jim

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago

This is a classic piece, and I love the contradictions in the text. It encapsulates my feelings on good software and code that it almost becomes an art than a science.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

PSA for Debian Testing users: read the wiki

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting

Control-F security returns 18 results. This is well known and there's even instructions on how to get faster updates in testing if you want.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

My thought was that a lawsuit is more expensive than arbitration, but settling a class action lawsuit is cheaper than thousands of arbitrations.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Thanks for sharing. We use all pytest-style tests using pytest fixtures. I'll keep my eyes open for memory issues when we test upgrading to python 3.12+.

Very helpful info!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I'm most excited about the new REPL. I'm going to push for 3.13 upgrade as soon as we can (hipefully early next year). I've messed around with rc1 and the REPL is great.

Do you know why pytest was taking up so much RAM? We are also on 3.11 and I'm probably going to wait until 3.13 is useable for us.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

EOL for 3.8 is coming up in a few short weeks!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

So cool!! Mercury is definitely the most mysterious inner planet due to its difficulty to get a space probe there even though it's the closest planet.

The spacecraft will arrive next year, and I can't wait for all the Science it will uncover!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Haha, I've been waiting for the 4K/8K reference in this volume. Poor Anna.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

TIL this exists

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I also like the POSIX “seconds since 1970” standard, but I feel that should only be used in RAM when performing operations (time differences in timers etc.). It irks me when it’s used for serialising to text/JSON/XML/CSV.

I've seen bugs where programmers tried to represent date in epoch time in seconds or milliseconds in json. So something like "pay date" would be presented by a timestamp, and would get off-by-one errors because whatever time library the programmer was using would do time zone conversions on a timestamp then truncate the date portion.

If the programmer used ISO 8601 style formatting, I don't think they would have included the timepart and the bug could have been avoided.

Use dates when you need dates and timestamps when you need timestamps!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

Do you use it? When?

Parquet is really used for big data batch data processing. It's columnar-based file format and is optimized for large, aggregation queries. It's non-human readable so you need a library like apache arrow to read/write to it.

I would use parquet in the following circumstances (or combination of circumstances):

  • The data is very large
  • I'm integrating this into an analytical query engine (Presto, etc.)
  • I'm transporting data that needs to land in an analytical data warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, etc.)
  • Consumed by data scientists, machine learning engineers, or other data engineers

Since the data is columnar-based, doing queries like select sum(sales) from revenue is much cheaper and faster if the underlying data is in parquet than csv.

The big advantage of csv is that it's more portable. csv as a data file format has been around forever, so it is used in a lot of places where parquet can't be used.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Wow everyone seems to love P3 but I actually liked P4 better. I mean I really enjoyed both, but P4 was a more immersive experience for me. I should reboot my vita and play it again.

I really felt like P4 had deeper connections and relationships between the characters. It felt more real, and that made the tension in the game more exciting. I love every second of it and am still trying to find a game like it.

Don't get me wrong, P3 was great also. The gameplay was superb and the characters were all great. But P4 still has a special place in my heart.

 

Here's a hypothetical scenario at a company: We have 2 repos that builds and deploys code as tools and libraries for other apps at the company. Let's call this lib1 and lib2.

There's a third repo, let's call it app, that is application code that depends on lib1 and lib2.

The hard part right now is keeping track of which version of lib1 and lib2 are packaged for app at any point in time.

I'd like to know at a glance, say 1 month ago, what versions of app is deployed and what version of lib1 and lib2 they were using. Ideally, I'm looking for a software solution that would be agnostic to any CI/CD build system, and doubly ideally, an open source one. Maybe a simple web service you call with some metadata, and it displays it in a nice UI.

Right now, we accomplish this by looking at logs, git commit history, and stick things together. I know I can build a custom solution pretty easily, but I'm looking for something more out-of-the-box.

 

I generally don't like "listicles", especially ones that try to make you feel bad by suggesting that you "need" these skills as a senior engineer.

However, I do find this list valuable because it serves as a self-reflection tool.

Here are some areas I am pretty weak in:

  • How to write a design doc, take feedback, and drive it to resolution, in a reasonable period of time
  • How to convince management that they need to invest in a non-trivial technical project
  • How to repeat yourself enough that people start to listen

Anything here resonate with y'all?

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