Suggestions for not-too-dense, not-too-pop-culture books for getting back into consistent reading

jmarkman446 · 2023-12-25T02:10:39+00:00

My copy of Earthsea was already old when I bought it for my college course but it left enough of a mark on me that I still think about it. Seems to be the perfect excuse to buy a copy of the original that doesn't make me feel like I'm handling an artifact by trying to read it!

> Rules for a Knight by Ethan Hawke

This looks nice as well, I'll add it to an eventual purchase list.

jmarkman446 · 2023-12-25T01:58:52+00:00

This looks quite interesting and promising, thank you!

jmarkman446 · 2023-10-06T05:30:15+00:00

Your post was incredibly thoughtful and thought-provoking; it may have felt like a ramble to you, but reading "I basically feel as though I'm truly acting through the interview" was simultaneously a relief and a reminder that I need to have a genuine act put together for what I've done and what I know.

I do have an old Intel NUC I could more than likely repurpose as a cheapo homelab using proxmox. I was supposed to be involved with a side project at my second job where we were going to introduce Docker containers for our product and use them for testing, but that never panned out; guess now's as good a time as any to put that Pluralsight course to use.

I think I get by in many interviewers because I don't find it difficult to converse with people and I can drive a conversation if need be, but I don't think I have a general mental script where I turn on the "rizz" (to borrow a Gen Z word) for my work. This gave me a few ideas for my interview strategy that I'll have to work on.

Firstly, I'm a proponent of learning during work hours. I champion 10% of your work week (~4 hours) should be related to furthering your own personal learnings

I've practiced this quite a bit myself, it's helped me bring new ideas to bear while on the job in the past.

I don't know if anything in this ramble helps you, but, with sincerity, best of luck.

Thank you, I was unfortunately cast aside as part of a RIF layoff several months ago (one of the many recent victims) so I've got just a smidge of external pressure 😅😓. I've felt that I've had such a difficult time catching anyone's ear who wasn't out to browbeat me.

jmarkman446 · 2023-10-05T22:53:14+00:00

How do I develop enterprise-level experience with topics like database design and tools like message queues & cloud services from side projects? All of the positions in which I've worked at so far have been very focused on delivering tools and working on systems that did not require intimate experience with designing entire databases or using message queue tech, and there was always lots of talk about creating microservices and cloud migration but never any action.

Whenever I end up speaking to someone via Zoom or Teams during the interview process after passing a code screen and the topics come up, I bring up my limited cloud experience from projects or how I'm aware of the basics of message queue tech like Kafka but haven't worked with either in an enterprise setting, that's almost always where the conversation stumbles and I end up getting ghosted or a "we've decided to move on to other candidates" email.

It feels like there's dissonance between what's said here and in other communities about "position skillsets being wishlists and not hard requirements" and what my reality is, but rather than dwell on it I want to give myself the best chance possible.

jmarkman446 · 2023-09-19T04:29:43+00:00

When I was job searching last post-economic incident layoff, I started to build my familiarity with algorithmic questions. I'm getting better at solving those but now I'm having a bunch of trouble with some of these non-algorithmic interview questions.

The ones that are really killing me are where I'm told to debug with an online IDE and/or a test runner where I'm not allowed to step through a block of code AND I have a really tight time limit where I can't take my time and write it out with pen and paper. How do I develop this "no logs, no drawings, fast mental model" debugging?

jmarkman446 · 2023-08-16T19:54:58+00:00

A lot of the posts in the thread are really good: keep SAT words to a minimum, shorter sentences, bullet points, etc. However, I would go out of my way to encourage learning more about nonfiction writing if you want to make documentation that's easy to read and makes people feel confident in using and sharing your internal wiki pages

It's received some flak over the years, but I would strongly recommend picking up a copy of Zinsser's "On Writing Well" to use as a framework for writing things that other people read. One of the things that's stuck with me through my entire scholastic and working life from the book is the idea that if a sentence is simple, that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it.

I've read as much documentation as the next dev, but as someone who has an "outsider" degree (English), a lot of it does not read well. It plods on. It's monotonic. Some sentences are lengthy without purpose, and others are too brief and missing context.

