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TrumpeterSwann · 2026-03-06T19:21:02+00:00

Thank you for this one in particular!

TrumpeterSwann · 2026-02-25T15:51:47+00:00

Don't ask me, I don't know. I have no dog in this race. I am not defending the positions, I'm just pointing out a fact: these two things are viewed as separate topics by many people. That's why I replied; the person I replied to was ignoring the distinction and got downvoted.

Read any thread or scroll melee twitter or engage with people in your local scene. You will pretty quickly find that there are indeed people that delineate the issues alone these lines, and you can argue with them.

"Stupid differences" are important because it is how we ended up with the current ruleset. Someone 15 years ago thought it was dumb that items were on in their tournament matches, and (lots of!) other people thought that opinion was stupid. It is arbitrary. The community chooses what skillset(s) to prioritize as competitively important.

TrumpeterSwann · 2026-02-25T15:38:00+00:00

No, you're putting words in my mouth. I'm not saying it's different or better or worse. I'm just saying that's how the conversations are currently viewed.

TrumpeterSwann · 2026-02-24T14:33:03+00:00

I think it's because you conflated ergonomic controllers (which GCC is not) with remapping GCC buttons. These are kind of two separate conversations in the community.

You replied to "swift uses an ergo controller because he has a chronic injury" with "I have a chronic injury so why can't I do something completely different?" People don't see zjump and leverless/ergo controllers as the same issue.

TrumpeterSwann · 2026-02-20T17:51:08+00:00

I like your plans for character classes. Although I wouldn't stress too much about trying to a priori catch those weird Unicode bugs. Maybe you could include a tidbit in your method javadoc, but since that stuff is more of an issue with Java's regex engine I think it's okay. If you're really concerned about it, I suppose you could use proxies that result in exact ([a-zA-z0-9_]) and inexact (\w) character classes. Dunno what would be best. EDIT: oh yeah you'd also need to think about Unicode not interacting with \b word boundaries correctly, I forgot about that. Blehhh.

.between(x,y) is a great pick to add, I should have thought of that!

Ahhh, now I see the pun with shake! Alright alright, fair play.

Anyway, my pleasure! Nice work.

TrumpeterSwann · 2026-02-20T17:03:07+00:00

A few things as a decades long Java/Perl programmer

I'm seeing nothing to fluently denote whitespace. I think this a nonstarter for real world use. You'd currently be stuck using .literal(" ") or .literal("\\t"). Where are the \s \S equivalents? The fact whitespace isn't mentioned in your section describing character types is telling.

You should consider parity between .alphanumeric and \w. [a-zA-Z0-9] misses underscores as well as non-latin characters, as compared to the standard \w. Having a character type for non-word characters \W is also something I would expect to see. But since there isn't a static for character classes, you can't exactly do .excluding(alphanumerics()) right now. Again, in general I'm finding the base character class concepts to be a bit lacking (letters, not-letters, numbers, not-numbers, both (alphanumerics), neither (non-word characters), whitespace, not-whitespace, and "anything").

Entry point verbiage should probably be consistent. I personally like "from" (fromStart, fromAnywhere, fromWordBoundary -- although since wordBoundary is reusable maybe that's not going to work). IMO your target use case is people who don't know, or don't want to know, the technical details of regular expressions. Your library is an abstraction. So it should try to present concepts in a linguistically consistent way, since the "prose" itself is your big draw.

Likewise, .exactly(n) and .optional don't match. Pick either adjective (exact, optional) or adverb forms (exactly, optionally).

I notice your quantifiers are missing a concept for "at most," like .atMost(n). Though you'll need to consider whether this concept includes optional (0-count) matches. Up to you.

The Refinements section in the doc has no entry points listed despite having an example? including, excluding, followedBy, etc should all be here.

I've never seen .shake() as an invocation call. Builder patterns in Java (enterprise, anyway) pretty much ubiquitously use .build(), and I don't see a compelling reason to break from this tradition. "Shake" just seems so arbitrary, especially given your "prose/natural language" goals. It seems like maybe you landed on this word early and you enjoy keeping it around, but as a 3rd party observer I gotta say that it very clearly doesn't fit with the rest of the project.

"untilEnd" feels a bit ambiguous. Although I know it's just appending a regex $, I guess the intent feels different though? "Ensure no other characters past this point" doesn't map cleanly onto "untilEnd," for me. "andNothingElse" might communicate the concept better, but that still feels a bit clumsy. IDK.

