soseng

This is also me. I was a double CS and Math major in university and one of my favorite classes as a young lad was combinatorics and probability.. 25 years ago..

It's true, if you don't activate this area of your brain often, it's easier to brute force the solution and reach for the easy mechanical calculation. I can feel this when I'm refactoring code. Today, I just have Claude do it for me with a few instructions. Each day, I feel a tiny bit more ignorant about the actual framework's APIs, its abstractions, and its rules. But I still would rather do other things with my time.

As for the problem, luckily for me, this one was easy to derive if you remember factorials, permutations, and remember to account for duplicate patterns

Not to say it isn't useful to a CS education, but the only time I've ever ran into the well-ordering principle was to establish the foundation for mathematical induction proofs. Students usually learn this in discrete math for CS in undergrad. Then in many future undergrad courses that are algorithms focused, the proofs tend to use induction and no one really thinks of the WOP

It's so easy to bait me with this nostalgia. There is something mysterious and enjoyable about dialing-in or connecting to a server in the unknown. During those days, many things were not easily discoverable which added to the fun.

For a brief time, this extended to the early internet with IRC servers. I spent most of my early teenage years downloading warez, .wav music files, and trying not to be a n00b on #c while asking n00b questions

Now that I am an old man, I wonder what today's youth do that is equivalent to this fun nerdy culture? Maybe I can partake, LOL.

Hate to comment on the medium or writing style instead of the content but you're not alone. I understand the terms in the article in isolation or used in other fields, but it seems like the author is using a lot of technical metaphors. Or maybe I'm not their sophisticated audience.

As a dev who only really uses the read-only version of Figma for the most part, I really like what they do. I can't speak for designers but having the Figma diagrams match the libraries and the design system we use is very very nice. no guessing about colors, typography, spacing. I can just copy and paste into my CSS for front end work. The interface is smooth and fast for us non-design focused devs

I suppose in the description of "large corp" and service mesh, Someone would already exist and this would already have been worked out. It would be a nightmare dealing with hundreds of microservices without this kind of game plan.

Curious to learn more about why it is difficult to debug. I'm not familiar with service mesh. I also work at a large corp, but we use gateways and most things are event driven with kafka across domain boundaries. I spend most of my time debugging each service locally by injecting mock messages or objects. I do this one at a time if the problem is upstream. Usually, our logging helps us pinpoint the exact service at to target for debugging. It's really easy. Our devops infrastructure has built out patterns and libraries when teams need to mint a new service. Everything is standardized with terraform. Everything has the same standard swagger pages, everything is using okta, etc.. Seems a bit boring (which is good)

"I was young, naive, and plagued by impostor syndrome. I held back instead of exploring more, engaging more deeply, and seeking out more challenges. I allowed myself to be carried along by the current, rather than actively charting my own course. Youth is wasted on the young."

This quote really captures how I felt during that time. I wasn't smart enough to get into MIT, but I spent a lot of time sitting in on the open lectures during 2004-2005. I remember meeting a few of their undergrads who wanted to start tech companies and always feeling like I didn't belong. And I may be misremembering things but it seemed like every pitch had to do with P2P.

Also, the first time I walked past those Frank Gehry buildings, I was awestruck. I just stood there for maybe 10 minutes looking up and down.

Same here! I was also a teenager in the mid-90s. And I was amazed by IRCd server code and bots. I bought a used copy of the book Slackware Linux unleashed w/CD-ROM and it had some networking code examples in C. I found Beej's Networking site because I was confused by a lot of that networking code. Became even more obsessed and went a deep rabbit hole. I spent a lot of time visiting different book stores hoping they had programming books. Bought Richard Stevens' amazing reference books and never looked back. Thanks for enabling my passion all these years later Beej!

This really triggered a lot of old memories from my early career. I started off as the 7th employee - as a Jr dev in a startup that eventually grew to 100+ and felt like an outsider for years. At some point I became a "senior" dev and the insider at this tiny company. It was quite a bit more stressful actually. I made more important decisions but it was super interesting. After having that insider taste, I kept chasing it at bigger corps for many years by becoming staff and eventually leading teams but never got that feeling again. I was either below a director or VP. To be young again...

Your experience almost exactly mirrors my own. I moved from Boston to the Midwest USA in 2016 and kept working remotely until a RIF in 2019. I found a local job that did require a commute but a few months later, we all became remote. In between, I started a family and had 2 kids who have always interacted with me at home. And I am very thankful for that opportunity that many do not have. Our company has since mandated hybrid work now but my team has been categorized as a remote-first distributed group. Now if I go into the office, I would be the only one there. Having said that, I do long for a physical whiteboard where my movements can help me convey my points or understand others better. The current technology is not so adequate in this area yet.. We use google workspaces/chat and meet. I curse it every week..

As a developer that still uses YUI on multiple production applications, I've never felt that my front-end skills were stagnating due to its usage. The same goes for ExtJs, which I have used heavily in the past. Both libraries allow you to create the models, views, controllers, templates, etc. And they both have notions of apps and routes. There might be a lot less magic going on in terms of getting data binding to work, but it's something javascript devs should understand anyways (loose coupling using custom events). I think the detriment comes more from newer companies looking to hire front end folks who have experience with modern frameworks such as angular, ember, and react. But there's also a lot of magic going on in those newer frameworks and libraries so when something breaks or you need to step out of the box, a deeper understanding of what's going on is usually good.

I work in Liferay Portal and AUI, which is a fork of YUI. Liferay will probably be impacted greatly by this. My company has done a few large scale Enterprise application implementations in recent years and continue to do more Liferay work (It's actually booming). YUI is a huge framework and not just a library. It contains a lot of neat UI Components and Utilities. Although styling the components and making them responsive always seemed tough.

To change it up a little bit, has anyone here been asked simple debugging questions? I've interviewed at numerous places and I've never been asked the question why a certain piece of code is breaking or how to fix it. The questions could be designed to be self-contained and just complex enough to get a feel for how the candidate thinks. My consulting job usually takes me to places where a project is in trouble or failing. It would seem that quickly understanding broken foreign code would be a huge asset. The closest question I've been asked is: "Here's a Singleton implementation in Java. What can go wrong?"