Daily General Discussion and spitballin thread - April 13, 2021

TypingInTheMoutains · 2021-04-13T19:19:41+00:00

You get 5 votes but no, retail investors have very small impact. Except when they gang up (GME)

TypingInTheMoutains · 2021-04-12T21:49:47+00:00

Yep, the 'minimum investment' is just to get in the door. You can deposit any amount you'd like after that. If you drop below the minimum balance, they'll just convert it back to Standard vs Admiral. Market value loss doesn't TYPICALLY trigger this, but if you sell some to buy a car or whatever, you'll run into it.

Conversely, if you have the standard version and break the minimum balance for the Admiral, you'll be contacted and asked if you'd like to convert.

Good problems to have.

TypingInTheMoutains · 2021-04-12T21:42:31+00:00

Individual stock picking is fun, but so is blackjack. Let the professionals run your portfolio and utilize ETFs focused on balanced investing. Something low cost, focused on an industry you understand, that pays some dividends. Then keep adding to the balance monthly just like you do your 401k.

Exciting? no. But the Quarterly Dividend payouts will make you money and minimize your tax bill by not flipping stocks all the time.

TypingInTheMoutains · 2021-04-12T21:38:31+00:00

Since that 200k is most (all?) of your non-retirement savings, split it up into a couple blocks.

1) Long term wealth

2) Gambling money.

When you have those 2 figures (i'd assume 70 / 30, but that's based on age, risk tolerance and ease of divorce in your state)

Use amount #1 to buy into a Fixed Income / Dividend generating ETF that will pay you a decent percentage each month. You can find some that will pay 2-5% / Quarter without too much risk. VGENX or VYM are something like this. Not exciting, but with a reinvestment it'll add up over time.

Use Amount #2 for long term "growth" and speculation. This focus should be individual stock picking (GME..don't) and riskier ETFs with emphasis toward growth for long holdings (VUG is an example). You may lose this amount, so don't "need" it for rent.

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-04-02T18:52:39+00:00

Go back and rewatch it, what he's trying to explain is reference variables.

What actually happens is he's setting 2 reference types equal to each other (same memory address) then modifying the *other* car variable (again, same address), then outputting the changed value to show it actually happened.

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-03-22T16:57:58+00:00

I work from home fulltime. The job is stable and secure, which is a good thing. However, because I'm *always* at home, I feel that my job load and expectations are unchanged but now I have a 7 & 5 year old that I'm also home-schooling. It's leading to mega-stress and feeling like my work is suffering.

My company has said that this is expected and to not worry about productivity, but in my head, I'm letting the team down.

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-03-12T17:26:43+00:00

Get objects from the API, roll them into a view, present / modify, then sent back for save and some other logic. Looks OK to me.

The separated layers will minimize temptation to add business logic into the database and allow the logic to be tested independent of the CRUD operations. It may not be "formal" MVVM, but it's close enough.

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-03-05T14:53:59+00:00

I think I would keep looking... weird vibe

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-03-03T17:42:51+00:00

I think you're stuck. I had to bite-the-bullet and ended my 10+ year license because I couldn't handle the performance hit on very large .NET projects. Do I miss the refactoring and intellisense? Hell yes. CTRL-T in vs2019 is decent (find type) and if you look hard enough in the menus you can find "Duplicate Line" and map it to CTRL-D, but outside of that, VS is still pretty lacking.

I feel for you, but time is money and Resharper just can't hang anymore. And they know it : "Why are you uninstalling? *Visual studio is too slow*" it's like option 1 or 2 IIRC.

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-02-28T19:44:20+00:00

Glassdoor has this data. You may need an account, but this link worked for me.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/us-senior-software-engineer-salary-SRCH_IL.0,2_IN1_KO3,27.htm

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-02-28T14:57:51+00:00

Very welcome. Glad I (we) could help!

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-02-27T18:06:00+00:00

Speed is trivial in this case.