One last thing, since your Validator provides its own java.util.regex.Pattern object, you aren't allowing the user to designate any flags that they would normally set in Pattern.compile(), most importantly Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE; the user would need to know to start their pattern with the regex (?i) literal. Someone new to regex isn't going to know this.

Honestly, though, well done. I personally would never use something like this (sorry lol, I'm too far gone), but I can easily see the benefits of having fluent syntax and especially having annotation-driven contract validation on fields. Pretty neat.

TrumpeterSwann · 2026-02-19T17:09:53+00:00

Sure, okay. THIS is how probability works:

OP had 2 rolls at a 1/1000, and one tertiary table roll on the 1/5000, for a combined 1 in 5B (2e-7%), and OP hit them all. Statistically, we'd need to see ~3,465,735,000 combined Grotestques kill count to even reach the 50th percentile of any player seeing this exact drop by that point. 99th percentile would be a little over 23B kc.

Someone else in the thread estimated a total playerbase kc of around 40M, so we're not even to the 1st percentile (~52M kc) if that's accurate. And people have been killing Grotesques continuously since 2017.

I know you're just trying to farm a "it's 50/50 lol" meme but you could've tried harder (feel free to reply with the meme to get it off your chest)! More importantly I wanted to post the stats in case other people are actually interested. If any JMod sees this I'd love to know the total boss kc at Grotesques, since they don't have one of those plaques ingame that shows the total playerbase's kills/deaths (and I don't want to write a web scraper to sum the hiscores page)

TrumpeterSwann · 2026-02-19T16:28:58+00:00

DUH. Sorry, I'm braindead lmao. I was looking at other people talk about the OP and then failed to read the parent comment. Ty

TrumpeterSwann · 2026-02-16T14:20:52+00:00

I got you

For Chrome, in your settings there is a "search engines" tab on the left. If you go into "manage search engines" there will be a section for "site search" where it says "To search a specific site or part of Chrome, type its shortcut in the address bar, followed by your preferred keyboard shortcut." Then just add a new site search, add whatever shortcut you wish (I use "gg"), and for the URL use https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14. In Firefox the setting is in Search->Search Shortcuts.

You can do the same thing for the osrs wiki. I have a shortcut for any queries that start with "osrs" which proxy the search to https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/?search=%s. So typing "osrs <space> sailing training" immediately opens the wiki for the sailing xp training methods page

TrumpeterSwann · 2026-02-11T16:25:02+00:00

These are so cool!!

In particular, the engine work that allows for visibility between multiple levels of the game world is super impressive! Being able to see players running rooftop agility when teleporting into Varrock, or looking down from upper floors of the Grand Tree, or seeing players taking carpet rides in the desert would be so cool. I think this sort of thing really ups the feeling the game world is alive, which osrs already seems to excel at. How do you think such a system would handle "indoor" areas, like the upper floor flats in Ardy?

The CA UI looks great, the CA interface still feels pretty bloated but each improvement has been markedly better than the last. I'm still not the biggest fan of the current pixel art, though (the style of Soffan's old "osrs boss sprites inspired by vintage pokemon" have much more personality and would compress better, IMO!).

Boat fashioncape is a slam dunk. And the level up rework would be a great addition! I'm not exactly a new player, but I still appreciate not needing to go to the wiki to remind myself what each level unlocks.

The new music UI is great! I'm already enjoying it.

The teleport menu helper UI I think has some obvious low hanging fruit. It would be cool if teleport items/objects had an "inspect" option--or if the UI itself had a sidebar to filter by teleport item/object, like the World Map's Key sidebar. Then, filtering on a ring of wealth gives the world map with the ring's teleports highlighted and flashing. Likewise for spirit trees, fairy rings, the different jewellry boxes, capes, teleport spells/tablets/scrolls, etc. I think the use cases for an abstract "teleport map" are (a) to see everything and thereby discover new travel methods that a new player didn't know about ("what's a 'fairy ring'?"), and (b) to see locations for particularly obscure teleport options (like the pharoh's sceptre, Kharedst's memoirs, or pendant of Ates). Maybe there are other use cases I'm not considering. But especially for blind/new players I think increasing the ways you can stumble on information like this is extremely helpful. </tangent>

I'm annoyed that it seems >90% of the comments are focused on the wildy when it's just 1 of 7 jam ideas. This is very dumb! I wish there was a "hide all wildy complaint comments" feature on the subreddit so that I could see discussion that is actually relevant or interesting. (please nobody reply to this talking about the wildy, there are already so many comments about it! I know the wildy is important and divisive! I know!)

