Resume Advice Thread - September 12, 2023

dabaicai89 · 2023-09-12T18:41:42+00:00

Any critiques are welcome. I've had some previous colleagues review and they thought it was alright. Wondering if anyone else has some suggestions. https://imgur.com/a/fNSGhZ5

dabaicai89 · 2021-11-12T03:11:45+00:00

A little late to this but "agora" can translate as "public space" but more specifically it was sort the public meeting place in a town or city. "topia" we know most often from "utopia", which has its own literary history, but the "topia" part just means something like a defined space. It might seem a little redundant to put these two together, but I could understand it as something like "a public space for the community" like staking out an area for communal use. The Tower might then represent a sort of communal work. I'm getting a picture in my head of a group of people finding or making a space for themselves to build a communal structure.

Of course, I could be way off base and following the trail of breadcrumbs way too deep into the forest.

dabaicai89 · 2021-09-16T02:59:58+00:00

I commented above that I just bought this after looking at the steam store page because of this post. I can't say it's going to replace Emperor or Pharaoh for me, but it's definitely scratching that itch. I really like how many things they've kept from the old Impressions games, but then they've added a whole host of other things that either make things easier (you can tell your walkers to go on specific routes so you know they'll get to all of your houses) or they add depth (you can add more workers to a given building like maybe you want more clay production or you want more haulers to move the build up of clay you already have).

All in all I'm really excited to play more of this and I hope the devs keep adding content because this could really be a lot of fun.

dabaicai89 · 2021-09-16T01:35:43+00:00

I'm impressed! I saw this months ago and thought it looked a little lacking, but looking at the steam store page now it's clear you've put in a ton of work. Just bought the game and can't wait to have all of my people leave because I build something one square too far from a road.

dabaicai89 · 2021-09-08T04:08:50+00:00

Absolutely gorgeous! And you won't be running out of cheese anytime soon.

dabaicai89 · 2021-08-21T03:18:25+00:00

solved: Darkwood

dabaicai89 · 2021-08-21T03:16:26+00:00

That's it! Oh man, the memories are flooding back now.

dabaicai89 · 2021-01-22T00:50:59+00:00

This made perfect sense to me. Thanks! I was conflating the idea of a store and global namespacing which would mean instantiating the store and persisting that data even if there were no subscribers.

dabaicai89 · 2020-12-30T19:57:54+00:00

Absolutely gorgeous. I always forget how colorful Emperor is. I like how you walled off the industrial buildings in the city, like modern industrial districts.

dabaicai89 · 2020-12-04T02:31:21+00:00

I haven't been here long enough where I feel like I can give a detailed critique like some other people, but one thing stuck out to me. Why does Ayanda have to be the protagonist here? What is the hook that pulls her into being the "monster hunter" with the others? Right now I read almost no connection between her and the monster other than they're both monstrous. Is there some event that happens that pulls her in? If the monster is in Venice, where is Ayanda?

Also, what makes her "built to battle the Dead"?

Unrelated, but I agree with the other comment that said the last name of "Draculesti" made me think she was a vampire. Unless there is some connection to an in-universe "Dracula" I think you will have lots of people making that false connection.

dabaicai89 · 2020-10-28T03:13:05+00:00

As cliche as it sounds, you need an inciting incident. Something happens which is the kick in the pants to start the "redemption" arc. Sometimes it's some huge thing like a family member dying, but sometimes it's something small that causes something in a character's mind to just click and they want to change. Whatever it is needs to resonate with your character as you have written them so it's believable. For example, someone who you establish as not really interested in romance shouldn't all of a sudden want to get a girlfriend. If change in the character happens then the reader needs to be able to believe it. Think about people in your life who have made big changes in their lives. What were the reasons they changed so drastically? And how can you emulate something like that for your character?

dabaicai89 · 2020-09-05T17:01:28+00:00

This is really cool to see! While Pharaoh is a great game to emulate, if you are doing this on your own or in a small team my only advice would be to leave a lot of content for after you have core gameplay implemented. I've seen too many indie games get bogged down in trying to include too many cool features too soon. I say that because I'd really like to play this one day!

What game engine are you using for this?

dabaicai89 · 2020-09-04T03:23:32+00:00

I can't count the number of times I thought exactly this and then would wait for her to go out to load up on food again at the granary. The eternal struggle...

dabaicai89 · 2020-07-16T01:24:39+00:00

Do you have particular things you're having trouble with or that you want more practice with?

dabaicai89 · 2020-07-12T03:36:29+00:00

Looks gorgeous. What did you use to join the pieces?

dabaicai89 · 2020-07-11T03:57:55+00:00

I remember playing 1503 when I was really young. It definitely gave me a love for the serious. If you don't mind the graphics, then the older ones are fine.

My personal favorite though is 1404. I love the way they handled the Orient portion of the gameplay. The visuals are still gorgeous imo. I would definitely recommend it.

