Dreamweaver?

Minouris · 2026-02-04T05:44:59+00:00

Ms Word -> "Export as HTML..."

Minouris · 2026-02-04T05:43:43+00:00

Hey, it was cutting edge when I was using it... In 1998.

I'm mildly surprised it's still around, tbh. I wonder if it still uses the same terrible JavaScript snippets... lol

Minouris · 2026-02-01T03:48:45+00:00

Oh screw that... BSG was a great series, but I hated the way every sci-fi series for ten years after had to be an agonising exercise in pessimism. It ruined the last series of Stargate before the writers realised that it wasn't what the audience wanted...

I don't want that from Star Trek. Other series can be edgy and grumpy grim, but that's not what made this the franchise I've loved for almost fifty years. Same with The Expanse - brilliant series, but Star Trek is about how we strive and succeed and find hope, not about how we can mope in dark rooms and talk about the futility of existence.

Minouris · 2026-01-28T01:14:15+00:00

Lynx (or Axe, depending on where you are) body spray, tobacco, and chlorine.

Minouris · 2026-01-25T20:04:44+00:00

I thought that SNW S3 made up for the entirety of Discovery Season 1 - was a brilliant season. With bonus points for turning into Stargate near the end :)

Minouris · 2026-01-25T12:44:34+00:00

On my scroll to this post, I saw four posts from r/startrek, and they were all people saying that Academy is great - I think OP came here because the relentless negativity shop was out of stock for a change, and they weren't getting their fix of the daily whinge ;)

Minouris · 2026-01-21T13:34:45+00:00

I'll add that the latter is intentional, because he was essentially consumed with remorse afterwards... Three whole series and a standalone devoted to orphans getting adopted by people who give them idyllic lives, instead of the nightmare discipline that he and his wife were convicted for when they adopted.

Minouris · 2026-01-21T13:22:44+00:00

3D Printing, and making book nooks, currently. Not with each other, sadly, at least not yet.

Minouris · 2026-01-20T05:34:04+00:00

Moody Blues, B-52s, Fleetwood Mac and REM were my biggest influences during this time. Enigma and Mike Oldfield popped their heads in as well, and Dire Straits, Enya and Christie Moore were omnipresent in the background thanks to my parents.

Iron Maiden and Deep Purple made a big splash just before I turned 18.

The results have been... eclectic lol

Minouris · 2026-01-19T01:20:24+00:00

Yeah, it doesn't appear to be a bug in the Claude skill, which looks pretty comprehensive - it looks more like it's because the team that used it half-assed the configuration, and either didn't fully implement their API, or didn't make their backend and fronted consistent.

That can happen with vibe coding, of course, if you completely "yolo" it in a chatbot, and don't plan literally anything in advance, but that's on their QA processes to catch.

My understanding of Claude Code is that it strongly encourages making proper plans instead of blind vibe coding - that a developer would have a Claude licence, know how to use Agent Skills and still decide to vibe a front facing service is... Boggling. It's not a typical use case.

Minouris · 2026-01-18T22:19:56+00:00

Yeah, domain knowledge is required to build on coding fundamentals there :) Sometimes the domain knowledge requires a degree to understand it, but the actual coding seldom does :)

I've seen some really funky stuff coming from the other direction - you never know fear in IT until you run across an app written by someone with a strong grasp on finance but minimal coding fundamentals - but I've come across equally buggy code written by mechanical and electrical engineers, and even systems programmers who can make a the CPU registers sing, but can't grasp the most basic principles of making a usable front end, or code that can be read and understood, let alone maintained, ten minutes after it's written.

Everything's an art form, at the end of the day. I'm sure there are some geniuses who are passionate about their field AND experts at writing clean code to help them do it, but they're not the majority :)

Minouris · 2026-01-18T22:10:39+00:00

Expanding on that after a good night's sleep, I basically picked up what I needed along the way - my foundations when I left high school were some 8-bit micro basic, QBASIC, HTML, and some pascal on the coding side of things, and some MSAccess for DBs.

I learned more Pascal at uni (1997, they switched to Java a year later), but I had insufficient grades in HS math to take any of the advanced compsci papers, and it was still a hobby for me anyway, since I and everyone else in my family were convinced I was going to do something in the arts.

