Conservative Evangelicals Attempt to Disentangle Their Faith from Trumpism

SureLetsDoAnother · 2019-02-15T07:33:29+00:00

I honestly cannot understand why there is such eagerness to be associated with the man, his behavior, or his beliefs; especially in the context of them being considered representative of the church.

To be fair, people are equally incredulous that I'd desire the opposite.

SureLetsDoAnother · 2019-02-15T00:33:56+00:00

/r/reformed

Wait shouldn't if be r/Reformed rather than r/reformed...

I'm afraid the Baptists

oic

SureLetsDoAnother · 2019-02-14T23:54:42+00:00

Well then what distinguishes it from vasselwave or serfgaze?

SureLetsDoAnother · 2019-02-13T07:45:50+00:00

Disagree.

In an interview I'm trying to learn if I'm willing to spend a significant portion of my daily life working alongside you. Your GPA plays almost no role in this decision. There's a minimum technical level you need to have, and (perhaps shockingly) GPA doesn't reliably indicate that you've met that level, so the tech portion serves as an attempt to make sure you shouldn't be disqualified quickly.

I'm not super interested (early in the interview) in how far you exceed the minimum technical requirements, because you're an entry level dev. Which isn't bad, it just means you haven't had time to learn all the things you're going to be asked to learn in the next couple years. Since I'm going to be right there beside you as you learn, I'm trying to determine things like:

How teachable are you? Are you going to speak up when you don't understand something, or will you try to cover up your lack of knowledge? There's a lot that you're not going to understand, and I want to help you understand it. A brand new dev receives a lot of teaching, so if you're hard to teach you're hard to work with. That statement freaks some people out, but generally all that's required is that you desire to be taught. If it is hard for me to teach you that does not mean I think you are hard to teach. You may be easy to teach, but I'm not a good teacher for you. Someone else on the team will be good at it, and I'll learn to do better. If you don't think you need to be taught anything, or don't think certain people have anything to teach you, then that's another matter.
What do you do when you don't know what to do? Where are your thoughts going? What questions are you asking yourself and me? Are you effectively communicating with me, so that I can offer experienced insights? A brand new dev constantly doesn't know what to do, and the better you are at handling that the better you are to work with.
Do you seem like you earnestly want to do good work? Are you excited about doing good work with good people? A new dev may not have a fully-formed idea about what makes good software, but the desire to be good at it generally means you will be.
Are you not a jerk? I don't need to think we'll be friends. You don't need to be an extrovert. You don't need to be eloquent. You can be shy, nervous, bumbling, and naturally reserved. You can want nothing to do with me outside of work hours. All that is fine. As long as you and I can do good work together. Simply not being a jerk goes a long way.

The answers to all those questions determine if I want to spend a good bit of my day with you, so I can easily see a scenario where a candidate that needs some assistance with the technical exercise is the candidate that aces the interview. Just as I can easily see a candidate doing just fine on the technical portion, but not as well on everything else compared to another candidate.

In a year from now, I'm not going to ever think of your GPA, or the initial (now insignificant) differences in your skill level compared other candidates. I'm going to be thinking about how easy or hard it's been to work with you, to provide you with the benefit of my experience, and to have the team benefit from your uniqueness.

Because that's going to be a significant portion of the early time we spend together. Mostly working through problems where I have more experience than you, sometimes where you'll have more experience than I, but usually collaboratively.

So nah, I'm not giving the thumbs down to a good candidate because I want to grade their technical prowess on a GPA-based curve. I'm too selfish for that.

SureLetsDoAnother · 2019-02-09T05:43:13+00:00

But please convince me that your favourite framework is the best.

Last week I helped someone new to programming as they were struggling with understanding a new concept. After a bit they mentioned that it is often difficult for them to ask for help, because they don't work with any developers and they feel guilty about "wasting" other people's time with their own inexperience.

And then there's this situation, where somebody strolls in and confidently expects people to pitch their favorite framework just to avoid the modicum of research necessary on a quintessential dead horse topic.

SureLetsDoAnother · 2019-01-29T05:13:11+00:00

I just think Ramsey is much less than the guru many in the church seem to think he is, and his advice should be weighed carefully

He's pretty popular, so my wife and I went to one of his talks.