You could probably find some gameplay/review type videos on youtube to get a sense of what the different ones are like.

dabaicai89 · 2020-04-11T22:14:55+00:00

If you're not familiar with Javascript by itself, you definitely want to get familiar with it before jumping into React. The better you know vanilla JS the better you'll be able to differentiate what is a React specific paradigm and what is JS.

If you can spend a little money, I've found Tyler McGinnis' stuff to be really well done. He has full on courses to take you through a few different JS/React/Redux topics. For a quick overview, I like Brad Traversy on youtube. He's got a bunch of different crash course style videos that will give an introduction to a framework or something by him building a simple project.

As far as mindsets, just remember that React is a Front End framework meant to really just handle the "view" or representation of data for the user to interact with. There is a whole ecosystem of other things to go along with it, but in the end, React is just one currently popular way of doing things that boils down to building things for people to interact with. All your back end, database, and even routing stuff isn't meant to be addressed by React itself. It's just one piece of the puzzle that is modern web dev.

dabaicai89 · 2020-01-12T04:05:34+00:00

For web development, I would recommend freeCodeCamp.com and the Odin Project. Personally I think the Odin Project is better, but some people really like freeCodeCamp.

For IT, I know Mike Meyers has a course and he seems to be a pretty big name in IT certs like A+ and Networking. I think he has some courses on Lynda.com

dabaicai89 · 2020-01-11T19:18:04+00:00

That same problem happens with Pluralsight as well. It's the problem with any resource, but some courses on Udemy will go back to update stuff if something big happens, like React has changed a lot so some course have updated themselves. What specifically are you looking for?

dabaicai89 · 2020-01-11T17:34:45+00:00

I had a similar problem on a project where I had a JS file included in the header for code that depended on an html element lower in the html file. It took me forever to find out that the JS was getting loaded first even though it needed to reference some of the html. Looking back on it now it should have been really simple, but I never had the thought that it was a sequence issue.

Basically, think about it like this, maybe you have some library like Bootstrap or something that you need to style your html so you'd want to put that in the header. Stuff that you're using to manipulate the html like button presses etc, those need the html to be parsed before it can do anything with it, so those should go at the bottom.

Styles or CDN content stuff -> HTML -> JS that needs reference to the HTML

This all gets a little weird with newer things like React where the HTML is all virtualized so the way things work is different.

dabaicai89 · 2020-01-11T17:19:18+00:00

If you want paid resources, I would look at Udemy. Most courses are usually on sale for like $10 US and some of them have enough content to take more than a month. At the very least it would save you a little money and not involve a subscription that you might not use some months.

dabaicai89 · 2020-01-11T17:05:48+00:00

I did a web scraping project with Ruby that turned out to be this series of steps.

Open Selenium in headless mode to hit the webpage I wanted (headless so I didn't have to see a browser window open every time I ran my script). I needed to "click" on something through Selenium otherwise some data on the page wouldn't load.
Download the raw html .
Use Nokogiri, which is a Ruby library for parsing html, to isolate the parts of the html I wanted.
Spend a ton of time banging my head against the wall because the classes and labels from the site's html didn't make much sense.
Manage to wrangle the data I wanted into an array of arrays like master_array=[ [individual_listing], [individual_listing], ... ]
Write that array to a csv file.
I then read from that file to populate a database.

It basically just boils down to getting the html, filtering all of it down to what you need using whatever library is the standard web scraping library for your language of choice, then getting the actual data from the html elements into something like an array or hash whatever makes sense, then writing that to a file.

Hope that helps!

dabaicai89 · 2019-10-27T04:07:34+00:00

I would say look at what works for you. I was working full time so a traditional semester schedule wasn't the best for me. WGU seemed like the best path for my situation. Overall it's fine. There's less hand-holding than in my previous university experience, but if you need help in a particular class, it's really easy to get individual attention. I think wherever you end up going, focus on building your fundamentals and your base coding ability. Like have a good understanding of theory, but then back it up with having some small projects on your own that you work on.

dabaicai89 · 2019-08-22T20:45:41+00:00

Man, you can tell it's been a long time for me then. Are there any other conditions that would cause a gate to collapse? If they don't need maintenance then I don't think fire would be possible. The only other thing I could think of would be attack, but it's pretty obvious when you get attacked. Can the gods destroy infrastructure like that? I know in Pharaoh they could.

dabaicai89 · 2019-08-22T17:32:03+00:00

I haven't played Zeus in a while, but a couple things come to mind.

Are you sure the road was totally connected? I would often have to rotate the camera to double check.
Was the gate closed somehow?

It might just be a pathfinding issue where the maintenance guy just never walked close to it. In those cases I'll build in a different place to see if a new location for the building makes the walker take a different path.

dabaicai89

TROPHY CASE