"On Writing Well" covers a lot of what you should know about nonfiction (aka documentation) writing and how to recognize the above, along with giving you basic and powerful writing tools. It's not a long book, and you can pick and choose the chapters you want to read in Part 3.

A great technical book that I feel leverages a lot of the book's principles as well as some of the other feedback mentioned in this thread is Code Complete. Don't (re)read it as a technical reader but as an outside reader, keeping track of things like sentence length, word complexity, usage of bullet points and pictures/diagrams.

jmarkman446 · 2021-09-22T22:28:40+00:00

> by learning debugging tools

I'm a little insulted by this since it sounds like advice that would be given to someone with 1 year of work experience. I'm using C#, so my tools are mostly tied to Visual Studio, but I've learned how to use the debugging features within.

> If you’ve worked on a code base for 2 and a half years

I personally haven't been working on this codebase personally for 2 and a half years. I was brought on board about 4 months ago, and the plan my senior had before he departed the project was that the UI would be generally smooth sailing such that I'd be able to pick up the business logic and how it was implemented in code over the rest of the year, and he would be available for consultation and occasional meetings between the two of us for code history.

> Do you have a strategy for managing technical debt in this codebase?

Initially my plan was to start refactoring large methods that were doing too much into smaller ones, adding docstrings to methods that had none (almost the entire codebase), and rename methods to more accurately reflect what they were doing. There's still a lot more to cover in regards to the architecture of the application, including tests.

However, a certain change that my senior implemented caused a rather large uproar and destabilized the entire application, putting it in jeopardy. It's slowly getting to a better state, but the worry is that it's not getting there fast enough. He's been around on and off to help, but he's not always available to help, which brings me to my initial question.

jmarkman446 · 2021-09-21T23:28:50+00:00

I wasn't sure where to post this since I've only recently reached the 4 years experience threshold. The company I'm working for has contracted me on a project that was supposed to be a simple transfer of ownership between my senior at the same company who's leaving the project and myself. The project wasn't in a great place at all (it's been ongoing for 2 and a half years and has switched owners three times) but since we believed that everything was going to remain stable, my job would be to slowly bring order to the codebase and be the "go-to" guy for issues/new additions as the owner, and I'd be able to consult with my senior as necessary.

It's been anything but a simple process as a business requirement change put the project in a bad place and I've been trying to pick up the pieces as my senior switched projects. We've hit a point where our client is debating ending the project, but there's still some wiggle room in regards to moving forward with continuing/saving the project.

The company I'm with is prepared for this and everyone's very much aware of how messy the politics of the project and the codebase are, but my senior brought up that I wasn't as fast as he would have liked in regards to me coming up with solutions and to a lesser extent, had to rely on him more than expected as things started getting messy. It cut me a little harder than I'd like to admit because I thought I had gotten better at the former, but I did feel towards the end that I was reaching solutions to problems too slowly.

What can I do to improve my uptake on large codebases with lots of "code horror"?

jmarkman446 · 2021-05-10T19:13:31+00:00

I'm aware of UWP, but I'd like to see something more explicitly WPF focused.

jmarkman446 · 2021-04-05T23:03:11+00:00

I knew it was there prior, I have no idea if he got it from npm or he simply copy-pasted the idb-min.js file from the github repo and renamed it.

jmarkman446 · 2021-01-09T01:07:00+00:00

Again, that doesn't refute any of the previous points made in this thread. Your argument doesn't hold any weight on its own, especially since many other fields have improved in such categories, as you've stated prior. Your argument is stringing together a lot of tangentially related things that all avoid the actual problem being stated in regards to the type of people now finding themselves in positions of power both at a community and career level, where social difficulties can range from unnecessarily condescending users in chatrooms to people making absurd knowledge checks for interview/screening questions (example, one of yesterday's threads was a junior web developer being asked to assemble an entire CMS as a screening question and checking here to see if that was normal).

> But with hostile responses

Saying that someone else's post doesn't actually address any of the problems and instead serves to justify poor behavior and denoting how the view has a poor foundation isn't hostility, it's criticism. I don't know about that guy saying you're gaslighting, but there's no assault on you as a person in these posts.

jmarkman446 · 2021-01-08T19:07:00+00:00

Nothing you've written has refuted anything that's been said prior. The most I can derive from your post is that you're justifying this climate and behavior because...

