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  • 9 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
Cake day: March 12th, 2024
  • beepnoise@piefed.socialtoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.ml•Better start fixing your spaghetti code.
    17·
    3 months ago

    I see coding tasks with juniors a way to actually have a two-way conversation with said juniors and get them engaging.

    What I tend to do is I’ll give them an objective, and then I’ll ask them what they think needs to be done. Each step of the way I’ll try and correct them and get them going in the right direction.

    If all is well, everything is cleared up, the junior knows what to do at each step, and then they go off and do it. Then I do the code review and the conversation restarts.

    More often than not, the junior dev will get mentally stuck on a problem that they cannot conceptualise. That’s fine - I tell them to leave it, work on the stuff they can do, and then we’ll tackle it together.

    Generally speaking, good junior devs can conceptualise a task about 50-80% and will get stuck on the other 20-50%. An excellent junior dev can be given a task and independently complete it - the code may not be perfect or up to a middle-senior coding quality, but they can get the job done.

    The bad junior developers are the ones who need their hands held at every step of the way and never seem to improve or improve at such a snails pace that it is taking effective resources away from the team (i.e. senior devs - 1 or more) to explain the task repeatedly.

    At this point, you need to raise that up to your line manager and have a serious discussion about whether you and your line manager think it is worth the investment to keep teaching this person while making said line manager aware of the problems (and make this based with facts that both you and the line manager can clearly observe and/or have observed).

    For the others, you should go from a path of having to explain fundamental concepts (mostly because you both missed out on the weird edge cases of the task at hand) to in months being able to leave said juniors to the task and have them mostly complete it without any help from senior devs. And seeing that progress is why mentoring & code reviews is great - seeing that personal development in real time is an incredibly rewarding feeling.

  • beepnoise@piefed.socialtoTechnology@beehaw.org•*Permanently Deleted*
    36·
    3 months ago

    There was a time where Elon Musk (EM) was pretty much a nerd darling. The real life Tony Stark.

    I don’t know where you are, but in the UK the positive image dropped quite quickly once he called a British cave diver a pedophile over the remarks said cave diver (Vernon Unsworth) said that EM offering his small submarine to help the Thai cave boys was a “PR stunt” and also to “stick his submarine where it hurts” (link). Admittedly the latter was harsh words, but to then go ahead and call a British person in Thailand a pedophile (obviously referencing Gary Glitter) was incredibly childish, petty, and virtually made a lot of Brits distrust EM as well as see him for who he really was from the online tantrum.

    I do feel sorry for those who have been suckered into thinking EM isn’t some narcissistic arsehole, although the number is dwindling (a personal highlight was when he got booed after Dave Chappelle introduced him to his audience in San Fransisco)

  • beepnoise@piefed.socialtoTechnology@beehaw.org•Steam is a ticking time bomb
    0·
    8 months ago

    Truth be told, it’s a little bit more complicated than that.

    PC Gaming has had tons of DRM examples - from SecuROM (anyone remember those times?) to modern day Denuvo DRM.

    So there are a few unpopular DRMs out there:

    • Disc checking based DRM (if the disc was cooked, that’s your paid game down the drain)
    • CD Key based DRM (if you lost the CD Key, that’s your paid game down the drain)
    • Online activation (you registered the same game on two different PCs? Try that again one more time and you’re done for. For added bonus, sometimes the activation software would register the same PC as different hardware because someone had the audacity to upgrade their hardware!)
    • Always online - need I say more?
    • Cloud gaming - now with the added joy of not owning the ones and zeros you paid for!!

    Steam has managed to use account based DRM while avoiding the trappings of pretty much all of the above (for some games you can enter a CD key, and that game is permanently attached to your account, which is great if you lose the disc, but sucks if you want to sell the physical game on afterwards), while the competition used any of the above (some used multiple layers of DRM, which is eurgh).

    Then on top of that, hats off to Valve - they do tend to listen to their customers and give them what they want, even if the whole point is to keep them tied to using Steam and strangle out the competition:

    • Cloud saving
    • Steam Workshops
    • Game streaming via local network
    • Sharing the game library with family
    • Controller support with button remapping for legacy games with poor support
    • In store game reviews
    • Store algoritm suggestions based on the game categories you buy and what you friends buy
    • Discussion forums (even if they can be thoroughly toxic at times)
    • Guides (the formatting is awful)
    • Fairly deep and independent social integration
    • Built in audio streaming via Steam
    • Those card things that you can sell for a bit of money or craft

    Compare that to Origin, Epic Store, GOG etc. They just cannot compete with what Valve offers in terms of features on top of features.

    What bothers me about Valve is that

    • They have such a chokehold on PC gaming that everything else feels inferior, and no other company can really compete in terms of features
    • They have fought refunds in the past (as mentioned in the article)
    • The whole paid modding fiasco because Valve really wanted to financially exploit a community known to give stuff away for free
    • How they often abandon their own products due to lack of customer attention and their limited size due to wanting to remain a limited company
      • I’m looking at Valve Index, and apart from Half Life: Alyx, I don’t see much in the way of new games. Even worse is that I watched someone on YouTube basically explain that there are still glitches and weird stuff that occurs in the Valve Index - aa product that costs £919 here in the UK.
      • I’m also looking at the Steam Controller, which has been very, very neglected with no talk of a sequel (given how successful the Steam Deck has been, I’m shocked at the lack of a “companion controller”)
      • I’m also looking at the infamous Steam PCs that completely flopped
    • How TF2 started the trend (at least on Steam) of microtransactions in games, and how CS:GO has carried that flag (and started a gambling community which has probably done untold damage to young children as they grow into adults and are confronted with the world of gambling)
    • How Valve, as a company that started off making games, has absolutely no desire whatsoever to make games anymore because of how wildly successful they are.

    And this is the stuff I can think of at the top of my head. I was going to say it also concerns me they don’t have a bug bounty program, but it turns out now they do.