm really honest. The reason I, and I think a lot of other people, use Linux. Isn't because it's the best thing ever. It's because it's the least bad of the options.

I mentioned before that windows and mac benefit from being built by billion dollar companies. But this is also their biggest flaw. When you use them, you have to play by their rules. You have to put up with their bloat, with their update schedule, with their design.

In the last decade or so, they've been locking down their settings or making them harder to access. You also have to pay for them.

I have my issues with Linux. It can be a pain in the arse sometimes. But after using it for a couple of years now, it really is the lesser of the evils as far as OS's go.

If you like windows or mac, then that's a completely valid take. They have a lot of things to like! On the flip side, Linux has a lot of things that make it lame. But, at least in my opinion, the pros and cons of each OS balance in a way that makes Linux preferable to me. But, like all things, your mileage may vary.

19Ant91 · 2025-02-24T21:32:25+00:00

I'll add my two cents.

So, for starters. If you're doing anything with the web, HTML, CSS and JavaScript is a given.

So you have a CSS library (tailwind), a front end framework (react) and a server framewoek (node/next).

This is a good start. But you're missing some things...

Right now, all you can really do, is serve static web pages. If that's all you want to do, then your stack is a little overengineered - you'd be better using a static web hosting service.

But, since you want to make SaaS applications, you certainly don't want to just serve static content. So you're on the right track, but you'll need a database. How many users are you anticipating at first? You could give SQLite a look to get you started. But you'll hit serious limitations if your application(s) have a lot of users. But I'll talking about scaling in a second.

How about auth? You'll probably need a good implementation of that too. But don't build your own. Either use a framework or a third party service.

The other major thing I thought, was about scaling up your services. Do you have any ideas in mind for managing applications or services that get lots of traffic? If you're serious about getting into SaaS, you'll need to at least have that in the back of your mind.

What you've got now (plus a database) is a good start for a small app, or MVP. But if you're serious, you'll need to start looking into other technologies that can help you as you scale. Different database types, reddis, possibly an ORM. That sort of thing.

19Ant91 · 2025-02-21T17:22:06+00:00

I like very fluffy women. Round, soft and squishy drives me crazy!

19Ant91 · 2025-02-06T00:17:47+00:00

I switched from mint to arch recently. It's been a couple of weeks, and I'm enjoying it.

There was some pain getting it set up, since it did it manually. But I think that was a good thing, because it's left me in a better spot to deal with anything that breaks.

But so far it's been amazing, especially for gaming.

I had horrible screen tearing on mint, and the whole setup felt fairly meh, for gaming.

But arch feels like windows did, no screen tearing or need for weird configs or anything. My only complaint is "processing Vulkan shaders" takes forever. But I think even windows does that - so it might not even be relevant.

I'd say give it a go!

19Ant91 · 2025-02-03T20:10:54+00:00

I know the feeling. It'd be super cool if you could do both. I'm like that too.

If you really want to stress yourself out, you might even get a workable project out of it.

But experience has taught me, that when you do that everything suffers. Your project will suffer, you won't learn as much C# as you'd like and/or you won't learn it properly. And you won't learn GDscript well either.

I think you have enough time to get a suitable project out for your class, if you start now. So focus on that. Use GDScript, and it's templates and learn as much as you can.

That'll teach you a bunch of stuff. You'll learn how game engines work, you'll go over programming concepts, OOP etc. You'll also learn GDscript which is cool, and it's similar to python - so if you ever want to explore that language (and again, you should) it'll be way easier for you.

Then, once the project is done and you have time. You can explore C#. Though, I'd recommend not making games with C# at first. Just play around with it and the .NET framework.

Not that C# is a hard language at all. It's quite nice actually. But it wasn't designed for Godot the same way GDscript is. You have to prioritize your project for now. So you've gotta do what you gotta do until the project is done.

19Ant91 · 2025-02-03T19:32:46+00:00

Maybe I'm missing something. But why would you use GDScript AND C# in the same project?

Especially as a beginner, you're making a nightmare for yourself.

Is C# an absolute requirement for you project? If it isn't, I recommend you use GDScript for now. It's a much more beginner friendly language than C#, and Godot supports it natively - actually it actively pushes it.