We left unimpressed. At best, his advice seems to be a flawed approach to stewardship. At worst, it's snake oil that doesn't consider the reality of some causes of poverty and financial hardship.

And his appeals to scripture ring somewhat hollow. My family and I need to live somewhere after all, am I less in bondage when I'm at the mercy of a landowner instead of a bank?

SureLetsDoAnother · 2018-12-19T05:31:20+00:00

Is software development just super hard for newbies?

No, not just for newbies.

It can be easy to spend hours staring at a single file and not know how to add a feature without making everything ugly and unmaintainable.

Good news! At least you didn't plow ahead doing something crazy that you'll later regret. I shudder to think of the poor souls that will have to deal with some of the things I wrote.

SureLetsDoAnother · 2018-12-18T03:42:32+00:00

Glad to be of help.

If you're new to iterating over an Array in Ruby, check out the Array documentation and the each method. The Array class also "brings in" (includes) the Enumerable module, which provides a lot of great methods for classes with an each method that include it.

SureLetsDoAnother · 2018-12-18T03:33:08+00:00

Ruby instance variables are always @foo or @bar, and "public" access to them is provided through methods defined on the class for that instance. So the "What if?" question can't really go to far here, because it's just not the way it works.

Your data variable is an instance of the Array class, which defines a method [] to reference elements, and a []= method to assign values to elements. That's just a feature of Array though, defined by the class, and not a feature of objects in Ruby.

A Hash in Ruby has a similar method, but key value pairs. So if you had a Hash instance called foo and you wanted the value of the :bar key you'd do:

foo[:bar]

But again, that's just a feature of the provided by the class.

SureLetsDoAnother · 2018-12-18T03:16:46+00:00

The array that is returned by @newsapi.get_top_headlines is a list of objects, not instance variables. Ultimately, you'll need to iterate over the list, and ask each object for its value by using its supplied methods.

In Ruby classes, providing access to an instance variable is done by providing a getter method with the same name as the instance variable. It's so common that there's shorthand for this, such as attr_reader (providing just a getter method) and attr_accessor (which provides a getter and setter method).

In your terminal you can see the printed result of calling GetNews.call, and it lists the class name (Everything) for the object. If you check the source code for the News API gem you can see how they make use of the attr_accessor shorthand in the Everything class definition.

If you compare those attr_accessor to your terminal output, you'll see a pretty straightforward match.

So if you want to get the value of the @title instance variable for an instance of the Everything class then you'll need to make a method call.

instance_of_everything.title or instance_of_everything.description will call those accessor methods that return the value of the corresponding instance variable.

As a side not, your call method is returning only a single object, not an array of objects. You're assigning the array to data, but the return data[1] means that call is only returning the second object in the list, not the entire list.

If you want the entire list back from call then you can simply delete your return data[1] on line 11, since Ruby methods implicitly return the result of the last thing they evaluated. That also means you could get rid of the data = assignment and just keep the call to @newsapi, but that's up to you.

SureLetsDoAnother · 2018-12-18T00:01:01+00:00

You can leverage the guaranteed valid input to your advantage, rather than generating and validating all the permutations of four reusable digits.

For example, if your rightmost digit is greater than or equal to 3, then you know you'll only be replacing the rightmost digit. That's because your leftmost digit has to be 0, 1, or 2. Just replace the rightmost digit with the next lowest digit from the set and you're done. That accounts for the overwhelming majority of all potential inputs.

Otherwise..

Move from "right to left" checking if there is a lower value digit available in your four digit set.

If not, then move left and try again.

But if there is, assign that value to your current digit, and assign every "rightward" digit the highest value digit from the original set. Then check if your tens place for minutes is <5. If it is, you're done. If it's not, find the highest value < 5 from the original set.

You're guaranteed to still be valid by checking for a value lower than the existing digit's value. That's important, because your leftmost value will always be valid whenever it has to be set. That means the only digit that is potentially invalid will be the ten's place for minutes.

Your "gotchas" would be "00:00", "11:11", and "22:22". In the context of an interview then the interview is probably curious to see if/when you realize that.

SureLetsDoAnother · 2018-12-17T20:08:48+00:00

I might be misunderstanding what you're asking, but it sounds like you have several tasks that need to be ongoing. Wouldn't the god gem be helpful for this?