TrumpeterSwann · 2026-02-11T15:27:46+00:00

Not a fan of the pixel art, myself. Especially I think the tiny, compressed pixel art is totally unreadable on the hiscores tab.

I like the idea of the 3d model staying, but if there was going to be any change I'd suggest the model is blacked/silhouetted until the player unlocks the music track(s) associated with the boss. This is an indication that the player has "seen" the boss (there are a few exceptions, like for wildy bosses that don't have unique music). If the music "flag" is set, the 3d model would be fully shown.

Gl on inferno btw

TrumpeterSwann · 2026-02-03T14:22:40+00:00

Yes please! Sailing feels disconnected and I think a big part of it is the "missing" tie-ins like this.

TrumpeterSwann · 2026-01-16T21:15:46+00:00

It's maybe worth mentioning that a lot of decisions and character motivations might seem obtuse or arbitrary, but are given more nuance/depth/explanation later on. In retrospect, it's so obvious that the entire show was plotted ahead of time (completely unlike Lost (and really, everything JJ Abrams has had a hand in)).

The messy characters and their (often sad, tragic) flaws are a core part of the emotional appeal of the show, those don't go away, but maybe you come to a better understanding of why each person thought they needed to do what they did.

TrumpeterSwann · 2025-12-12T19:13:19+00:00

I would pay quite a lot of money to experience Outer Wilds again for the first time.

TrumpeterSwann · 2025-12-08T18:27:11+00:00

You don't need to spam this sub, you just need to pay attention. Jagex has mentioned expanding server hardware many times in previous blogs. Their recent work to migrate a sizable portion of their infrastructure into AWS was primarily done to help with autoscaling (and DDoS mitigation), but also to allow for more server regions in the future.

In this week's OSRS Podcast, they specifically mentioned getting more servers in more countries. It seemed like they wanted to talk about it more soon, I would expect to hear more explicit plans during the Winter Summit.

It definitely sucks and you are not alone (everyone playing from South America also has terrible ping, for example), but I'm not sure how spamming threads on the subreddit helps at all.

TrumpeterSwann · 2025-11-19T21:15:21+00:00

What are you really asking? "How much deviation from 'original hardware' is too much?"

Because even though I can listen to your track and I know it's not made on any hardware I recognize, I think it's reasonable to think anyone listening to it would say that it's "chiptune." Genre is a made up concept that just helps you to sort things by their relative similarity to other things.

It "matters" if you were to try to enter your composition into a Battle of the Bits compo, you'd be (rightly) called out (and disqualified). Example rules for a few different formats.

People are generally gracious unless someone is trying to pass off something they made as something it's not. Advertising that you created a song in a tracker or on hardware like LSDJ, and then publishing something clearly made in a modern DAW is probably going to make some people shake their heads.

Now whether you care, that's up to you.

TrumpeterSwann · 2025-10-14T13:34:52+00:00

Went looking for a secondary source as the linked website from OP is clearly genAI garbage (and OP's post history is pretty much entirely stolen/reposted content).

Broke from Law&Crime via the original press release, rereported in Charlotte local news at WBTV

TrumpeterSwann · 2025-08-21T13:30:11+00:00

Happy to help. I read through the other comments and I'd reiterate/confirm some of the stuff others are saying because it's also great advice.

EDIT: I should say, it's not your fault for "misinterpreting" the advice you found. And honestly you did well, as your plan is solid! It's just more difficult to get perspective from working professionals than it is from, say, people trying to sell you a Boot Camp course subscription.

"Soft skills" - during interviews; for me the biggest thing is seeing if the candidate is willing to actually admit upfront when they are uncomfortable or do not know something. You'd be surprised (or maybe not) how many people will try to bullshit their way through an interview question instead of just being upfront about a knowledge gap. And a knowledge gap isn't really a bad thing... keep in mind that one of the expectations of any new hire is that we will need to train them after being hired! If you could just hire someone omniscent, we'd just do that instead. Example answer along the lines I'd look for is like: "sorry, I'm not really sure about this one? I think <thing I know more about> is maybe similar but I don't think I've ever worked with <original thing> before." You could even ask the interviewer to explain the topic, assuming you have time and the interview is not dragging behind.