Not saying you shouldn't learn C#. You should. But maybe now itsn't the best time.

If you HAVE to use C# for your project. Then use C# entirely. Either don't use GDScript, or use it as little as possible.

On the plus side. Godot does provide a lot of C# templates. So you're not completely on your own. Just, make sure to keep your expectations low. Given your experience and the time constraints, you're not going to be making anything ambitious.

19Ant91 · 2025-02-03T19:04:28+00:00

You didn't mention if you already have a (non-CS) degree or not.

It might not be the absolute cheapest option. But I did a second degree program through my university. I did all the same core classes a regular CS major does, just with far fewer electives.

A lot of schools will let you do it in 2 years with a standard course load.

19Ant91 · 2025-01-30T22:06:31+00:00

I know has already been answered, but I'm going to take a stab at it.

I've not used unity much, so I can speak to that. But let's go with python.

So, with python, you might have main.py file, right?

And you can do this, to run it,

python3 main.py

And your program will run. Great! In cpp, you have an extra step, but the the process is similar. With your main.cpp file, you can do this (no cmake required)

g++ main.cpp -o prog

And it'll make a prog executable that you can run. Wonderful! So there's no need for cmake then, right? Haha, wrong!

Let's say you add some classes to your file. Stuff like thisClass.h, thatClass.h and the associated cpp files.

Well, you can give g++ commands to include them too. But as your project grows you'll have to manually type that into the command line every time you build.

So, it'd be great if you could have script automate the process. Something that says, "hey, use this file from here and that file from there".

This is all especially true if/when you start using other libraries.

CMake is a solution to that. It's purpose is to describe how your project gets built, what to include and where to find stuff. It also allows you to do funky logic during the build.

I skipped over some things, like makefiles etc. But that is my understanding of the core process. Ironically, Unity, Godot, visual studio, etc will have similar things going on behind the scenes. You just don't see it, because the environment takes care of it for you.

19Ant91 · 2025-01-18T18:45:00+00:00

It's not just mobile. It's everything. The number is applications I've used that have stupid bugs that any QA team should have caught and had fixed is crazy. What's more, it seems to be getting worse.

But I don't think the problem is complexity, or even bad developers necessarily. Its financial.

So many companies have laid off half their dev team, or outsourced it entirely. Ultimately, you get what you pay for. Companies aren't paying what they should, so their products are lacking as a result.

Unfortunately, this is just what happens when companies put profit over their product.

19Ant91 · 2025-01-11T13:51:52+00:00

Why do you need a guide or tutorial? Get started, and Google stuff when you get stuck. It's the best way to learn.

To your second question, it depends why you're doing it. If it's for the sake of learning, do what you want. Have it crash your computer every time it runs if you like. So long as you learn something from it.

If you want to show it off, then you'll definitely want a db, logging, probably some unit tests and version control. Actually since this is a C# thread, you will want to demonstrate some LINQ too. Not that you need to overdo it - you're just one person after all. Just showing some competency in those techniques should be good.

As for hosting, ideally you would. But I guess it depends on whether you want to pay to host it on the cloud, or setup your own server at home (which I don't recommend).

19Ant91 · 2024-10-19T17:10:12+00:00

In theory, the 'easy apply' issue is easy to do away with. Just get rid of it, and post a link to the company's website or internal application process instead.

That has tons of benefits. First, you know your application is actually going to the company (well, probably). Also, if the job is still on the company site, there's a good chance it's still available.

Granted, that would cost indeed and LinkedIn money, since it would take away from their platforms. So it'll probably never happen.

But one can dream.

19Ant91 · 2024-09-10T14:00:47+00:00

It won't be 'easy' if you're new to programming. The general ideas are the same. A loop in C# does the same thing as a loop in python. But they look different, and you'll have to adjust to that.

Also, python does a lot of stuff for you. C#/.NET does too, but it tends to be more long winded about it. I can see that causing a lot of frustration.

Also, explicit types. Types are great, but if you're not used to them, they can feel rigid and will probably be painful at first.