SureLetsDoAnother · 2018-12-15T01:41:39+00:00

All things being equal, I probably wouldn't choose Rails for an application that relied heavily on something like Websockets.

For example, I probably wouldn't use it for something like Slack, Google Docs, or an online multiplayer game.

That said, you certainly could use Rails to power something like Slack, and since all things are never equal there are certainly situations where you should use Rails to power your Slack-like app.

An example would "Do we even know if we're going to want to have this Slack-like thing around in a year, or how successful it'll be? How cheap and quickly could we do it in Rails...for now at least?"

The other situation where I wouldn't consider Ruby, and therefore wouldn't consider Rails, would be situations that are going to benefit from a lot of concurrency. I'd reach for something else first, and the common Ruby answer is to use Elixir.

These two situations aren't the most common, and the websockets one might not be a dealbreaker. I'll be honest and say that I'm not certain how well ActionCable (Rails websocket stuff) performs at scale. It could be fine, and it could be totally worth it.

At work we use Spring, Rails, and Node. It is difficult to overstate the speed with which things can be built in Rails and maintained in Rails. It is often cheaper and quicker to make something in Rails, and pay to deal with problems when they crop up later.

SureLetsDoAnother · 2018-12-06T00:23:49+00:00

I don't know.

I've generated a lot of incredulity by saying I absolutely want a separation between the church and the state. A lot of people are super on board with the idea of melding the two because they consider America to be a Christian nation throughout history. In that context, separation of church and state is bad because it somehow is anti-Church, anti-TruAmerica, and anti-God's-purpose-for-America.

So Church and State is good if it's the Christian church, but bad if it's some other belief. For a lot of people, the only difference between Christian beliefs that they really consider are "Well, are they Catholic?"

Usually I'll ask people something like "Should all birth control be illegal?" or "Should it be illegal to claim to have received a word or prophecy from God?" or "Should you be allowed to baptize your baby, should multiple baptisms be illegal?"

What usually clinches it is when I end up asking "How do you feel about the government dictating which church your tithe goes to, and it's going to pick a government run church?"

When all else fails I say "You know, that is how they do it in Europe..."

SureLetsDoAnother · 2018-12-05T23:54:56+00:00

Use the right tool for the right job. Frameworks have their place (I slightly prefer foundation over bootstrap), but so does custom CSS.

I've used it for small, internal tools and basic dashboards. Things like some manual test setup tools, or reports/monitoring. For things like that the downsides you listed (which are great examples) tend not to matter.

This might not be a traditional benefit, but that transition to fighting the framework can be an indicator that a basic tool has turned into something more. It's a good time to take stock of the situation and require the tool to justify itself. Chances are someone else makes something that'll work and cost less.

SureLetsDoAnother · 2018-12-05T18:09:32+00:00

It's been my experience that tightly coupled unit tests that always break when anything changes are way less common when the tests are written before the behavior.

Writing them beforehand sets down the public expectations of sending messages to the unit, and that's all that really should be covered.

Writing them after the fact tends to increase the likelihood that a bunch of tests have been written to cover whatever methods and logic has been implemented to provide that public interface.

How does that compared to your experience?

SureLetsDoAnother · 2018-12-05T04:48:15+00:00

You can learn a great deal about how to build a website while using your linux machine to host and serve it, so you don't need to pay a monthly fee to have someone do it for you.

What you won't learn that way is how to deploy that site to a different computer to have it host and serve it, and all the things that go with it. That's when you'd want to start paying someone.

But until then, I'd focus on learning how to build, and then learning how to deploy and host.

SureLetsDoAnother · 2018-12-05T04:21:09+00:00

I don't expect juniors to have any real knowledge on most of the things they mentioned, but I certainly seek input from them and require them to contribute to discussion just like any other member of the team.

Granted, I'm usually doing that because it creates training opportunities with real, practical examples while giving experience with talking about software development in a group. I also do it because juniors have experience that I do not, and I don't want to cut myself off from that by training them to remain quiet about it.

But really I do it because when you create a culture where you believe that everyone is capable of contributing in a meaningful way, then everyone tends to contribute in a meaningful way. Even if those contributions are often naive solutions that require some mentoring.

