IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Tenks

Bronze Knight of the Realm
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Yeah its shit. And if you talk to any of the people on the search engine team (the pile of C) they'll talk about how theirs is the best search engine in the world. I just shake my head. The thing is a house of cards and it the most inefficient pile of garbage in the universe. Every single index of every single record is loaded into memory at start up 100% of the time. A record hasn't been accessed in over a year? Yep its in memory. An index is hardly ever used? Yep its in memory. Our servers to run the search engine have memory out the ass simply to keep up with the demand the engine puts upon it. Nothing can ever spill over into a filesystem. At the end of the day it just writes itself out to disk for backup and if it needs to restart it just loads back up from that snapshot and replays any updates from the day.

Rant off. I just really dislike it. Luckily the "team lead" quit recently putting a timer on the life of the search engine. His second-in-command is also hinting heavily he's going to leave as well. We could get a working ElasticSearch up and running in like a month but the guy who recently quit had so much clout and authority he threw up every single roadblock possible to prevent us from standing up a different search engine.
 

Lendarios

Trump's Staff
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For you guys that are on development teams -- how does your team enforce code styles? I guess I'm "one of those guys" that is extremely anal over variable and method names. But our team has no consistency at all -- these people are all over the place. I realize styles have changed over time and people just have their habits depending on how long they've been coding. But things like PascalCase for private variables I don't think was ever in vogue (talking Java/C# world here).
Re sharper.
 

WhatsAmmataU_sl

shitlord
1,022
0
Hey code nerds. I have an idea for a website, a twist on fantasy football and sports gambling. I'm entirely new to web development outside of being a 2/5 with html/css. This seems to be the most active programming post, so I figured I'd post my questions here.

I found a pretty good set of videos describing a web development "stack" that goes from HTML to CSS to PHP to MySQl to PHP+MySQL to AJAX and jquery. I'm in the middle of the "PHP+MySQL" section of this instructional video and think I need to reconsider my approach. My website would obviously be heavily reliant on user management, and I'm a little overwhelmed on what it would take to implement secure user management in something like this just using php and MySQL. The instructor in the video is very careful to admit "Secure user management is outside the scope of this course!" and I feel like I don't even know the questions to ask on how to do this properly. I'm a programmer by trade (Industrial automation, so pretty low-level stuff), and I feel pretty comfortable with everything I'm being presented, but there must be an easier way.

What web development framework would you all recommend I should use for developing this site, and why?
 

ShakyJake

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What web development framework would you all recommend I should use for developing this site, and why?
You may want to consider Microsoft ASP.NET MVC framework. User account management and security is baked into one of the template options. Obviously, though, you still will want to understand what's going on.

I've been working through a MVC5 book and it's pretty sweet. Microsoft has become a lot more friendlier towards third-party libraries. In fact, one of the scaffolding options includes JQuery, JQuery UI, and Bootstrap.
 

WhatsAmmataU_sl

shitlord
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You may want to consider Microsoft ASP.NET MVC framework. User account management and security is baked into one of the template options. Obviously, though, you still will want to understand what's going on.

I've been working through a MVC5 book and it's pretty sweet. Microsoft has become a lot more friendlier towards third-party libraries. In fact, one of the scaffolding options includes JQuery, JQuery UI, and Bootstrap.
Thanks buddy. What book if you don't mind me asking?
 

Asshat wormie

2023 Asshat Award Winner
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Since this is the general CS thread I thought i'd share something that popped up online the other day that i have found absolutely fascinating. There is a new language out there that is gaining a bit of traction, Julia. This language was created as part of a PHD thesis and the guy posted the draft of the thesis on github. Its a fairly non technical read and one does not require advanced degree to understand any of it. The thought process is enlightening.

phdthesis/main.pdf at master · JeffBezanson/phdthesis · GitHub
 

Vinen

God is dead
2,783
490
Since this is the general CS thread I thought i'd share something that popped up online the other day that i have found absolutely fascinating. There is a new language out there that is gaining a bit of traction, Julia. This language was created as part of a PHD thesis and the guy posted the draft of the thesis on github. Its a fairly non technical read and one does not require advanced degree to understand any of it. The thought process is enlightening.

phdthesis/main.pdf at master · JeffBezanson/phdthesis · GitHub
Awesome!

Another language for people to misuse.
 

Asshat wormie

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Awesome!

Another language for people to misuse.
Meh. People misusing a language has nothing to do with the language and everything to do with the people. Plus, if and its a very big if, julia ever gets popular, it will most likely be used for scientific computations so the amount of people using it will be very limited.
 

Asshat wormie

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These are the worst offenders. Julia isn't targeted at programmers, it's targeted at academics, the people who currently use Matlab, Python and R very heavily for scientific computing(who literally only know enough about programming to do execute formulas for their field).