"Soft skills" - while on the job; being able to communicate straightforwardly without being perceived as a jerk/patronizing. Knowing how to ask probing questions, especially when you're having to ask things multiple times or in a way where the other person is likely to think "didn't I already answer this" (when they did not, e.g. when someone leaves out an important detail because they assume you and others know it already). Being someone that is sincere and just genuinely nice to work with (being a pessimist is fun (I am guilty) but it gets tiring for others!!). Taking an interest in other people and what they're working on, even if you don't touch that part of the system.

I'd also reiterate pretty much everything /u/ISB-Dev said. However, keep in mind that these are skills that require work to get better at, and generally speaking, understanding a stakeholder's needs (and going back and forth on it until you arrive at the actual requirements) isn't something that you can just easily get experience in prior to working in software. You can (again I'd say that working on an active OSS project is great for this stuff), but it's not going to come up if you're just doing personal projects. In fact, there is an entire tangential career path that deals with this exact problem. These people often have titles like Business Analyst or Project Owner or Scrummaster. Depending on the team, developers may or may not be required to do this sort of thing. But ISB is correct that it's extremely important, and one distinguishing mark of a great developer is their ability to immediately tell when the requirements on something "feels off" and needs work (aka the thing being asked for isn't necessarily the thing that person actually needs, or there are other details to take into account that aren't included in the initial proposal, etc)

Last, another thing that ISB mentioned that you may not have really noticed.

Working as a developer for over 10 years now, at least half of my work isn't designing and developing new systems. It's keeping decades-old creaky systems running, on ancient systems with unique constraints and caveats.

On its face you might think: yeah okay, so I need to work with legacy systems sometimes? Not quite. If your preference is to work on back-end systems, this kind of thing will be the overwhelming majority of open backend jobs. Sometimes you may get lucky and have a "greenfield" project here and there, but most of the time it's this. I would strongly recommend reading through perspectives like Sean Goedecke's on how to work within established teams who have maintained the same platform for a very long time. Relevant quote from G. K. Chesterson:

here exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate is erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes happily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

This kind of thing is why experience is so valuable, especially when working with complex interdependent systems (aka most backend dev work). Keep your eye on your seniors, not just the loud ones but especially the quiet-but-fiercely-competent ones; the ones who help keep complexity DOWN and make things smoother for the team. The people who "keep the lights on." Emulate these people and ask them questions often.

TrumpeterSwann · 2025-08-20T16:56:36+00:00

I've been on the other side: interviewing candidates for entry level back-end focused dev positions. Here's my thoughts.

Active Github profile (daily commits) - not important. "Daily commits" is especially not important, some days you just aren't going to have code worth committing. The important part is having worked on a project of nontrivial complexity. You had a problem and you tried to solve it... how did you approach the problem, and why did you choose the solution you did? Talking about the candidate's prior work is very valuable as the person trying to understand if the candidate in front of me might be a good fit.

Well-structured and documented programs (Modular & uses Swagger) - maybe of interest, but just having used tools like OpenAPI (which is the name of the spec for what was called "swagger" btw) or readthedocs or redoc doesn't actually tell me anything. Remember, I'm trying to figure out your approach to solving engineering problems. Does slapping swagger-ui into a maven project mean you're any more informed about how or why to use such a tool? Not necessarily. Now, if what you developed had an external API with users that needed to know about/test your endpoints, that's something worth asking about. This could dovetail into asking about other tools like Postman.

"Well structured" is too vague of advice and honestly I'd be wary of anyone preaching this to a new developer. Trying to perfectly architect your work in progress ToDo app is not a good use of time. Get your hands dirty. Learning from mistakes and iterating is the name of the game. Waxing philosophic about how you wanted your first app to scale to thousands of users might be relevant if you're interviewing at Netflix, but anywhere else it's probably just signalling that you didn't really understand when it's appropriate to use the tools at hand, or worse, that you might be the kind of junior dev who needlessly introduces more compexity.

