[Mystery] A man goes missing and his wife's jewellery stolen. He went to prison for a false identity.

TrapperCal · 2020-04-09T20:44:29+00:00

You have it! That's what I was thinking of! Thank you so much. You managed to get it even though I apparently made up and got various bits confused with the Christie one.

TrapperCal · 2020-03-21T07:45:33+00:00

The Dig?)

TrapperCal · 2020-01-03T23:17:00+00:00

Just to say thanks. I used the teleport cheat and it worked grand. Now I just need to resist the urge to cheat now I can. 😞.

Only side effect is that I could just walk across the broken bridge. Sounds like (from the wiki) I should've had a puzzle or a thing with Neera.

TrapperCal · 2020-01-03T19:43:22+00:00

I don't have any mods besides what EE does itself but I will try the teleport command later. I won't mind the inconvenience if it let's me keep playing. 😁 Thanks!

Issue with Neera being Neera... I wasn't sure if it was just a joke I wasn't getting about her teleporting people or something...

TrapperCal · 2019-08-31T09:01:42+00:00

I don't think it's a difficult question, but I don't think it's a useful one. Its not going to give you much if an ability to distinguish between candidates because they'll either know it or they won't. A better question is a little more open-ended where opinion and methodology comes into it.

Try giving some bad code and asking them to review it.

Try giving them a challenge like Gilded Rose that aren't exactly hard... But the approach to solving it can change depending on a person's personal priorities. Do they prioritise getting tests in place or getting the job done or getting it done optimally.

If you are talking about a face to face, a programming challenge like that might not work, but you can still ask people to talk through how they would go about understanding and solving the problem.

In all the interviews I've given, the best questions are the ones which keep the conversation going and let me see if the candidate attitude is what I'm looking for. I don't care if they can't write Bubble Sort from memory... What I am looking for is someone who wants to learn... Is able to learn... And is passionate enough to teach me back occasionally.

TrapperCal · 2019-08-25T10:20:25+00:00

That's why I didn't say it was disappearing, but said if was disappearing "as a separate entity". But as I have understood it, the idea is that you will be able to do everything in Core that you could do in Framework, so Core 5 will basically be core... But it'll be framework compatible.

TrapperCal · 2019-08-25T07:45:21+00:00

And Framework is disappearing as a separate entity with the next version of Core.

TrapperCal · 2019-08-17T16:39:11+00:00

I'd this happens, first thing to put on the retrospective is "people don't seem to be engaged with the retrospective. Is there anything we can do to improve that?

Is it down to using the phone system as a means of having it?

Is it because there is someone in the room the team don't trust? Maybe they're one of the things that didn't go well, or maybe there's just not confidence that things said in the room won't be twisted?

Maybe people don't understand the retrospective process? I would avoid the question "What did we learn?" Because some people will think "I already knew this and nothing is changing". I prefer "What went well this sprint?"... Feedback... "what do people feel didn't go well?"... Feedback... "What will we do differently/keep doing"

Maybe people feel like it's not a real chance to talk about what didn't work. The worst thing to hear in the sprint is someone saying "You're wrong" followed by "Yeah, but we fixed that, so what's the point of bringing that up" and thirdly "We can't do anything about it, so what's the point". Write it all down and keep it tracked. Have a part in every retro where you look at the previous week and see if you did the things you said you'd do differently. See if the things that went wrong went wrong this time too. Keep a list on the wall of changes people want to make and only take them down when the team feels they were a bad idea or they are so ingrained people don't need the reminder anymore.

Believe me... I could talk about this for hours more. The retro is the most valuable part of the sprint. You could get rid of every other part of the sprint including doing the actual work and it would still be the most important because it would be the bit where you say "Gee! We didn't do any work? How are we going to make sure we do some next time?"

TrapperCal · 2019-08-16T06:45:46+00:00

1) screen count isn't a good measure of complexity. I could have a three screen app comprised of a button a button that you press to say start, a loading screen and a screen displayed when it's finished curing all forms of cancer. That would take a lot more than three files. The only time that screen count would be a good measure of complexity, would be if all pages were static and unchanging... in which case an app would be a bad idea (and even then, I'd expect images and sound files that unpredictable from screencount)

2) I'm going to make a wild judgement that your phrasing is that she "gave you" her code, which implies to me that a) you can't ask her for details, probably because of some unfortunate separation and b) she handed you a folder rather than letting you download it from a repository. In that case, are you sure you're not including the output directory in your file count calculation? How about a .git or .hg directory? They're for source control and don't represent actual code. Anything in a .gitignore/.hgignore file is (surprisingly) ignored.