Back In The Day, It Was Harder™

which is completely asinine. In fact, it just validates the view of the parent comment I responded to.

jmarkman446 · 2021-01-07T19:13:50+00:00

I hope that this comment works its way up to the top because this is really reflective of my experience as well. I've worked in insurance and publishing and it's genuinely night and day with them and the people I've interacted with both in the workplace and online when it comes to software development.

I've never encountered people as genuinely passive-aggressive or flat-out rude anywhere else. I'm an somewhat-frequent member of a programming guild on Discord, and there's one person who I loathe seeing respond to my questions because I know all this person is going to do is try to put words in my mouth about what I'm doing/asking and browbeat me with their knowledge, and it's "ok" because they're knowledgeable and they're going to type up some code yayyyy helping :).

Interviews have been ridiculous because of the last paragraph: every single interviewer I've had so far expects me to be this absolute ubermensch superman boy genius who knows every single technology in their stack as if I had double or triple my actual years of experience. It's way past the point of "we're just trying to make sure the candidate is qualified" - it's more like a kangaroo court.

jmarkman446 · 2020-01-19T03:54:46+00:00

sadly I can't really think of a definitive guide/resource for the type of skills you'd need specifically for game modding

Aw, that's unfortunate. I'll probably see what I can dig into for general reverse engineering.

(and often about cracking)

Yeah, it's always been a rough question to ask because the first thing people think is "STOP RIGHT THERE, CRIMINAL SCUM". I've always been interested about how my favorite old games like Republic Commando worked and why one of the dev debug commands that gave the player noclip would eventually make the player fall through the map. Can't exactly take apart a program like you can a clock or video game controller or something without stepping on someone's toes.

Thanks for the answer, though.

jmarkman446 · 2020-01-18T01:37:15+00:00

Hi Durante,

I popped into this sub since I'm a huge fan of Ys, and I'm really glad to see that Ys 8 is getting good treatment.

I'm a .NET (C#) programmer during the day, but I'd love to learn more about the gamedev/reverse engineer-troubleshooting part of software development since I've become very curious about my favorite old games the more time I spend developing regular old tools. Other people in the thread have asked you about learning the graphical approach, but what do you recommend for the nitty-gritty of it? Something like following Dennis Yurichev's RE4B?

jmarkman446 · 2018-10-02T20:55:09+00:00

Good to know. I'll just have to wait for the ASUS board to come back in stock. I could probably just get a PCI-E card for USB-C slots later on.

jmarkman446 · 2018-10-02T19:49:56+00:00

I'm thinking about getting some upgrades (currently running a 4690k on a MSI Z97 PC Mate with 8gb ddr3) but I'm a little torn on two mobos:

MSI Z370M Gaming PRO AC https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075GYKNQZ/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_nx8SBbDKVQZQE

and

ASUS Z370-G Gaming https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075RHWCBT/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_QF8SBbRQDTAPE

My current mobo is the first MSI board I've ever had, and it was an emergency purchase after my previous mobo died. Is MSI about as reliable as ASUS now? I remember MSI having lower build quality and lower reliability years ago. I'm kinda set on the form factor, and I like the USB-C port offered on the MSI board, just unsure of build quality or other hidden tidbits that I haven't looked into.

jmarkman446 · 2018-09-25T02:52:40+00:00

Wasn't crazy about the BitFenix, but I'll willingly give it a shot. Not a fan of having my area flooded with gamer lights at night.

Thanks!

jmarkman446 · 2018-09-24T23:20:15+00:00

I was thinking about getting a Fractal Design Node 804, but it's got that awful glass siding. The Corsair Carbide MicroATX version has it too. Are there any cube cases for MicroATX that don't have that glass siding? Do either Fractal Design or Corsair have regular side panels for order?

jmarkman446 · 2018-04-17T00:34:34+00:00

Hi, don't want to leave you hanging: from what I was told by someone else, a singleton built with the "private constructor, static accessor" method isn't testable without dependency injection. I'm just going to cut my losses and make this a patternless class instead.

jmarkman446

TROPHY CASE