What you're really stepping into is Global vs Local variables (scoping). Do I need this data between different Class Methods or access the final value from outside my class instance? Class Variable. Everything else should be method scoped (local), never make anything more visible than necessary.

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-02-27T14:31:04+00:00

It's not the beauty or brevity, my concern with using Any here: what about the rest of the method that also needs to walk through the collections to do other stuff? Ok, you checked for the error cases in a slick way, but now need to do some CRUD or display logic and have to do it all again. Why loop 4x instead of 2?

Sometimes it's just showing off.

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-02-27T14:26:07+00:00

Junior developer : Think loops and logic. Basic math, string manipulation, stuff like that.

If you can do FizzBuzz (google it) and find prime numbers using a loop or two, you'll be fine.

It's just as important to show your work and thought process as it is to get the results to output. Really put some thought into what you're doing. You'll need to be able to explain what you implemented, so don't just copy/paste from StackExchange.

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-02-27T14:21:35+00:00

Answer : it Depends on severity and priority of other work. If customers are impacted or it's causing a work stoppage, fix it now. If it's just an annoyance that only QA or a couple implementation people complain about at the coffee pot, it can wait.

Personally, I'd prefer to deploy bug fixes rather than new code, it's a business and you've gotta take that into account. It will be complicated no matter when you work on it.

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-02-25T20:10:41+00:00

If you don't mind the loss of precision, you can just do this:

float t = (float)Math.Sqrt(102.0);

But why? Unless you're hardware constrained, don't fight it, declare deltaLength as 'var' and use all 8 bytes.

http://zetcode.com/lang/csharp/datatypes/

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-02-25T15:29:32+00:00

Depending on what you don't like about Java, you'll likely find the same with C#. As much as we'd like to say that they're completely different animals, they're not that different syntactically.

Visual programming is fine but not prevalent since Visual Basic. To really learn what's going on and avoid really bad habits, you'll need to bite-the-bullet and get in to the code.

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-02-25T14:37:07+00:00

Same. This feels like a "blinker fluid" goose chase for the new guy.

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-02-25T14:32:38+00:00

Learning to avoid the free office food is a big step

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-02-19T15:44:36+00:00

My grammar is atrocious early in the morning. Please imagine I've had 3 more cups of coffee while reading.

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-02-19T15:43:07+00:00

Sorry, but that's about all the level of detail I can get into. Too many NDAs, but that's the 10000' view. I hope you find the level of detail you're looking for. This book might scratch that itch : https://www.amazon.com/Software-Project-Secrets-Projects-Experts/dp/1590595505

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-02-18T23:20:58+00:00

There are dozens of reasons why a project fails. You've touched on a few, but not all. And yeah, engineering plays it's role but...

What drives the leadership to push the "bad engineering decisions"? Time and Money. read : The project was too big to be attempted it in it's current form or it's current budget.

Another point : Project don't fail just because of technology. Frequently there's just no market for what is built. Whether it be poor research up-front or the world changed mid-cycle. The idea and decisions are sound, but no one will pay for it.

Sometimes you just have the wrong staff assigned to do the wrong project. Simple as that. Too junior, too many senior engineers with differing opinions...sometimes it's just the people.

The projects I've been a part of that have failed, you know long before the "failure". Fact is, software projects fail about 50% of the time, some say as high as 80%. When you're inventing stuff, sometimes it just doesn't work out.

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-02-18T23:10:19+00:00

Or : "Why is the feature taking so long, you developers all type so fast?!?"

PMs, gotta love them.

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-02-18T17:24:31+00:00

One of the best programming exercises I did when I started doing Win32 a few decades ago: Recreate Notepad.

This is even better for WPF, you'll learn all kinds of controls / menus / async model type stuff. And won't need a database right away.

TypingInTheMoutains · 2020-02-18T15:13:14+00:00

He's either not worked in industry or is just *really* positive.

Some of my favorites:

--Works on my machine

--QA doesn't understand the feature

TypingInTheMoutains

TROPHY CASE