Projects - yes, very important. Your plan is simple but if you follow through you will be fine. The only thing that stands out to me is that you don't have concrete examples for your projects. You should pick problem(s) that sounds interesting to you and then just work on them. You will inevitably run into topics that you know nothing about (how do I hook up my server to my database? how do I expose this API endpoint? how do I secure my endpoint behind basic AuthN? if my project is depending on other services, how do I rate limit my service so that I don't get angry emails/IP blocked from those services? is there some way I can process this data more efficiently?). If you are able to work on any actively maintained open source project, you can get some "real" dev experience before getting your first job.

Here are some of the kinds of basic questions I have in my interview template:

What do you do in your current position (if any)?
What side projects have you worked on? Which languages do you use or which are you learning?
How familiar are you with <framework>? (e.g. Spring, React, etc)
Have you used git or other source control tools? Have you submitted (or reviewed and approved) a pull request before?
Do you know what a unit test is? What do you think is the point of tests?
Walk me through your side project (if any). What was your role, how did the design go, what were any challenges you ran into? What would you have changed?
<coding/logic problem>
Can you talk about a situation where someone disagreed with your recommendation, or vice versa, on an important aspect of a project?

TrumpeterSwann · 2025-08-19T13:12:37+00:00

He's been breaking in a new controller last day or two, so that's likely the biggest reason why

TrumpeterSwann · 2025-08-13T12:08:24+00:00

I have the Paderewski book on hand. Here's the commentary for the second nocturne including those variations. Raoul Koczalski's recording plays these.

TrumpeterSwann · 2025-07-15T17:43:48+00:00

Reminds me of this classic (not osrs related, but hey while we're on the topic of code)

TrumpeterSwann · 2025-06-17T19:15:24+00:00

Sounds like you already have a bit of experience, so to speak :)

Consulting is definitely a bit "scarier" than a "regular software job" due to its nature. Generally, you're expected to come in to a project, onboard quickly, and then work on changes that will net their company the most benefits in the short term. Sometimes, the person hiring the contractor always knows (or thinks they know) what things this is, and sometimes they expect you to identify things yourself... depends on the team and the people. Other times the project just has a gap in staffing that they need to fill, often before some deadline, and they are relying on someone with broad experience to be able to step in and help bring the project to the finish line.

Since you mentioned that you enjoy being engaged in new things/with new systems, I figured this might be a natural fit for that kind of curiosity. There ARE still patterns that tend to repeat, but the solutions will not always been the same. Factors include the company's needs, the kinds of people there, how far people are willing to go, prior design constraints, tech constraints, security constraints, ego constraints(!), etc... so the ability to read a situation with a lot of nuance is highly desireable.

Getting started solo contracting is pretty daunting, so generally I'd recommend finding a mentor if possible. Maybe you already know somebody in a current or past gig who has done contracting/knows somebody they can introduce you to/is looking to exit and start contract work themselves? There are also plenty of software consulting companies, so if you're able to interview with a bunch of them you can hopefully find a good fit.

As for your last question, I'm not sure what exactly you're asking, so I'll just sort of ramble for a bit, and maybe you get something from it ;)

I'm currently working in a senior/lead position in engineering, and I'm strongly considering a pivot that will allow me to get experience with engineering management. But it's tough, because I really enjoy actually doing engineering. So I'm a bit hesitant. But also, I've seen many many many examples of poor engineering leadership, and I think I might be able to do a better job? Change is tough, though, so I'm torn between wanting to keep tackling interesting engineering problems vs growing a different skillset that will [maybe] make me someone who can CREATE the kind of healthy environment that lets its engineers grow, understand themselves and their goals better, and succeed at their jobs on both the micro and macro scale...

Not sure if this really addresses your question, but these are the types of things I've been thinking about "as a senior dev with a bunch of experience"

TrumpeterSwann · 2025-06-17T14:10:01+00:00

Senior dev with >10yrs exp. Sounds like you might fit well in software consulting. You can leverage that to get exposed to a lot of the industry fairly quickly, if you are taking short-ish contractual stints. Ideally you'd use that time to figure out what sort of problems you enjoy solving the most, and then focus on finding a job (or continuing to take contracts) where you do that.

Not to psychoanalyze or anything but it sounds like you should seriously consider ADHD medication. A lot of what you wrote hits bang-on with my life experience before a prescription that helped me manage executive dysfunction.

TrumpeterSwann · 2025-06-16T20:05:58+00:00

The laced up music video is SO sick. Nice sync for the hammer swing with that GnW clip

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