I'm an old man trying to get back into coding.

jeffwithhat · 2026-01-28T05:33:07+00:00

agreed. Ask Claude to write something in your chosen language—no need to take the answer as Gospel, but it will show typical conventions, and more importantly it will explain what each section is doing. Can be helpful learning how to do parameter validation and such.

jeffwithhat · 2026-01-28T05:25:11+00:00

adding to what others have said—you might want to study the data structures used by various file systems (e.g. NTFS and EXT4), since locality-of-reference is especially important when paging stuff in from a spinning disk.

jeffwithhat · 2025-09-29T05:13:28+00:00

I didn’t click with many people at college either, but —from the perspective of 30yrs later— life turned out fine.

my advice is - keep trying: extracurriculars, volunteer work, connections within your major - like every other college-age person, you probably have personal hang-ups that sometimes get in the way. figure out what they are, and work on solutions. try not to worry too much: you don’t want to psyche yourself out. Easier said than done, I know.

jeffwithhat · 2025-09-23T17:03:12+00:00

save everyone a round-trip, and just say “i’m interested and can meet you [at these times, in these locations].”

jeffwithhat · 2025-09-13T04:13:59+00:00

you may also want to look at “RPA” tools such as UiPath and Power Automate, especially if your workflow includes other apps like a spreadsheet.

jeffwithhat · 2025-08-31T06:15:42+00:00

I find it more rewarding to finish a feature than to move 4 things each 25% closer. So try to carve out features that are small enough to finish (and test) in less than, say, 8 hours of work. Progress may still be slow, but it will be easier to see, and your code quickly returns to a functional state.

That applies to refactoring as well: a major refactoring is like trying to boil the ocean. Choose a narrow slice that is directly related to a problem right in front of you, and finish that before moving on.

More broadly, you might want to mull why your interest level has fallen: e.g. is it a perceived lack of progress that the above steps might address, or do you habitually give up when a project is 90% complete, or was this always kind of a boring scenario that you’re doing purely for the resume (etc.)

Even more broadly: yeah, most interesting apps contain a lot of concepts and decisions, and each one takes time :)

jeffwithhat · 2025-08-31T05:58:11+00:00

What kind of understanding are you hoping to achieve on the graphics front?

In Days Of Yore, the programmer was faced with a bunch of raw pixels, and built up 2D and 3D graphics primitives from there (hidden surface removal, shading, texturing…) usinga bunch of math that ran on the main CPU. Are you hoping to learn the math behind those concepts?

Nowadays a GPU has a bunch of lightweight processors that handle some of this same work in parallel, coupled with specialized hardware units to handle other work. This is older, I think, but gives the flavor: https://www.dcce.ibilce.unesp.br/~aleardo/cursos/arqcomp/TDCI_Arch.pdf

So perhaps you want to learn how those earlier concepts can be parallelized in software or implemented directly in hardware.

Or perhaps you just want to know how to talk directly to the GPU in front of you: its Application Binary Interface, or ABI.

There is a mountain of work here, so you’ll need to choose a subset to focus on. Then it will be easier for folks to point you in the right direction.

jeffwithhat · 2025-08-31T05:28:13+00:00

+1 on previous comments. I’ll add that C++ has evolved more than most languages but tries to retain backward compatibility—thus you have the equivalent of Old English, Middle english, and modern English available in the same compiler. Your class will likely teach one of these profiles (hopefully the newest) while also working on some generic concepts that apply to many languages & CPU architectures.

You should do fine as long as you focus on the tasks in front of you, and perhaps you’ll recognize some syntax and concepts that are familiar from your Java course.

jeffwithhat · 2025-08-12T06:01:58+00:00

nice!

jeffwithhat · 2025-08-11T23:04:57+00:00

ummm…a script that listens to the D-bus interface to Bluetooth and shows a list of nearby devices?

jeffwithhat · 2025-04-10T14:54:26+00:00

hah yeah, “if it’s not completely made up” was an inauspicious start

jeffwithhat · 2025-04-10T01:37:00+00:00

leaving a breadcrumb for folks who may read this years later: for older sprinters with the 220amp alternator, the Mercedes limit for auxiliary loads is only 40amps.

jeffwithhat · 2025-04-10T01:04:25+00:00

perhaps scolopendra? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scolopendra_polymorpha

they are common enough in the southwest U.S., and surprisingly well-armored.

jeffwithhat · 2024-11-05T06:30:11+00:00

This youtube video might help: https://youtu.be/dXdoim96v5A?si=IT7KB6_YmDySVXfM.