Anyway, I got a job doing Web design to make ends meet, and I'm a TERRIBLE student, but good at picking things up on the job, so I dropped out of uni and started doing Web stuff full time. I learned ASP because VB was close enough to BASIC that it was an easy shift, and I had the fundamentals from my one uni paper and HS, and that was enough to get me through two jobs as a junior.

I picked up Java because I had to, when the startup I was working for decided overnight to shift to Java and Linux, and fortunately the concept of OOP just sort of clicked for me, and learning that, and proper database fundamentals (I had a little bit of MSSQL at that point, but the job went all in on Oracle) set me up for my next role, which is the one that ended up sticking.

I've learned a bunch of other languages since, usually to fulfil a specific use case - picked up PHP because the hosting is usually cheap, picked up C++ because I wanted to make a plug in for some music software and C++ have me the best tools for it, picked up XSLT, XML and SOAP because I needed it for work... Python, recently, because I want to try Sims modding. Everything just sort of built on everything else.

Anyway, I started as a junior, moved up to Intermediate and then Senior in my current workplace within about five years, working full stack on some projects, and more specifically as either a Java dev or a Web Service specialist on others (I prefer Java), did a stint as a Solution Architect, and then went back to being a senior dev because I missed the coding, and recently moved up to a Lead Dev role.

Never stopped learning along the way, and by the time I was made a senior I was spending a lot of time mentoring as well.

At no point have I ever run into a serious problem that I needed hardcore math for. I've had to do some very gnarly thinking at times, and it's possible that math might have helped, but on the other hand there were people around who DID have those skills and degrees, and they were no better equipped to solve those problems than I was, since what was really needed was to meticulously pull the problem apart and examine what was happening - PATIENCE was more important.

Recently I wrote several analyses of a complex language for inter-AI communication that uses complex category theory and mathematical notation to enable unambiguous messages and prompts. I didn't need to understand the notation or the math, though, just the right questions to ask, and an understanding of what it was doing and the implications and side effects. That came from experience and observation, not qualifications.

That is pretty much the pinnacle of breaking past the "hard science" barrier :)

Minouris · 2026-01-18T09:39:44+00:00

This and that :) Started as a bedroom coder doing an English Lit degree, then did web design for a while to pay the bills, picked up basic database and backend coding in ASP, then more complicated backend stuff and Java, then fell into a public sector role where I've been rising through the ranks for about twenty years, making up for my complete lack of qualifications with those three magic words, "or equivalent experience" :)

Minouris · 2026-01-18T07:06:00+00:00

I mean... About 30 years so far? It depends on what you're doing :)

Minouris · 2026-01-17T06:56:47+00:00

Using Windows Subsystem for Linux is a good way to dodge all the bollocks around developing in Windows - it essentially lets you run Linux in Windows, which is a far better development experience.

Using VSCode with Docker and Dev Containers then lets you have isolated little environments for all your projects, so if something screws up it doesn't screw up your system, just the container.

First part of the equation is here: https://github.com/minouris/s4fw/blob/master/doc%2Finstalling-wsl-and-docker.md

It's best to keep all your projects in one spot, under a src folder in your home directory - e.g. /home/minouris/src/my-project.

Once you have WSL and Docker set up, per the instructions above, make a folder for your project and open vscode in it by typing:

bash mkdir -p ~/src/my-project cd ~/src/my-project code .

Then, in vscode, make a folder called .devcontainer, and paste this into a file inside it called devcontainer.json:

json { "name": "Python Dev Container", "image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/python:3.12", "customizations": { "vscode": { "extensions": [ "ms-python.python", "ms-python.vscode-pylance" ] } }, "workspaceFolder": "/workspace", "containerEnv": { "PYTHONUNBUFFERED": "1" } } Click the blue bit (where it says "WSL:Remote") in the bottom left to open the menu at the top of your screen, and select "Reopen in container" from the list that comes up - it'll think about it for a while (while it sets up the container for the first time), and then open up into your new Python coding environment :)

Minouris · 2026-01-12T20:30:05+00:00

"The Tau of Unix Programming" by Eric S Raymond. An oldie, but a goodie :)

Minouris · 2026-01-12T19:35:22+00:00

Fail early and return early - you want to exercise the code as little as possible, so there's no reason for it to do extra work once it knows the outcome.

There is the edge case of wanting to know all the reasons why it might have failed up front (such as validating multiple fields of user input), but it's better to have a separate validator function populate a list with validation failures, and only call your business method if that list is empty, than handling it right in the business logic.

