What Are You Working On? April 2015

[andrewmcwatters]

it's more that angular is a steaming pile of shit poorly designed by half-assed java enterprise developers

it was so bad it never took off until google picked it up later in its life because some half-assed developer of the team ended up working there, seemingly by chance or connections

[Bladezor]

[QUOTE=srobins;47607741]This question might be better suited to it's own thread but once again, WAYWO is basically "programmer general" so hopefully you guys will let this slide..

What do you think makes the difference between a programmer or software engineer and a "codemonkey"? ie the difference between an actual respectable programmer/developer and just someone who can write code and "get stuff done". Is there any notable distinction or skills that you consider necessary to confidently call yourself a bonafide 100% certified programmer/software developer? This isn't meant as a way to rile anyone up or create any debate, just something I've been thinking about lately and wanted to get outside opinions.[/QUOTE]

I've been in the software industry for about 4 years.

I believe Programmer has become a rather derogatory term, it's essentially the 'code monkey' title.

That said here's my personal interpretation of a "Programmer": A) They're either amateurs, or B) They do just enough to get by and don't really try to expand on their knowledge base. That's not to say Programmers aren't important, they get a lot of stuff done. But, at the end of the day, they tend to be fairly complacent and lack inner drive.

Software Developers have drive, but they're also lazy (in a good way). They're constantly trying to abstract things to make their job easier, whereas a Programmer might just muddle away doing what they've always done regardless of how tedious it is.

Software Engineers are typically your architects, they lay the Foundation for your Software Developers and Programmers to work from and usually have tons of experience.

Obviously Software Developer is a more respectable title than Programmer, but I believe you have to take the [url=http://ncees.org/about-ncees/news/ncees-introduces-pe-exam-for-software-engineering/]PE test[/url] to be considered a [i]Software Engineer[/i].

Now to answer your question "Is there any notable distinction or skills that you consider necessary to confidently call yourself a bonafide 100% certified programmer/software developer?"

I don't know that there's a reliable way to quantify that. That's something that would take some introspection. As far as what the industry goes by, it mostly comes down to knowledge and experience.

Oh and a word of caution, your schooling carries [b]very little[/b] weight in this industry. There's been plenty of MIT, etc graduates who look great on paper but are [i]terrible[/i] developers. In fact, while I was in college there were plenty of people who hated writing code, some would even cheat their way through courses, and all that's going through my head is [b]WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE?[/b] Even if they do manage to land a job, they'll get shit-canned so fast.

[andrewmcwatters]

i know people who call themselves software engineers and they're total jokes

not all software engineers are software architects

i'd rather just call myself a software developer, which is what i am, and leave the title of engineer to my employers. further more i do work internationally, and such a title is illegal to bare without certification or license in some regions

[editline]26th April 2015[/editline]

in most places you do not need a license to be called a software engineer, however

these restrictions are in place due to locales having existing laws and regulations on any individuals baring the title "engineer"

[Layla]

I'm a brogrammer

[srobins]

[QUOTE=Bladezor;47608444]Oh and a word of caution, your schooling carries [b]very little[/b] weight in this industry. There's been plenty of MIT, etc graduates who look great on paper but are [i]terrible[/i] developers. In fact, while I was in college there were plenty of people who hated writing code, some would even cheat their way through courses, and all that's going through my head is [b]WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE?[/b] Even if they do manage to land a job, they'll get shit-canned so fast.[/QUOTE]

Yeah I've heard similar things. I'm currently studying nursing and I have obscure pipe-dreams of using my 4 days off each week to keep improving as a software developer and pick up freelance/contract gigs and see if eventually I can break through to software without formal education.

[Mr.Heal]

[QUOTE=Bladezor;47608444] In fact, while I was in college there were plenty of people who hated writing code, some would even cheat their way through courses, and all that's going through my head is [b]WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE?[/b] Even if they do manage to land a job, they'll get shit-canned so fast.[/QUOTE]

I use to be in Computer Science, I just left the degree for a different one this semester.

There is a girl boy pair in Software Engineering, who are actually getting married. They met in first year and since then he has coded every single one of her assignments in every course. She failed an assignment once because their was an issue and the professor asked her to compile her code, and she did not have the knowledge to do that. That was at the end of the second year, we are taught in the 2nd week of the first semester, maybe even earlier, how to compile c code using a makefile.

[b]WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE?[/b] sums up my thoughts about her really nicely.