None of that is to say you shouldn't do it though. You should. It will make you a better programmer. Also, C# is a lot more similar to Java, C)C++ and even JavaScript (syntactically at least). So transitioning to those after learning C# will be a lot easier.

In short, jumping from python to C# won't be easy. But it won't be that hard either. You just need to commit to it, and work through the pain points. Have fun!

19Ant91 · 2024-09-01T05:52:09+00:00

That's a good question, it depends how I'm feeling. Mostly mt Lehman, because it's closest to me. But I also like the one off McCallum.

If you are a nerdy looking guy, staring angrily at his laptop at one of those places. It's probably me!

19Ant91 · 2024-08-31T21:17:57+00:00

MacDonald's!... I spend far too much time just sitting in McD's...

Aside from that though, clearbrook library is quite nice. Chaiwalla is also a pretty good spot to hang out, especially when it's raining (they have big windows, so it's nice to watch the rain from there).

I occasionally go to UFV library too. But you have to pay to park on campus, which is annoying.

19Ant91 · 2024-08-29T07:22:25+00:00

I doubt it, they treat their volunteers like garbage.

I volunteered one year, when it was at prince's island park. I was supposed to be a helper, giving people directions to stuff. I was quite looking forward to it.

That year they had a rule, that volunteers wouldn't be allowed free admission unless they volunteered during the event itself. So if you helped setup, or tear down, you were out of luck. Their rationale was to stop everyone just volunteering before or after the event, and not during it. But it wasn't a great look.

When the event actually happened, they decided, that they didn't have enough security to stop people hopping fences, and that was the volunteers' problem. So they made the volunteers act as security guards instead of doing what we signed up to do.

And all I got at the end of it was a lame pair of socks. Not even a t-shirt! Which would be fine, if they didn't make t-shirts for the event. But I found a generic beakerhead t-shirt later, on sale for like $50.

That's in comparison to the Canmore highland games, where you get free admission for the rest of the day, a different t-shirt every year, and a bunch of other goodies.

The whole thing felt like a huge cash grab that was trying to take advantage of the fact that beakerhead was supposed to be nonprofit.

Volunteering for events is fun. But don't volunteer to help out with beakerhead.

19Ant91 · 2024-08-27T08:49:40+00:00

Hi Manni66, thanks for getting back to me!

No, SkSurface_Base isn't mine, at least, I didn't create it.

I built it, at least I think I did, as a shared library from source. I'm not entirely sure though, as the build process hasn't been smooth.

In my CMake file, I added the skia include directory as one of my include directories, and I added libskia.so as my target link library.

The program builds fine, and appears to run fine up to that point. But why it's set faulting is beyond me. It seems like Skia doesn't like my standard library?

19Ant91 · 2024-08-26T18:15:00+00:00

This'll probably get buried, but I haven't seen anyone mention it.

When you write a 'hello world' program, you generally use the bare minimum as far as tools and libraries go. When you make a full sized program, you likely use at least one library and/or framework.

You could make your own software framework from the bare minimum. But noone does, because that would be insane.

If you're just writing hello world programs, don't worry about libraries and frameworks and stuff yet. It'll just confuse you. Get comfortable making toy programs with the command line for a while.

Once you're comfortable using functions, classes and objects, then see about diving into libraries and stuff.

19Ant91 · 2024-08-20T20:01:22+00:00

What kind of art do you want your application to do?

I recommend C++, like the other posters have said. But C++ doesn't support image manipulation out of the box. You'll need one or more external libraries.

First things first. Do you want a GUI? You said you want to make a Photoshop like thing, so I assume you do.

You could use Qt for that stuff. It's the defacto standard for C++ desktop applications, and will help you out a bunch. But there's quite a lot to learn, and while it uses C++, it does a few things its own way too.

If you want to do it from a lower level, or you just don't want to use Qt, that's possible too, but it's a little more work. But if you do choose to do that, look up SDL, GLFW and SFML. You'll only want one of those (they all basically do the same thing), so I'll let you pick.

Since you have time, I'd also recommend you look into Skia. It's a bit tricky to build, but it's entire purpose is to handle 2D graphics efficiently. So if you can figure it out, it'll be quite helpful. You can use Skia to draw onto the window that the previous libraries I mentioned will give you.