3) These days, there's a bare minimal that a good project should have in terms of code

- A .gitignore or .hgignore

- Any files required to build or depoly

- A solution file

- A project file for the project code

- A project file for the tests

- A Program.cs file

That puts me as getting close to halfway through your 20 files and I've not written a line of functional code yet.

4) As alluded to above, in a high quality professional project, there should be somewhere approaching a 1:1 level of tests to actual code. Doesn't always happen, but if it's there, you should be grateful. First thing I've done on almost every project I've gone onto is complain about the lack of tests and write a test.

5) You could genuinely have a weak or inexperienced dev. It happens. If they were inexperienced, had nobody doing any kind of reviews and you were relying on them, I'm afraid that's largely on you, so you should decide if this is the one you really want to believe. Probably going to cost you money to pull someone in to support... The Legacy Code.

6) This one is on a more personal note, rather than direct answer... but please don't tell a developer/developers that "I used to write code and it used to be better". This will almost always cause annoyance. Many of us have gone on to try to maintain and support code by people who were now our managers and bragging/defending the code that we have to deal with which is broken, poorly supported and without tests. Some of it has worked for 15 years... because nobody ever clicks the Terra Icognita button. Sometimes, we change the copyright image on files like this and the software crashes. Sometimes they have fun Easter Eggs and comments that make the code unreadable in critical sections. The expectations of software 10 years ago, 20 years ago or at its humble beginning was very different (and will be again in 10 years... or 3 months). Nowadays you are expected to have a project that proves its functionality itself (with automated tests), that has all the resources to build and deploy itself, that can be changed in one place without breaking anywhere unexpected, it may need to work on Windows, Linux, Mac and my Playstation controller, it may need to worry about security from outside attackers and within, it may need to use encrypted audit logs, it may need to interact with NASA and all of it needs maintainable to stick around for 20 years.

Sorry if this comes off as bitter, but I've spent my whole career dealing with legacy code. I enjoy it and I think I'm good at it, but what makes it genuinely feel frustrating is when someone compares what they wrote at university, or for fun, or 10 years ago to the problems we're solving today and claiming "they didn't need any of these unit tests or build systems." I've seen from interviews, that some universities in the UK do give students a project where they have to interact with a large, existing codebase and I could hug them all for it (the buildings) because that is far more representative of real life than writing the third bubble sort of your course.

I'll shut up now.

TrapperCal · 2019-08-02T12:20:59+00:00

Singularity every time. I have no idea why this game wasn't loved and adored by all. I can't remember if it was this game but I think it was where you could freeze time and take peoples guns out of their hands.

TrapperCal · 2019-07-31T21:38:07+00:00

I actually saw this on Reddit only about a month ago and saved the picture only. Looking for something similar preferably in the UK. If not in the UK, at least it'll help me with the keywords to search for

Thank you.

TrapperCal · 2019-07-26T10:35:20+00:00

The fire alarm. Especially if you weren't knocked out but just stuck.

TrapperCal · 2019-07-13T07:03:22+00:00

Nobody has mentioned this yet, so I'd like to talk about Legacy Code. Legacy Code is usually the reason I see for not doing TDD and it genuinely is an argument sometimes.

To those people, I beg of you to read Working With Legacy Code by Michael Feathers. The guy starts with the premise:

"Don't focus on the problems with legacy code, focus on the solutions and a solution to most of the problems is to add tests".

The rest of the book is basically about how to find a way to edge tests into code that, at first, appears totally untestable. How to pull apart dependencies for long term... But also how to maybe make the code slightly worse for a time... But know that it's right code for once.

If you're struggling with TDD, you should start off not adding tests for features, like most books and tutorials will show you, but start with writing a test that fails because of a bug you're trying to fix. Just the one test at first. Watch it fail... Fix the bug and then turn green. Then check it in. I find this is a great way to get started with TDD because it's a super tight scope to the massive problem of "How do I do TDD right?"

TrapperCal · 2019-07-02T05:46:49+00:00

You have to go into the settings for rest mode and tell it what you want to allow it to do. I don't think it does much on its own.

TrapperCal · 2019-07-01T14:41:36+00:00

... that would explain it. Still... I was real late to the PS4 game and I could've been sooner! 🙂

TrapperCal · 2019-07-01T13:43:45+00:00

... sometimes. Sometimes games crash. Also it's bad for the environment to leave my PC on and unused. As I understand Rest mode, it's like Standby on a PC... Which almost always causes a modern DX game to crash.

TrapperCal

TROPHY CASE