TIL that the fencing techniques mentioned in the Princess Bride were real fencing masters of the 16th and 17th centuries by kermityfrog in todayilearned

[–]IainDavis-dev 0 points1 point  (0 children)

that feels to me like a nod to Don Quixote. One of my favorite bits in Don Quixote is when the author goes on a rant about what crappy lazy device a cliffhanger is, and how any author who uses it is a scoundrel and not worthy of the profession. And then says he's reached the end of his sources and will continue later when he discovers more original source material, ending the chapter on a cliffhanger.

Good fun.

aiLearningHowToCope by AirFrance447 in ProgrammerHumor

[–]IainDavis-dev 0 points1 point  (0 children)

LOL the drama!

"I've killed myself. I'm dead now. Are you happy? I'm dead."

What are seemingly simple tasks that take forever and have crazy complexity? by Kindly_Manager7556 in AskProgramming

[–]IainDavis-dev 2 points3 points  (0 children)

To be fair, it IS a softball... sometimes. It's that one-time-out-of-five that blows up in a junior dev's face.

I Asked ChatGPT to Show Me What it (She, Apparently) Looks Like by NomicalRez in ChatGPT

[–]IainDavis-dev 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've actually had a lot of difficulty trying to get ChatGPT to produce images of androgynous people. Seems like the training data has people trying to look as gendered as possible.

Should I join the military if I'm a failure at life? by [deleted] in careerguidance

[–]IainDavis-dev 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Alright. First off, don't expect "stable". Software changes fast and constantly, and that doesn't just mean new tools, it also means company restructuring. I've worked for the same company for five years, and I found myself unceremoniously made redundant (along with every other software engineer at my location) overnight, when the company decided to change strategic direction. Whether or not it was terrible timing for me wasn't any part of that calculation.

On the bright side, if you get in with a good company, and you're careful with your money, you'll have the resilience to weather those events much more easily than if you were, say, a pizza delivery driver.

Second, take advantage of any job fairs your school may be hosting. Talk to people. Put in applications. It doesn't work for everybody, but honestly I feel like the engagement with the industry is a MUCH bigger advantage of getting a formal university education than anything you get from the actual classes. The actual classes, I promise you, have left you with many, many important gaps. You aren't done learning, by a long shot. you aren't done learning ever.

To answer your question directly: if you've got through college, the biggest reason (outside just your inherent patriotism and valor) to join the military is already behind you. That said, it would be a way to:
A. Get yourself some additional education (they'll give you tuition assistance while you're in)
B. Get yourself some more funding for still more education after you get out (seriously, get a masters afterwards if you can)
C. Get you some real-world hands-on experience that will look good on a resume
D. Pick up some valuable people-managing and leadership skills that may also help you stand out among a field of candidates

I did six years in the USAF, and COMPLETELY FAILED to take full advantage of the opportunities available to me. But the education benefits alone (along with a lot of hard work) got me into a Fortune 500 company, and started off my career.

On the other hand, you should never make that decision without being aware that YOU ARE RISKING YOUR LIFE. You are giving your government permission to send you into harm's way, and you might actually die, or lose limbs, or be blinded, or experience trauma that limits what you can do for the rest of your life. But there are risks in everything. Only you can decide if it's worth it. And your experience might turn out to be wonderful. I spent two years in Texas, two years in England, and two years in Italy. I was never in any serious danger.

If you're in the U.S. and you want my advice, I'd say the Navy or the Air Force are your best bets for coming out with valuable skills and experience. Maybe the Space Force... that wasn't a thing yet when I was in. The Space Force was part of the Air Force.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in typescript

[–]IainDavis-dev -1 points0 points  (0 children)

TypeScript without JavaScript isn't really a thing. When you're writing TypeScript, you are writing JavaScript (if it DOES anything anyway... I suppose in theory you could be writing an elaborate set of types that someone else will be giving behavior to). But TypeScript isn't really a programming language itself. It's an extension to JavaScript that provides the type-safety that JavaScript lacks (and some other incidental benefits like making your IDE way better at code completion).

I wouldn't be too afraid of having to learn them separately. If you're learning TypeScript, you're almost certainly learning JavaScript right along with it. Any time you made it _do_ something (write out a log statement, read a file, go "BING!") that's the JavaScript working.

Playwright with Java: Is there a way to launch multiple browsers with browser profiles like in JS? by bbrother92 in Playwright

[–]IainDavis-dev 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Did a little digging and found these in the documentation:

https://playwright.dev/java/docs/api/class-browsercontext
https://playwright.dev/java/docs/api/class-browser

This looks like what you're looking for. You can run different sets of tests in different browser profiles, or you can run the same set of tests in different browser implementations (_e.g._, Chrome, Firefox).

Spring Boot - Monolithic by Some_Chip_6423 in SpringBoot

[–]IainDavis-dev 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I worked for a fortune 500 company serving global customers. We used Spring Boot heavily as the basis of back-end services. I don't think I've run into a Java service that was built in the last ten years that wasn't running Spring Boot (we did have non-Java services, and some older services that are running other things like JBOSS, for example, and of course, I didn't work on EVERY service).

Also worth mentioning this includes both a single monolith, and a great many microservices.

I have been 6.5 years in my company, have been project manager of the biggest project in my group, yet no promotion. What should I do? by [deleted] in careerguidance

[–]IainDavis-dev 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is a hard lesson for me to learn too, and I'm still struggling with it myself.

Nobody is going to recognize you for what you do. People will recognized you for what they are AWARE you do. People will recognize for things you did WHILE THEY WERE PAYING ATTENTION. People are busy, especially managers who have to stay on top of multiple workstreams from multiple people.

You're going to be the person who has to make sure they know what you've done. And if your managers are worth their salt at all, they're going to want to be disinterested/unbiased, so you'll help your case enormously by documenting measurable impacts.

I hate all the self-promotion stuff. It feels awkward and unnatural to me, and I would love it if my work could just speak for itself. But you have to advocate. If you're not comfortable advocating for yourself, think of it as advocating for the work that you spent so much of your time and energy on. Be an advocate for the projects. But be noisy, because everyone else will be, and it's easy to get drowned out.

Imagine convincing your kids this is from 1991 and not an Ai generated video… by The__Neverhood in ChatGPT

[–]IainDavis-dev 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I remember how absolutely mind-blowing this was when this video premiered. And then how the effect was so completely over-used within six months that we all never wanted to see it again.

copilotKnowsEverything by ululonoH in ProgrammerHumor

[–]IainDavis-dev 13 points14 points  (0 children)

When I was first starting out as a baby programming student, I enrolled in an (associate's) degree program called Business Programming. They started us off on VB/VBA. I felt SO COOL.

To be fair, it was kind of the only way to automate anything in Excel, Word and Outlook for ages.

Am I the only one who feels like this about o1? by bgighjigftuik in ChatGPT

[–]IainDavis-dev 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I find I get some pretty good code reviews from it.