It’s a lot like building a car for someone. You get it working. Spend a bunch of time tuning that engine and just making it purr. You put your heart into painting it perfectly maybe even giving a little extra love. Then the customer takes it and says, “everything is great except the horn doesn’t work at 19mph. Works below 19 mph and above 19 mph but not at 19 mph.” You are left staring at 2 wires and a switch having to figure out how something couldn’t be any more basic has this odd quirk. That’s programming.
Category: Programming
Coding
So you want to be a programmer?
In programming, you do a lot a writing. Probably as much writing as some best selling book authors but your books will never be read per se. Let’s use books as an analogy.
If you write a program from scratch, you are the author much like Stephen King. You plot and plan the story. You define the characters and their backstories. You write biographies of these characters that will never make it into the book but these details are important. In programming you do much of this same detail of work in project planning, database architecting, creating or choosing a programming framework, meetings and discussions with clients (book publishers) as well as your team, deciding what external resources will be used and so forth. You are Stephen King.
If you don’t write a program from scratch but instead work to modify a program that someone else wrote, you have to get into the head of that person. Much like if you were going to modify or edit one of Stephen King’s works, you’d have to get into his head, figure out the back stories, and really analyze the writing. With code, you have to figure out what the other programmer was thinking all without the documentation and backstories that were created during their process. You have to become Stephen King.
The people who use your program or the modified version of someone else’s program do not have to get as intimate with the works. They use it. Or in Stephen King’s case, they read it.
Your minimal design is not intuitive
UI designers. What do you think. Will I be getting notifications in email or SMS?
So you want to be a programmer?
Practice the art of coffeeing. Put the creamer down. Never touch “mild” again. Fire up that dark roast. And here is the tricky part. Like a surfer seeking the perfect wave, you MUST learn to find that fine line between the brain fog of too little coffee and the jittery distraction of too much coffee. There is a magical flow state where too much and too little collide. It is up to your disciplined practice to find just how much coffee must be consumed throughout the day to ride that wave for maximum productivity.
Today’s productivity music
Today’s simple goal is to close out or get close to closing out 3 projects. I want to go into next week with a fairly clean slate. To that available, I sacrifice some hearing as I turn up the cyberpunk in the name of productivity! Hack the planet!
Why are you hard of hearing?
“Why are you hard of hearing? Did you work artillery? Construction? Machine shop?”
“Software development. Headphones. Cyberpunk. Loud.”
Professional growth
While I search for new employment, I’ve been taking the opportunity to expand my skillset. I’m very excited about React.js. I’ve been reviewing algorithms and calculating their complexity in time and space and really enjoying the exercises. Next up, Jenkins.
This all began with an Atari 400 (technically with an Atari 2600)
Every single time I pull up a terminal window and begin typing “ssh -l” I feel like such a hacker ? “Morpheus, I’m going in!”
Productivity
Spent the day nose down in the WordPress codex on a WooCommerce Storefront theme and building a Max Mega Menu into the store. Beautiful plugin. Day of PHP and CSS.
An active mind is a healthy mind
Knocking the plaques off the brain. Began the day with some Spanish practice and some Morse code practice. Then jumped into codewars.com and the first challenge I was given was…”write a Morse code decoder!”
Here’s my passing code (wordpress stripped the indentions):
function decode_morse(string $code): string {
$returnstring = ”;
//break the input string into words based on three spaces between words
$morsewords = explode(‘ ‘,$code);
foreach($morsewords as &$word){
//translate each letter of each word from Morse using the built-in library
$morse = explode(‘ ‘,$word);
foreach($morse as &$value){
$returnstring .= MORSE_CODE[$value];
}
$returnstring .= ‘ ‘;
}
//clean up return string by removing any leading or trailing spaces we added or that were in the original input string
return trim($returnstring);
}
Now to return to becoming a PowerApps and Azure expert. Light the incense, dim the lights, and turn up the cyberpunk. I’m going in!
Error messages do not lie
As a programmer, you have to learn to trust the error messages. They can be cryptic and frustrating, but they usually tell you exactly where the problem is if you are willing to listen.
Catalina Trashed My Development Environment
And then made it work so much better than before! In troubleshooting, I applied updates and corrected problems with my previous development environment with lessons learned. While this was a nuisance, my machine is in better shape for it.
Any .NET advice for this?
Maybe you .NET experts could give me a shove in the correct direction.
I am still trying to resolve this error: "Error: Sys.InvalidOperationException: ‘DocMapUpdatePanelId’ is not a property or an existing field."
My ReportViewer won’t function and I’ve narrowed it down to system.web.extensions. I am using Framework 4.6.1 and should be using system.web.extensions 4.0.0.0. The references show it as 4.0.0.0 and when I try to add the reference I get a message that says “system.web.extensions is already referenced” I cannot remove the reference either.
When I look in the GAC, I do not see 4.0.0.0 but instead system.web.extensions 3.5.0.0.
I am working with Visual Studio 2017. I have installed all updates. No amount of uninstalling and reinstallng via NuGet makes a difference. Adding and removing dlls from the bin directory makes no difference. Solution has been cleaned. Temporary files have been cleared repeatedly.
Going to the forums with this results in a bunch of guessing, or silence.
Pretty sure I’m in Hell.
Confessions of a programmer
Confessions of a programmer: As a coffee drinker and programmer, I don’t want a standing desk; I want a desk with a urinal. #coap
Confessions of a programmer
Confessions of a programmer: I never presume the previous developer was incompetent. Instead, I assume they just had a drug problem. #coap