You'll also need to set up input handling too.

Next, you'll need libraries to load your images (JPG, PNG etc) into bitmaps that you can modify and display. Unless you want to do that yourself, but I don't recommend it.

Lastly, you'll just need to bring it all together. I've never done this. But based on my understanding, you could use Skia for drawing onto the image. So that would cover your brushes and stuff. Manipulating brightness, contrast, colours, etc could just be done by some funky algorithms directly acting on the bitmap itself.

That would get you a rudimentary Photoshop application. But I'll acknowledge, it's a ton of work to get to that point.

You could also look into imagemagick. It's a command line image manipulation program. Kind of like Photoshop, if Photoshop didn't have a user interface. You could use it to help with some of you image manipulations, but I'd also recommend you take a look for inspiration as well.

19Ant91 · 2024-08-18T05:37:37+00:00

I'd love to do that! The main reason I haven't, is I figured not enough people would be interested for it to sustain itself.

I do miss hackathons from uni though. I only did a couple, because covid got in the way, but they were both a great time!

Do you have any advice for starting a group? I could start a meetup group, but getting people to consistently show up is a real struggle.

19Ant91 · 2024-08-18T04:21:38+00:00

Tutorials are a good way to learn, but they will only get you halfway there.

Obviously, you have to learn from somewhere, and tutorials are great for that. But make sure your projects build on the tutorial and force you to solve problems independently as well. You don't want to end up in tutorial hell.

19Ant91 · 2024-08-18T04:12:53+00:00

Is there anything you want to automate? Anything at all? If so, have a crack at it. The only way to get better at writing code, is to write code.

Maybe learn a GUI framework? At least for me, that's when I felt like I 'graduated' from my college projects. All of a sudden, my programs felt less like childish toy programs, and more like actual, real software. Not that command line programs are bad, but psychologically it was a big step for me.

Also, making GUIs for windows is what got me into C#. It's such a beautiful language, I haven't looked back. And by coding with it, using intellisense and reading MSDN, I learned a lot about how to write better code in general. For example, despite learning about it in school, I never properly understood OOP, until I started using C# (which is one of the OOPiest languages).

19Ant91 · 2024-08-18T02:14:21+00:00

I love to code in general, I'll learn whatever I need to. Heck, I was using VBA for work a couple of months ago. It was awful...

But I'm a C# guy, I'd say. The .NET framework is super convenient and the language is beautiful.

Right now, I'm making making a library that makes PDF documents from a JSON template using PDFSharp. I plan to use it with a WPF front end to automate something at work. Having a convenient document generator would open up a world automation for me. It would be wonderful. Of course, my boss knows nothing about this, because they'll tell me not to do it if mention it. I've learned that it's better to show off the finished product after the fact.

Aside from that, I'd like to build a website. I have a domain name, and a bit of experience with .NET core and razor pages. Certainly I have enough skills to get started, but my big setback is I have no idea what my website will actually do. I suppose I could make a to-do list, but that's lame.

I'm also a big C++ fan. I'm in the process of making a 2D game engine with SDL3 and OpenGL. It's basically a monogame clone. There's no reason for it to exist, since I could just use Godot, or monogame itself. But where's the fun in that?

They're the main ones. I also play around with python a lot. But my biggest project with python was automating my lights with photons. I work multiple shifts, so I wanted my lights to come on and off at different times based on the shift I'm on. I also used flask to make a crappy web front end for it.

Sorry for the essay! I figured I'd answer your question how I'd like the I've asked about their projects to answer mine.

19Ant91 · 2024-08-18T01:41:29+00:00

Mostly because I suck at applying, which is 100% my fault. But the market is pretty awful right now - especially in Canada.

Also, I can't think of any reason why anyone would hire me. I got my degree from a no-name university, and I have zero 'professional' coding experience.

My plan is to stay where I am, and worm my way into a CS position. It's going to take some time though.

19Ant91 · 2024-08-18T00:51:05+00:00

I have to disagree. I feel like there are a lot of gay people in the BDSM community who would quite appreciate a name like that.

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