Programming as a career

generated garbage, yes

I was confused by the lack of obvious ads, but it's all amazon affiliate links on a number of the pages

b-but

About the Author
Liam Frady
Liam is a freelance writer with a passion for professional audio, cybersecurity, and information technology. Aside from writing, he can be found in his home studio moonlighting as a mixing and mastering engineer. Outside of work, Liam can be found spending time with his family, cooking up fun recipes he found online, or making music in his spare time.

Liam sounds cool

fun recipe requirements: velveeta and a butane torch finish

filename or fileName?

anything as long as it's not hungarian notation

path_name surely

if you can't choose between them go with path_Name

Path_Name

path-name

"path" and "name" are both types, and i too oppose hungarian notation, so i would recommend "x"

path-name

― butch wig (diamonddave85), Thursday, June 8, 2023 3:47 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Isn't this a FE/BE distinction? Javascript stans would go with camel cased, everyone else would go with snake case (personally I'd prefer pathname).

what is a "path name" anyway? it's just "path".

I frequently assign a path to 'dirname', which is very bad.

pathname is an entire path including the filename
as opposed to filename which is the filename part

path, to me, suggests the pathname without the filename

(don't get me started on aws s3 library that expects bucket and key)

this is java, so camelCase. does always raise questions when part of the name is something like API or URL or AWS or SQS or SNS though.

path-name

easier to type, harder to c+p

Surely that was a joek answer.

https://www.theserverside.com/definition/Kebab-case

Thanks.

Note that in python, options specified by kebab-case will be converted to snake_case in the actual code iirc.

(don't get me started on aws s3 library that expects bucket and key)

object storage does NOT have folders no matter how much they make it look like it!

due to interoperability with file systems, you might end up with a prefix in object storage which may look like a path but it's not!

path/name
path--name
path__name
path:name
path;name;
path…nauseum

^ Aren’t folders in a lot of file-systems also an abstraction that doesn’t actually exist?

pathAndFileNameCombinedWithOperatingSystemAppropriatePathSeparatorIncludingOptionalFileExtension

ThreadSelectedControllerServlet

LOL

it's all fake, but you can generally have folders with zero files in them

an object store prefix can't have no values, so you end up with zero byte files to hold them when you sync in an empty directory

object storage does NOT have folders no matter how much they make it look like it!

― mh, Friday, June 9, 2023 10:09 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

windows path separators to thread

Well, I got laid off today. Have to remember how to update my resume.

Ugh, sorry.

sorry to hear that, Lee

Sorry to hear that, man

Sorry Lee. I'm trying to return to software after a ten-year absence and it seems my timing couldn't be worse

Welcome to the party, Leee! :/

ooof

Thanks everyone, this is the first time I've gotten caught up in mass layoffs, so I'm trying to figure out what I should be doing, aside from stuffing my face with comfort food.

Nah you're doing it right

I've got a couple Udemy courses that I've let lapse -- React and Docker -- and so I'm getting back on that to see if that'll help me in my upcoming round of applications (I see a LOT of positions that are looking for fullstack). But of course, it's one thing to follow along with the lectures, and another thing when you need to do something in a real-world environment (I have managed to create Redis and Elasticsearch containers, but fully dockerized web apps have been beyond my grasp).

All the positions right now seem to be looking for Senior devs.

I dunno if this reflects any larger trends in the industry, but in my last round of interviewing (around 2021), I don't remember doing many/any take-home assignments, with I think 2-3 rounds of technical challenges, most of which focused on design questions (as opposed to "manipulate strings, arrays, or data structures").

This time, I've been interviewing for about 3 weeks, and I've already done one take-home with another one that I have to reserve time for, I've done two technical challenges, both of which have involved string/array manipulation. And, although I haven't gotten that far yet, there seems to be closer to 4-5 rounds of interviews for any given position.

I love take-homes. I am not great at recalling terminology, even for concepts I understand well, so I've flubbed some of those answers in past interviews. Take-home is more similar to the real work and I'm much better at that, even under time pressure

Like you Leee, I've been at my search for three weeks now. Out of 40ish applications, only one response, but thankfully it led to an interview and a soon-to-be second interview and seems promising. Just rejections or silence otherwise. I do think I need to change up a few things with the way I'm searching though. And I feel like every listing I see wants experience with Docker so I'll be heading to Udemy for a course soon too

docker is just a fancy vm, right? so that's like asking 'are you good with installing / configuring computers?' does it even say what is running within docker?

the whole dev-ops thing annoys me. used to be two separate jobs taking 100% of someone's expertise. now someone who can code a bit is expected to also know, for example, how to secure a webserver for a national company or how to tune a filesystem for many small files.

Vinnie, I dread take homes, because for me they take a lot of time and energy. That said, I've actually been making a dent in my Udemy course on Docker and Kubernetes!

And yes, Docker is a modern version of a VM, which, even though I'm not good at it, is a lot easier and faster to set up than whatever Oracle's solution is, namely because Docker containers are usually built on a pared down Linux image.

(Of the job listings that I'm seeing that I have to pass on applying for because I lack the qualifications, it feels like they're usually full stack, and looking specifically for React on the front end.)

I haven't been getting callbacks

:( Whiney. Spray and pray is unfortunately/probably the most reliable method -- it's a number's game -- unless you're willing to hit up former colleagues and ask them, which I haven't done ~yet~ because that seems overly mercenary and transactional. But if this drags out I'm more than willing to swallow my pride.

I just finished a 2-hour take-home, and my brain is totally exhausted. I have another phone screen in a couple hours, yippee. :\

:( Whiney. Spray and pray is unfortunately/probably the most reliable method -- it's a number's game -- unless you're willing to hit up former colleagues and ask them, which I haven't done ~yet~ because that seems overly mercenary and transactional. But if this drags out I'm more than willing to swallow my pride.

Why? I always like helping former co-workers.

Because it feels nakedly self-serving to me! I know, I should get over that feeling.

you should!

FWIW, my best jobs have been found via former co-workers. And I definitely try to help folks who are good and reach out.

xpost I feel compelled to speak up for devops. My experience is that for services you either need to do a devops model (end to end ownership) or a SRE model (professionalized ownership with a seat at the table). In the late 90s and early 2000s, I saw many shops that had a clear distinction between development engineers and "ops" folks. The situation often devolved because the ops folks were not empowered to request the things they needed to make the software operate reliably, so they always got blamed and couldn't do anything about it. Meanwhile, the development engineers just looked down on the ops folks. If you want stuff to work, you just can't do that.

Now, as you grow as a company, it really does make sense to have oncall be split to teams that can handle it during their working hours for the most valuable services, and so that ends up being separate teams from the development team. But these oncall teams basically need the ability to have input into the system design and the roadmap in order to be effective. They need to be able to tell the development team "no".

So yeah these days that probably means you need to know k8 or some basic AWS stuff. That's OK, there's lots of resources on that and I've found it really enlightening and challenging.