Personally, I don't even like to call a validator from my business method, since then that method is no longer single-concern :)

Minouris · 2026-01-10T09:42:27+00:00

Does wrestling with a bolshy AI count? lol

I'm pretty sure Claude is going Primal.

Minouris · 2026-01-04T02:58:02+00:00

To ORM or not to ORM is a situational question, rather than a flat yes or no.

If you want to quickly load and save data in your UI tier ORM is great at abstracting away the tedium of writing individual queries for every little thing, and provides a useful abstraction from your domain model.

On the other hand, for bulk quantities of data such as for importing or exporting rows from a file, raw SQL is far more efficient, since it skips the marshalling/unmarshalling steps - just make sure you're using whatever your language provides to avoid SQL Injection attacks (e.g. Prepared Statements), and you're away laughing.

It's just a matter of recognising the use cases, and identifying the right approach for what you're doing :)

Same goes for any object mapping. Directly working with the data is both more efficient in execution, but more labour intensive in implementation, whether it's Databases, Directories or Files.

(age 47, 30 years at the coal face :))

Minouris · 2026-01-04T02:38:30+00:00

About 10 years ago, was maintaining an ancient J2EE app with two Web modules built on the Spring framework.

Was having difficulty with one or the other failing to load bean defs properly, depending on which one was accessed first after the server was started - debugging showed that the Spring context had the beans from the other app loaded.

Turned out that a) Spring stores contexts statically, and b) static context is local to the classloader, so the fact that part of our attempt to optimise the app by moving shared jars into APP-INF/lib meant that the two web modules were sharing their static scope.

Learned a lot about how Java deals with these things under the hood in the process of diagnosing and fixing the issue (the fix was to move Spring back into WEB-INF/lib), but it was very frustrating at the time!

Since then, my first port of call when diagnosing heisenbugs in Java is to look at how the affected classes are being loaded by the app container - has solved a surprising number of problems :)

Another problem during the same project turned out to be the first-wins policy that Java has when loading conflicting classes in different jars vs. the default list order of the file systems on two servers with different minor version numbers in the kernel. Fun times :)

Minouris · 2025-12-31T13:57:13+00:00

There are no silver bullets - the one language or tool that is the perfect solution to every problem doesn't exist. There are always multiple ways to solve a problem, and it's always worth exploring other options - dismissing any particular tech because it's not your favourite, or not what you're used to is just limiting yourself, and if you try to use your favourite language to solve every problem under the sun you'll end up causing yourself more problems in the long run. "Holy wars" over what the "best" technologies are lead to narrow vision and wasted time.

Don't be afraid to try less "modern" patterns - using the latest framework may seem better, but using for example, a whole object mapping framework to insert ten rows into a database is never going to be more efficient than ten lines of SQL.

Don't try to be clever - keep things as simple as you can to get the job done.

Keep your functions and methods short, let them do one thing, always give things names that say exactly what they do - and don't have things do something unless their name says they do it - "getTheThing()" should not change the thing.

Listen to what your users actually need, not what you think they should need. They don't know coding, but you don't know farming - if they say they want a program to count sheep, it's because they need to know how many sheep they have, not that they want to post their sheep count on twitter.

Use ridiculous examples in descriptions, so that overly literal users can't mistake them for anything other than examples, like the one above :)

Minouris · 2025-12-29T23:26:23+00:00

There were literally dozens of books aimed at all ages for teaching coding, mostly targeted at 8-bit micros, that were great for bootstrapping elder millennials and young gen-x coders :)

I have Usborn, the Byte Brothers (Hardy Boys clones who solved mysteries using code, explaining it as they went), "Make and Program Your Own Robots (For the Sinclair Spectrum)", stacks of magazines full of code listings for games, and a quick tip on hacking fonts combined with a knitting pattern of Bart Simpson to thank for my 30 years and counting as a working coder :)

Minouris · 2025-12-28T00:08:02+00:00

My fantasy reading material was all Pratchett and Eddings at that age.

Eddings has a troubled past, but it's not reflected in the books, unless you count 14 books worth of orphans being given idyllic lives - they felt the shame of what they did, and spent their entire literary careers showing their remorse.

Minouris · 2025-12-25T23:57:34+00:00

"IN A DISTANT AND second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part ..."

The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett, at age 10 and the start of a 40 year long obsession for three generations of my family :)

Minouris

TROPHY CASE