[QUOTE=srobins;47608580]Yeah I've heard similar things. I'm currently studying nursing and I have obscure pipe-dreams of using my 4 days off each week to keep improving as a software developer and pick up freelance/contract gigs and see if eventually I can break through to software without formal education.[/QUOTE]

Anecdotal evidence, but there are people in this thread who are professional without formal education, and I personally know someone who got a degree in philosophy but was unable to find a job. He worked at Starbucks while he learned to code, and contributed a lot to open source projects.. In fact he is one of the creators of CakePHP I think. He works at a software company now, making really good money I would guess.

I think you can do it! Believe in yourself and stuff!!

[Kwaq]

tbf i work in a role where there is not a lot of time and you really do have to 'get stuff done' to meet customer demand

im trying to build a framework for the business to simplify the tasks being done (since its all spaghetti over 100s of projects atm) but when you always have customers (simultaneous projects) to look after quality of code goes right down

[Geel]

Remember that networked mutex I made in PHP?

I turned it into a general (very simple) "protocol" and it's now called Memtex. I've written a PHP library and a (currently untested :v:) C# library for it.

The plan is to make memtex-csharp, memtex-php, memtex-node, memtex-anythingthatcanaccessmemcached.

Eventually you'll be able to share networked mutexes across anything. Want a PHP script to wait for a mutex a C# application owns? You can do that.

[url=http://github.com/geel9/memtex-php]Shittily-done memtex-php[/url]
[url=http://github.com/geel9/memtex-csharp]Shittily-done untested memtext-csharp[/url]

[Bladezor]

[QUOTE=Kwaq;47608729]tbf i work in a role where there is not a lot of time and you really do have to 'get stuff done' to meet customer demand

im trying to build a framework for the business to simplify the tasks being done (since its all spaghetti over 100s of projects atm) but when you always have customers (simultaneous projects) to look after quality of code goes right down[/QUOTE]

Oh yes, no judgment there, I run into those same problems.

When there's a critical incident you got to get it done. That issue falls more on the Dev. Manager. For example, if I'm working on commitments and something critical comes up where I need to drop everything I'm doing to rush something out, I make it clear that depending on the situation code quality is going to suffer. That said, it still needs to be addressed at some point as technical debt before it calcifies and becomes "that horrible piece of the code base that guy wrote"

That's the sad reality of dev in the real world with tight deadlines, corners are cut. This was probably the most humbling part, now when I look at bad code I usually think twice before passing judgment.

[nixnax123]

I need your opinion!

Would you guys rather this as a ship trail effect?

[img]http://a.pomf.se/ekdfgp.gif[/img]

Or this?

[img]http://a.pomf.se/ikrupb.gif[/img]

[img]http://www.facepunch.com/fp/ratings/tick.png[/img] for top, [img]http://www.facepunch.com/fp/ratings/cross.png[/img] for bottom.

Or, if you're not feeling either one, I'm open to suggestions!

[sp]you can also see a particle effect on the bullets on the top gif (;[/sp]

[`impulse]

I added floor transitions and slow motion!

[vid]http://a.pomf.se/umgeuo.mp4[/vid]

[AntonioR]

Added some basic path smoothing based on the visibility between nodes in the path (white line = original A* path, orange = smooth).

Also adding temporary nodes(yellow start, magenta end) to the mesh/tree (three lines coming out are temporary new connections).

[img]http://i.imgur.com/r0kcgLH.jpg[/img]

[Fourier]

[QUOTE=DoctorSalt;47608293]Fuck javascript, node, protractor and angular so hard. The simplest shit is becoming hell for me. Even break statements don't work like they should - goddamn this.[/QUOTE]

I somehow feel you, everything is asynchronous so better get used to think like that

[Dr Magnusson]

I just had the strangest bug. Whenever I would write a file as 1bpp with a color palette, the bottom-most line would fill in with the wrong color, like so:
[img]http://i.imgur.com/3r8MBWE.png[/img]
[I]The color is originally blue and yellow, but Paint doesn't support color palettes for monochromatic images, and imgur don't support monochromatic images, period[/I]

I spent ages stepping through the program trying to find out why the image came out wrong when I wrote it as 1bpp, while 24bpp output worked fine. It was only when I noticed that only the left-most pixel on the second line from the bottom was also the wrong color and remembered that bitmaps are read/stored bottom-left to top-right, that I figured out what was going on: since the std::set I was using for storing the color palette was ordered it would store the the white color as color #1 in the palette and start churning out 0-bits as the color index, when it then encountered the black color and added it to the palette, the color palette would get sorted and shift, so now all the bits that it had painted as white, would now be pointing at the black index in the color palette.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/FOCKwaZ.png[/img]
[I]The suspect pixel[/I]

The bug was fixed by moving to an std::unordered_set instead, but it did take me a full day to realize this :v:

[Fourier]

One full day? That was short :v:

[Natrox]

[QUOTE=geel9;47608782]Remember that networked mutex I made in PHP?