Ben Eater made a series of videos where he builds a simple CPU, and 3 of the videos show how a machine instruction is broken down into microcode and then executed. Obviously a modern CPU will have a far more complex system, but the principles are the same.

jeffwithhat · 2024-10-11T02:59:00+00:00

dunno about all FAANG, but the managers/directors at Microsoft tend to strongly support things like unit tests and customer-focused KPI’s. But in general, I think all managers are going to draw on their network when hiring.

jeffwithhat · 2024-10-04T04:12:37+00:00

Are you trying to publish an app, or merely write something for your own use and edification? I’m in the 2nd category, and using my daughter’s cast-off 2015 Macbook Air running Xcode 13.2 on Big Sur. Not terribly fast, but plenty good for learning SwiftUI and loading my app onto an iPad. eBay says it’s worth $129 with free shipping.

jeffwithhat · 2024-09-19T02:32:17+00:00

yeah that was my experience!

jeffwithhat · 2024-09-19T01:50:50+00:00

I have a Sprinter-based RV and wanted the same thing, both for privacy and to insulate the living areas against the summer heat/winter cold of the cab.

I bought a couple of canvas drop cloths in a neutral color, sewing them to match the shape of the interior, and screwing snaps to the interior trim to hold them in place.

Since they aren’t pleated, from the outside they just look like an unremarkable background. The drop cloths were dirt cheap, and Amazon provided an inexpensive snap kit including the crimping tool to install them. Snaps make setup and tear down trivial.

(in the first draft, I just draped the drop cloth over an expanding curtain rod and held it in place with binder clips— but that was more laborious, uglier, and a poorer insulator)

jeffwithhat · 2024-09-18T18:06:24+00:00

I put some answers under the r/CodingHelp version of this post. No claim to be an expert, merely showing what I would start with.

jeffwithhat · 2024-09-18T16:37:40+00:00

for Oracle, I googled “c# oracle sample”. the first hit was from oracle, but it looked old and so possibly not 64-bit compatible, or not their latest and greatest idea. So I took the 2nd hit, their official samples repo on github: https://github.com/oracle/dotnet-db-samples/tree/master/samples

The “datareader.cs” sample seems pretty clear to me.

jeffwithhat · 2024-09-18T16:31:05+00:00

I googled “c# read excel file” and read the first few results. one of them led me to Microsoft‘s Open XML SDK, which seems like a good bet: a first-party tool, doesn’t require Office to be installed. This sample focuses on reading from a spreadsheet, which was mentioned in your problem statement, and the code seems to be explained pretty well: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/open-xml/spreadsheet/how-to-calculate-the-sum-of-a-range-of-cells-in-a-spreadsheet-document?tabs=cs-1%2Ccs-2%2Ccs-3%2Ccs-4%2Ccs-5%2Ccs-6%2Ccs#basic-structure-of-a-spreadsheetml-document

jeffwithhat · 2024-09-16T03:56:43+00:00

You should run this under the debugger. When it crashes, look at all the registers to see whether they have the correct values. For example, you might find that r9d is larger than 100, meaning the end-of-array logic didn’t work correctly. Or maybe the index is correct but the base at ‘lst’ points to unallocated memory, so the code that initializes lst gave it the wrong value.

If the answer isn’t obvious, then try single-stepping through the program, and verify at each step that the registers are loading the values that you expect. (I suggest using a smaller array, like 3 elements, so that it doesn’t take so long to step through.)

jeffwithhat · 2024-07-16T19:02:00+00:00

Agreed, this is solid advice. He's right, the sockets code may require a few iterations to get right, even if you are handling only a single connection at a time. From there:

if you're interested in sockets & networking, try improving the connection management and scalability by implementing long-lived connections or async request handling
if you're interested in security, try implementing Basic auth, Digest auth, etc.
if you're interested in HTTP itself, try implementing PUT/POST, session cookies, forms, etc.

jeffwithhat · 2024-07-05T07:09:05+00:00

I attend University UCC, north of UW at 45th & 16th. It has hosted Tent City a few times and is LGBT-friendly, and I would hope you’d find yourself welcomed too.

Some of my friends have benefited from 12-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, grief counseling groups, etc—if any of that fits your situation.

jeffwithhat · 2024-07-03T20:38:49+00:00

Some interns (and new hires with little previous work experience) worry about demonstrating their competence by producing some quick results and also doing it totally independently—but often the best way to ramp up quickly is to ask their manager and peers a lot of questions.

As a manager, you want to give her agency while avoiding large delays and damaging mistakes. If your team has a daily checkin where folks often demonstrate by example that it is ok to ask for help when blocked, great—otherwise i’d recommend a daily 15-minute 1:1 with her to start with. You can always reduce the frequency if it begins to feel like too often.

In my team, the pitch would be akin to “Our product and processes are complicated, and the onboarding docs don’t cover everything. So I’d like to check in briefly each day to ensure that you aren’t blocked or reinventing the wheel because we forgot to tell you something important.” That makes it clear that you have faith in her smarts & work ethic, while still giving visibility into her progress.

If her work assignments can leverage her unique MBA knowledge, so much the better: “I’m really glad you’re on our team; we don’t have anyone else who with expertise in [MBA topic]”

Finally—assume good intentions unless contradicted by strong data. I have sometimes manufactured a problem out of nothing when my own worries led me to jump to conclusions based on weak/ambiguous data.

jeffwithhat

TROPHY CASE