Programming as a career

but wouldn't /^(9A)*(9B)*(9C)*$/ allow 9A9A9A9A? i can only have at most one of each.

Sorry, yes, it would - I misread "at least 1 of A, B and C" to mean that repeats were OK as long as A-B-C were still in order.

Probably something to be said with listing the valid combinations separately for readability, though. As long as it doesn't result in such a massive list nobody will ever read the whole thing...

maybe i'm missing something but isn't it just A.*B.*C
haven't done regex in ages

never mind

maybe i should do more regex? tried for a programming job for the first time in over a decade, flubbed a coding task where it required a "\w" but I put in a "*". fun but stressful.

i love writing regexes--they're like a fun puzzle imo. regex101.com is a good tool for writing/debugging

but \w / \W seems designed to confuse

I enjoy writing regexes too, but I don’t think I’ve ever written one without referring to a cheat sheet. They don’t seem like good material for interview questions because who can remember all those special characters.

I have spent my entire career avoding using regex as much as I possibly can, the most unreadable abominations that they are.

xp yeah it reminds me of the tests I got in college where you had to remember specific syntax which always felt dumb because in the real world you could just Google it. which I still do, often :)

in retrospect it was kind of funny how adamant they were about not sharing your code with your classmates, even calling it "plagiarism" over and over, when in reality like half of what I do is copy something and change it a bit

lol, I was careful to specify that I enjoy writing regexes. Reading them, not so much.

https://nedbatchelder.com/blog/201302/a_regular_crossword.html

https://nedbatchelder.com/iv/webp/pix/regular_crossword.png.webp

you bugger

(Google image search has the answer. i remember doing it at the time and getting less than half)

https://thetypingoftheregex.com/

so,

"What have you done to his eyes?"

with "What" and "have" highlighted. what matches that? 4 letter words with a 'ha' in them? how do you write that as a reg exp? what am i missing?

would it work to do everything in string before 'you'?

I have to google regex solutions rather than knuckling down and learning the syntax, so i don't share this as someone who can complete it. Admire anyone who can though!

um, maybe, letters rather than words. it goes so quickly though it's hard to spot the patterns.

i had another that was two words starting with ex among other words.

there's a video of the game on the guy's twitter feed, you use the global flag: /What|have/g

I guess /[^\s]+ha[^\s]+/ would work, harder to type quickly though.

Ugh so fussy, but I guess that's regex for you (I keep forgetting to match the punctuation when that's part of what it looks for).

i've written my fair share of regexes and i have no idea how to do the exclusions... what's the syntax? also symbol ligatures (try typing !=) are for disgusting savages

symbol ligatures and cursive italics or, as i call it, "frontend brain".

ligatures and italics have over 600 years or + of history tho – I think they're extremely useful.

Regex is, and always has been, a horror show, so this is very apt.

regex stands for reginald, ex-marine

I feel a new screename comin' on!

HI DERE!

Should probably post this in the macOS hoonja-doonja thread, but holy crap this was the best $3 I spent.
https://krillapps.com/patterns/

My point is really that product designers who can’t program struggle to iterate. They can make the design process feel glacial and cumbersome. If you can program, it’s possible to brute-force a solution and retain some creative momentum. I guess this is probably a better discussion for a different thread!

― Allen (etaeoe), Friday, November 4, 2022 12:09 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

ok i put it here

whats the nature of the block as far as iteration just not understanding how much work various changes will take / inability to design with flexibility baked in

the one good PM i've ever worked with came from 4th line tech support. PMs who start there career in non-technical roles are generally useless. MBA types are worse.

lol I had typed out a long comment responding to that in the other thread but gave up when it was moving too quickly

tl;dr version is that product ideas and direction can come from anywhere but you have to
1. Have someone running a project who can comprehend the nature of the work being done by people reporting to them, whether that's a management relationship or just a project coordinator
2. Have people who can successfully break that work down into digestible components, and explain to that management how they have value. Maybe that's an individual developer, maybe that's the person guiding a software development team

not all projects have easy first deliverable pieces and the terrible project managers are the ones who think a demo is going to "work" off the bat. and the really bad ones don't understand what completing something looks like and think that as soon as it appears to "work" you can just send it out the door

are we talking about project managers or product managers? i was talking about product.

I think product design (what is the thing being addressed, what are the working parts, how do people interact with this) is a different skill from product management or project management, for sure

one of the best project managers I had did work to learn all the jargon and how the pieces interacted but had absolutely no idea what half the things actually were. but they could run meetings very well, communicate with other groups to figure out if we were lined up with what other teams and stakeholders expected

yeah I kind of conflated the two, but I think in the twitter example (sleeping on floor lady) it sounded like those roles were also very conflated

They are often conflated. They shouldn’t be! I do think both are valuable, I just don’t think product designers who make web shit but can’t program are super useful.

I don’t know if we’re too easy on product designers (i.e., it’s fine you don’t know anything about technology) or too easy on engineers (i.e., it’s fine you don’t know anything about the product you’re writing). Maybe it’s both.

I've mentioned it before, but the one guy I knew in high school who was enamored with Google when it first appeared in the late 90s, then went to the nice school, did a non-programming course of study, and then went to work at Google was just heartbroken when he got there and found out that management wouldn't even consider product ideas if they didn't come from programmers

he quit that place and did ok later though

broke some tests that were asserting using the toString() output of an object containing other objects containing other objects containing other objects

I respect their confidence in their ability to maintain consistent string representations.

elsewhere we have tests that compare the md5sum of the (binary file) output with an expected md5sum. and if they don't match, then what? absolutely no way of debugging it. could be one bit out, could be complee garbage.

One bit out would be impressive, until your assassination by the NSA shortly after.

(i didn't mean we were generating clashes, more that the output could be a single bit different from the expected but the md5sum would be completely different and there'd be no way of knowing how close you are)

Oh yeah, sure!

I think it’s relatively affordable these days to generate MD5 collisions these days

Oh yeah good point!

these days!

The byline -- is he ours? https://github.blog/2023-03-23-we-updated-our-rsa-ssh-host-key/

wrong dude