I turned it into a general (very simple) "protocol" and it's now called Memtex. I've written a PHP library and a (currently untested :v:) C# library for it.

The plan is to make memtex-csharp, memtex-php, memtex-node, memtex-anythingthatcanaccessmemcached.

Eventually you'll be able to share networked mutexes across anything. Want a PHP script to wait for a mutex a C# application owns? You can do that.

[url=http://github.com/geel9/memtex-php]Shittily-done memtex-php[/url]
[url=http://github.com/geel9/memtex-csharp]Shittily-done untested memtext-csharp[/url][/QUOTE]

I could probably use this for my project if you had a C version!

[sidneys1]

[QUOTE=srobins;47607741]What kinda help do you need, regarding VBOs?[/QUOTE]

Well, I've looked at a bunch of different OpenTK examples of how to do a VBO (insuring first that they work). I register a buffer, bind it, upload the data, then unbind. Then come drawing time I have tried every combination of code I've seen to draw it, but I always get a blank screen. Right now I'm just using a Vector2 array to try and draw a bunch of 2d points. [URL="https://gist.github.com/Sidneys1/b2fbd61389d37e2e9c39"]Here's what I've got.[/URL]

[Megolas]

[QUOTE=Funley;47603257]To teach myself some Unity, I recreated the classic image puzzle game (I don't know what it's called :v:). I'll hug the first one who solves this.

[t]http://i.imgur.com/Wps7ZAY.png[/t][/QUOTE]

Tip: Add lines between every fifth square ([url]http://www.puzzlemuseum.com/griddler/pics/gridpuz.gif[/url])
Makes it so much easier to work with when you make big ones (I'm totally not addicted).
Also, try to disabling shadows from the light source, makes it pretty annoying.

Now, as for the solution:
[url]http://imgur.com/8zWV9IU[/url]

[url]http://imgur.com/4sXYm9b[/url]

[Geel]

[QUOTE=Natrox;47609896]I could probably use this for my project if you had a C version![/QUOTE]

Problem is I'm kind of shit at C :v: But I'll look into making one.

[Fourier]

Also make python version because raspberry pi -> muh popularity

[stone555]

[QUOTE=mix999;47604440]Made an ADC for a project. I think something is wrong on the software side, specifically I think matlab takes too long to sample. So this is my analog signal that is being passed into the computer

[img]http://i.imgur.com/ePhSpjQ.jpg?1[/img]

And here is how it looks on the computer once it has been converted into digital.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/ZK9LBL7.png[/img]

Its sampling at 300 samples per second and sending it to the computer at that rate, confirmed with realterm, but when matlab takes the input, the signal seems to be at around 75 Hz ish rather than 100. Is matlab just slow at sampling serial input? Also here is my entire setup if curious.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/A5CE7MN.png[/img]

[img]http://i.imgur.com/HPzqSC8.jpg?1[/img]

[editline]Edited:[/editline]

Here is my code by the way, maybe you guys can see something wrong with it? Something that can be done better?

% Initialise plot
figure(1);
out0 = zeros(1,1000);
% Open Port
s = serial('COM3');
set(s,'BaudRate',9600);
fopen(s);

xrange = 300;
out0 = zeros(1,xrange);


% Code goes here %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
for i = 1:100000

    for j = 1:xrange
        A = str2num(fscanf(s));
        while isempty(A) == 1           %check if serial val is empty
            A = str2num(fscanf(s));
        end
        out0(j) = A;
    end
    out0
    plot(out0, 'b', 'LineWidth', 2);
    axis([1 xrange 0 255]); grid on;
    drawnow;
end

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

% Close Port
fclose(s);
delete(s);
clear s;
fclose(instrfind);

[/QUOTE]

Have you tried not including the plot commands within the second loop? (i.e. just wait until all data is accounted for and then plot). I know plot calls can be quite heavy sometimes in MATLAB.

