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

A little assembly does help! I wouldn't say for writing entire programs, but little bits and pieces are a good exercise. Branching and loads and stores and how the various calling conventions work.

How many times have you blown up something and landed in the debugger with no source? I can look at that and usually tell what it is doing at a glance.

As for how-has-this-helped-you-lately, I actually found a unity shader compiler bug just a year or two or three ago. That wasn't "at a glance" though, that was days of pain dual gpu debugging with the nsight tools. I had never seen the shader assembly I was looking at before, but once you know x86 you can usually figure out what you are seeing.

Try some fpu stuff too! It's wacky and different. Numbers are pushed onto a stack and can vary greatly in precision based on global control word settings. When I saw how all that worked I was amazed that anything using floating point doesn't just randomly break.

Kharzette said:

A little assembly does help! I wouldn't say for writing entire programs, but little bits and pieces are a good exercise. Branching and loads and stores and how the various calling conventions work.

How many times have you blown up something and landed in the debugger with no source? I can look at that and usually tell what it is doing at a glance.

As for how-has-this-helped-you-lately, I actually found a unity shader compiler bug just a year or two or three ago. That wasn't "at a glance" though, that was days of pain dual gpu debugging with the nsight tools. I had never seen the shader assembly I was looking at before, but once you know x86 you can usually figure out what you are seeing.

Try some fpu stuff too! It's wacky and different. Numbers are pushed onto a stack and can vary greatly in precision based on global control word settings. When I saw how all that worked I was amazed that anything using floating point doesn't just randomly break.

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When our shit is really broken we put hardware debuggers on the cpu and step through all our C code translated as assembly. It's fuckin wild

Hey, I need a little advice about writing/publishing apps and signing keys, my google skills are failing me and I'm self taught on web programming. I feel like I'm probably doing lots of work arounds for something there's an easier way of doing. I got some amazing help here last year (from Control) so turning to you guys again

I've spent a year working on an education website with procedurally generated math questions, it's going pretty well and I'm ready to start looking at how to monetise it. I've decided that my first step is to try and sell it as an app (probably microtransations to buy each subject area), so I'm using Adobe PhoneGap to turn my website into a hybrid app.

I've managed to use PhoneGap to make an Android app and got it onto Google Play for testing, so far so good. I want to use PhoneGap to make it into a Desktop Windows and iOS app now, iOS can wait but I need Desktop Windows ASAP so I can set it up on my wife's touchscreen laptop and record myself using it for YouTube videos to market it.

The hardest part of getting onto Google Play was figuring out how to get a signing key for Android, I just about managed it. The process for Desktop Windows seems much more complicated and I don't know where to start, the tutorials talk about things I'm not using. Part of the problem is that I don't think my dev envirnoment is much good. I'm using Netbeans which isn't really doing much for me, all the online tutorials talk about using Android Studio or Visual Studio. I downloaded Visual Studio and I don't even know how to start a new project, looks like it's set up for C instead of the HTML/CSS/Javascript I'm using.

I could just move all my code over to my wife's laptop but I don't always have access and I'd rather keep it all in one place because I don't know how to do version control either, maybe I could just have my code on a memory stick?

So my questions are:
1) Is Netbeans fine or is there a better environment to write HTML/CSS/Javascript in? How do I port my code across? I feel like there's a way of doing this without using the PhoneGap website to wrap my app for me.
2) How the fuck do you get a Desktop Windows signing key? PhoneGap will make the app but my PC refuses to run it.

Sorry if this is too much, just hoping that someone does this for a living and can just point me in the right direction!

First things first. Make a private bitbucket/GitHub repo. Get that code under version control my man.

Mist said:

Java app? Lower your Java security settings.

Otherwise, it's a UAC thing.

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Thanks but it's moot now as since I added the Android key to PhoneGap it now doesn't build the WIndows and iOS versions like it did before and wants signing keys before it does it.

Noodleface said:

First things first. Make a private bitbucket/GitHub repo. Get that code under version control my man.

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Thanks I'll do that, I'm assuming there'll be tutorials I can google since I've heard of GitHub. What are the benefits? At the moment I got a folder full of backups I'll lose if my laptop dies :/

Right so the big benefit of course is your code is stored online and you can access it anywhere. You can clone the repo to any machine you're on and build it on that machine

The real big benefits are for teams working on the same codebase. But in your case it's both a backup and if you need to share the source with anyone they can view it In the browser or Clone it.

Just read that raytheon merged with an aerospace company and the other company has the majority

Looks like I got out right before mass layoffs

Chris said:

Thanks but it's moot now as since I added the Android key to PhoneGap it now doesn't build the WIndows and iOS versions like it did before and wants signing keys before it does it.

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What kind of "Windows" app are you building? UWP? I've never worked with those, but I'm guessing these signing keys have something to do with the Windows Store. Classic Windows WPF and web applications don't require such things.

Noodleface said:

Just read that raytheon merged with an aerospace company and the other company has the majority

Looks like I got out right before mass layoffs

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The only way you get laid off in defense mergers is if you're a corporate employee.

Just google how to self sign code in NetBeans. That should at least let you build it for now. If you want it to go on the Windows Store at some point then you will need to pay for a code signing key.

Certify your desktop application - Windows applications

alavaz said:

The only way you get laid off in defense mergers is if you're a corporate employee.

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Or a Democrat gets elected. Its also why Republican Circle-jerking is so prevalent at Defense Contractors.

Vinen said:

Or a Democrat gets elected. Its also why Republican Circle-jerking is so prevalent at Defense Contractors.

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Business was booming for the whole Obama administration. I doubt administration effects merger layoffs though. Maybe if they happen to be losing a rebid or not rebidding on a program at the time the merger happens they may lay those people off.

A friend sent me this and I've got it bookmarked: Oh, shit, git!

I could have really used it on my last project. Twice I got git in such a snarl that it ate hours of work. I started to actually manually back things up like a savage after that having completely lost confidence in it.

I'm using it exclusively now from the command line and the workflow is not too bad. I haven't had any odd incidents or assgoblinry, but I'm not doing anything complicated these days. No trying to merge from other branches and getting conflicts etc.

The great thing about git is even if you do a bad hard reset you can still get back your changes as there is a changelog that is kept behind the scenes until git garbage collects.

Kharzette said:

I'm using it exclusively now from the command line and the workflow is not too bad. I haven't had any odd incidents or assgoblinry, but I'm not doing anything complicated these days. No trying to merge from other branches and getting conflicts etc.

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What I typically do, when merging from other branches, is just create a temporary topic branch for a merge dry run. If everything is cool, then just do the merge...otherwise figure out the conflicts so you'll know what to do on the real merge (or just merge in the dry run if you get everything working).

We just make dev branches. Do changes. Stash. Git pull or fetch and rebase. Stash pop. Commit. Push. Checkout master. Cherry pick that commit.