This segment of the market has some of the most off the wall shit you'll ever witness approaching it from a professional perspective.Auditing academic scientist code is the like reading a horror novel, that only gets more depraved and terrible the further you go, until you realize there is no possibility of redemption...only more terror.
True, but how often do you professional guys have to see the code that we butcher?
 

Tuco

I got Tuco'd!
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These are the worst offenders. Julia isn't targeted at programmers, it's targeted at academics, the people who currently use Matlab, Python and R very heavily for scientific computing(who literally only know enough about programming to do execute formulas for their field).

This segment of the market has some of the most off the wall shit you'll ever witness approaching it from a professional perspective.Auditing academic scientist code is the like reading a horror novel, that only gets more depraved and terrible the further you go, until you realize there is no possibility of redemption...only more terror.
As we speak I'm working on conversion of academic matlab code to C++. And everything you say is true.

Tenks_sl said:
he shame is it was an enormous pile of C so very few people knew how to work with it. For the most part any bug fixes are simply adding an if test for the very, very specific case that caused the bug, telling the person who ran into the bug to try it again and they're happy because it works but the fix was such a one-off band-aid that it constantly runs into needing these one-off fixes instead of addressing the root cause of the problem.
Tripameng_sl said:
That sounds toxic, as a general rule we find out the root cause of the issue and then leverage whether a quick fix is better or fixing the underlying issue. Even if we do the quick fix, we schedule an overhaul in a future build. Since migrating to our new product from old one, we've been following that pattern and it's kept the code very clean and manageable. We have very few problems considering we don't run any automated tests against our code (yea it's fucking retarded but not my call).
I'm familiar with this problem. Someone leaves a pile of code that works but nobody understands the code well enough to properly maintain it and it's so bad that anyone new to it would need to rehaul it. People will want small changes done to it and we have to be very careful to make very artificial and obtuse changes to limit the risk. It'd be nice to just schedule an overhaul, but it's hard to justify the cost in a system that works well and only needs minor changes.

There is an upcoming project that will extend that codebase, and I'm hoping I can get enough fat on that portion of the project so I can rehaul the entire thing. Otherwise it'll be a disaster.
 

Asshat wormie

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Matlab is a terrible pile of shit. Anyone coding in matlab, especially now that python and specifically numpy is available, is a fucking crack head. At least with R, the amount of packages one can use far outpaces stat tools written in python. But Matlab is an archaic piece of shit that needs to die.
 

Vinen

God is dead
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490
Matlab is a terrible pile of shit. Anyone coding in matlab, especially now that python and specifically numpy is available, is a fucking crack head. At least with R, the amount of packages one can use far outpaces stat tools written in python. But Matlab is an archaic piece of shit that needs to die.
Wrote Matlab code during a college internship. Can confirm all prior comments.
 

moontayle

Golden Squire
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I'm familiar with this problem. Someone leaves a pile of code that works but nobody understands the code well enough to properly maintain it and it's so bad that anyone new to it would need to rehaul it. People will want small changes done to it and we have to be very careful to make very artificial and obtuse changes to limit the risk. It'd be nice to just schedule an overhaul, but it's hard to justify the cost in a system that works well and only needs minor changes.

There is an upcoming project that will extend that codebase, and I'm hoping I can get enough fat on that portion of the project so I can rehaul the entire thing. Otherwise it'll be a disaster.
I'm looking at this in the future. We use an engine based on ActionScript since it's cross compatible with our Windows and Android systems. The problem is that Google changed how certain things were handled with KitKat, so any device running that version doesn't play nice with our engine. So unless we can find a workaround (and I know shit about AS), we're going to need to create an entirely new engine for our Android platform, especially since we need to move to Lollipop in order to start leveraging live video feeds.
 

Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
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Company keeps downsizing our group and I'm having to take on an obscene amount of work in spaces where the 'expert' has left the team. A whole lot of todo's and debug stuff in this mass of code that only one person knew how to work in.

This is frustrating..

I mean I'm learning a lot, but at the same time I'm learning from scratch
 

moontayle

Golden Squire
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Company keeps downsizing our group and I'm having to take on an obscene amount of work in spaces where the 'expert' has left the team. A whole lot of todo's and debug stuff in this mass of code that only one person knew how to work in.

This is frustrating..

I mean I'm learning a lot, but at the same time I'm learning from scratch
This is my world at the moment. Was supposed to be the junior guy on a 3 person team but the lead left and the other person has been out of the country dealing with family stuff. I'm working on future functionality but so far all I've managed to accomplish is how not to do what they want. Currently neck deep in distributed systems.