[andrewmcwatters]

[QUOTE=Kwaq;47608729]tbf i work in a role where there is not a lot of time and you really do have to 'get stuff done' to meet customer demand

im trying to build a framework for the business to simplify the tasks being done (since its all spaghetti over 100s of projects atm) but when you always have customers (simultaneous projects) to look after quality of code goes right down[/QUOTE]

lower end client proposals

[editline]27th April 2015[/editline]

actually this is a problem with management and business development, those people are suppose to be making room to help you improve the image of the company by increasing your potential to create value in the organization

software developers are expensive assets that you don't use as workhorses unless you're paying them poorly

when you're working on something like 3-5 simultaneous projects i'd be seriously questioning the sales end of the business

[editline]27th April 2015[/editline]

it doesn't pay off to do several 5 figure vs a few 6 figure contracts between the firm and clients unless you're doing rapidly short schedule to ship projects with prefab codebases that are essentially proprietary white labeled software packages that your company has built for such business setups

[Natrox]

[QUOTE=geel9;47610172]Problem is I'm kind of shit at C :v: But I'll look into making one.[/QUOTE]

I might take a look at it myself and port it. I'm mostly a C++ programmer but I think I can manage with C. :v:

[Хум]

Someone kill me please..
I've spent two days over a simple mistake of not pushing a value to a stack... :suicide:

At least now everything works properly, I think it's high time I recode it to make the code tidier.
[IMG]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/46283290/funcs.png[/IMG]

[Geel]

[QUOTE=Natrox;47610704]I might take a look at it myself and port it. I'm mostly a C++ programmer but I think I can manage with C. :v:[/QUOTE]

It's a very simple protocol -- I can make a memtex-c repo and you can contribute to it if you like!

[Natrox]

[QUOTE=geel9;47610713]It's a very simple protocol -- I can make a memtex-c repo and you can contribute to it if you like![/QUOTE]

Sure thing. I'll see what I can do this week.

[andrewmcwatters]

[QUOTE=geel9;47610713]It's a very simple protocol -- I can make a memtex-c repo and you can contribute to it if you like![/QUOTE]

sounds like you've got something cool on your hands. so is this networked mutex usable for anything, sort of like a message dispatch or is it built specifically for things like database transactions? either one seems neat, just curious. i might want to use that for some experimental stuff with va

[Geel]

[QUOTE=andrewmcwatters;47610780]sounds like you've got something cool on your hands. so is this networked mutex usable for anything, sort of like a message dispatch or is it built specifically for things like database transactions? either one seems neat, just curious. i might want to use that for some experimental stuff with va[/QUOTE]

Basically it's just a "mutex" (not literally as someone pointed out since mutex means something specific on the cpu level) that can be shared over memcached.

You're guaranteed exclusivity on the mutex over the network, meaning that only one *whatever* (server/thread/application/whatever) can maintain control of that mutex at any one point.

There are already applications out there, but none that really have a suite of libraries all using the same protocol for sharing a mutex across any programming language. PHP and C# can share a mutex, or C++ and PHP, or a mutex can be shared across a suite of applications running C#, C++, PHP, Python, Node, and C.

The actual code is super simple it's just...a standard, I guess.

[editline]27th April 2015[/editline]

The main drawback is the network overhead but depending on your use-case it's not that big a deal.

[editline]27th April 2015[/editline]

That and the fact that there is currently no support for an "abandoned" mutex beyond it exceeding the lifetime you specified when you acquired it. If you acquire a mutex with an infinite (-1) lifetime, and your program halts or something before it can release the mutex, it'll basically only get removed when memcached clears the key for memory reasons.

...which is another issue I have to fix, actually.

[r0b0tsquid]

[t]http://i.imgur.com/wTgQ54p.png[/t]

I want to make the QWOP of driving simulators.

[nixnax123]

Some gameplay!

[vid]http://a.pomf.se/jzqods.webm[/vid]

And a changelog!

[quote]- Added a trail effect to bullet particles.
- Particle System now supports sprite-based particles.
- Optimized some collision detections.
- Any case where String.format() has been used is now replaced by the
appropriate StringBuilder; StringBuilders are so much faster and memory
efficient
- Added an ms/f counter to the game screen.
- All text items are now hipster cool[/quote]

Just need some more gameplay ideas... the game still isn't fun.

[editline]27th April 2015[/editline]

ms/f is only shit because of my recording software, by the way