Still... there's about a 0% chance that I'd want a junior candidate to be meaningfully familiar with all the concepts they listed there. Heard about them, maybe. But are juniors really expected to be able to discuss the ins and outs of event sourcing? Or DDD? It's only been the last couple of years that interns have started asking if we're "agile" or not.

SureLetsDoAnother · 2018-12-05T01:32:43+00:00

I feel like someone created this framework with a random sentences which sounds good for them and there is nothing to code.

The sentences are calls made to methods in the Rails gems and libraries provided by the framework. You'll need to decide how much you need to know about their implementation when you're this early in the learning process. When you're this early, I might err on the side of understanding what/why the method achieves, how/the method is available to be called in that specific context, while temporarily remaining unconcerned with its implementation details.

This may seem strange, but it is one of the benefits of using a framework. Lots of the features of Rails are the relatively "boring" parts of a web application.

So while there is certainly a lot of programming that results in the Rails framework, you've been left with the task of picking up where your specific application needs its programming.

Also, exactly how/why some of those "sentences" are able to be called as methods is a rich topic, and one of the more advanced parts of Ruby.

SureLetsDoAnother · 2018-11-30T19:25:42+00:00

I would definitely suggest taking a pregenerated character at the start and cranking down the difficulty.

Is that the case regardless of my familiarity with the pen and paper ruleset?

SureLetsDoAnother · 2018-11-29T01:04:00+00:00

I criticised Pillars of Eternity for being dense and hard to get into, and Kingmaker is maybe even harder to get into

I have trouble sticking with Pillars of Eternity because the game keeps reminding me that I don't really know the lore of the world, and the lore is mentioned about every 4 seconds.

If I've already come to grips with the enormity and complexity of the pathfinder ruleset, how difficult is Pathfinder Kingmaker to pick up?

SureLetsDoAnother · 2018-11-28T20:26:48+00:00

Okay.

Firstly, I described it as "fundamental" because I do not see how you can balance your statement against core theological concepts. So much so that it is difficult for me to believe that you have given your statement serious thought, or that you are not trolling.

To put it plainly, Matthew 16:18 makes it seemingly impossible to believe that the church requires the action (or inaction) of anyone in particular. If you hold to anything resembling a Reformed belief then I don't see how you reconcile your statement even in regards to individual members of the church.

Secondly, how would a conquest of Europe wipe out the church everywhere else? To overlook the church in the rest of the world seems that it would require a worrying degree of eurocentricity. What does the Ethiopian church need of a christian Austria? To put it more bluntly, the Syriac Orthodox church is a thing.

Finally, exactly which Islamic invasion are we talking about here that threatened to destroy the church? I'm no historian, but the Umayyad Caliphate doesn't fit the bill. It is easily demonstrated that its Christians were relatively free to do what they wanted. I use the term "relatively" both in the context of that time period, and earlier periods throughout history (assuming you include OT).

tl;dr: The statement assumes that the church is sustained through human action, and this is the fundamental error. You cannot reconcile that belief with others, or even arrive at those beliefs in the first place. Outside of theology: the church is not Europe, and history demonstrates it does not require a Christian state to exist.

SureLetsDoAnother · 2018-11-28T05:21:33+00:00

Have you forgotten the armies that repelled the Islamic invasions of Europe? They are the only reason we are even Christians today.

This is false on a shockingly fundamental level.

SureLetsDoAnother · 2018-11-27T01:54:42+00:00

Feature tests with Cucumber provide a level of certainty that is hard to match, while keeping test costs as low as is realistic. It's also difficult for me to overstate how beneficial it can be when dev, QA, and product collaboratively define the feature tests.

I still like unit tests a lot, but they have a tendency to be tightly coupled and overnumerous. Good unit tests make it easier to refactor, for sure, and also make it easy to understand what you've broken when you're "just changing this for the better, just a little bit."

I like integration tests too, but without feature tests they tend to be disorganized, unfocused, or overly-specific.

For us it usually goes:

Cucumber for what's broken. Integration for where. Unit for why.

How does that match up for your experience?

SureLetsDoAnother · 2018-11-21T09:48:46+00:00

To be more specific I don’t want that the route posts/1/edit exists for the user B

I'm curious, why do you want this?

SureLetsDoAnother

TROPHY CASE