The Big Programming Thread - Page 940

On January 17 2018 16:58 dsyxelic wrote:


How did you decide on wanting to do front-end? And did you look for a full-stack job or did it just happen that you got a full stack job and/or your skillset naturally fit it so you ended up there?

For me at the moment my skillset is so broad (or in a negative way, lacking) and unfocused and so are my interests. I guess that is because I'm only a student, but at the same time I feel like most of my peers have an idea of what field they want to go into and even intern listings seem to be more focused. It is mostly at large companies where there are more generalized roles but even there there are tons of specialist roles that it seems like I should aim to specialize soon. I've done at least one small project + a course in a bunch of fields but nothing really seemed to click. If I had to attempt to explain what was the most fun for me in the past, I'd say something that automates large tedious tasks. For ex. a program that constantly checks multiple sites for the latest news on a specific person/thing.
Basically anything that takes something super large and turns it into something small.

On January 17 2018 20:31 Blisse wrote:


My first internship was a QA position at a local startup that hired lots of interns. I did very well, so they asked me to come back for a random dev internship. I did. I started learning Windows dev because I had a Windows Phone. I lucked into a really good mobile internship position because I _missed_ the deadline, so my application competed with much weaker intern candidates. I got the job without any technical interviews. Because I worked on Windows, I got an interview with Microsoft, got lucky with a technical question when I was super excited to find the solution, and got a Microsoft internship doing mobile. I did okay, but they gave me a return offer, and I asked to intern on a Windows team doing C++, which went great! I wanted to do more Windows mobile dev, but realized the platform was dying, so I switched over to Android. I interviewed at a local start-up doing Android, and they gave me the position without a technical interview because I already had many internships. I took a year off, but I'm now working on Android at Square because I recalled the start-up using lots of Square libraries in the app.

I have one of the most varied intern work history compared to almost all my classmates and friends. I had no clue what I wanted to do, and honestly at the time I didn't care and didn't plan it in any way. I just tried to find the best, most interesting opportunities to me at whatever point in time. I got an offer to return to Microsoft on Windows, but I declined because I felt it was in my best interest to diversify, but maybe someone else wouldn't feel the same way. My capstone project ended the same manner, jumping projects, from helping a teacher to writing a research paper to programming a technical solution, over a year and a half of project time. Our professor uses our capstone as an example of not being afraid to _not_ commit until it feels right.

I took courses that I felt were interesting: distributed systems, computation, security, real-time operating systems, UI, criminal law, geology. I dropped courses that didn't seem interesting after a few classes (b/c of teachers, coursework). I attended some of my friend's lectures, like etymology, genetics, music in film. Some were useful, some were fun, I feel better about expanding my horizons in this way, finding out all the things I liked, disliked or found interesting. This style fit closer to the type of person I am.


Go for the opportunities that you feel will bring you the best outcomes. Paul Graham calls this upwind. Read the whole post.

On January 18 2018 00:34 ShoCkeyy wrote:
Backend is boring for me, frontend is much more fun, two sides to each story. But I'm also a full stack dev for fun, now architect/strategist/optimizer professionally.

On January 18 2018 23:57 Manit0u wrote:


It's all cool and dandy until some asshole comes along and wants you to do one of those "pixel perfect" projects...

Also, JavaScript is bullshit.

On January 19 2018 02:58 travis wrote:
Well I am doing it because I really enjoy the puzzle and I feel like I am learning a lot.

As for functional programming, aren't loops faster?

On January 20 2018 02:25 sc-darkness wrote:
How can a loop in any programming language be faster? They run on the same CPU. Same CPU instructions? Unless compiler/interpreter messes it up.

On January 20 2018 03:08 Excludos wrote:


It depends entirely on how the compiler handles it. In most regular languages it's not implemented well and recursion will end up consuming a lot more of the stack (And can even lead to stack overflow). It looks fancy, but not really super useful. You need to find a language which supports tail recursion..which I'm not sure about right now. I would think certain versions of Lisp does.

Quick google: Scheme, Prolog, all the MLs (SML, Caml, OCaml), Haskell, Erlang, Elixir are all optimized for tail calls. Apparently Common Lisp is not.

On January 19 2018 02:58 travis wrote:
Well I am doing it because I really enjoy the puzzle and I feel like I am learning a lot.

As for functional programming, aren't loops faster?

On January 21 2018 06:41 sc-darkness wrote:
Has anyone got Entity Framework and Microsoft SQL Server experience? I've got a task after an interview to цреате an ASP.NET MVC project and another one which will have to provide endpoints (this is the project which will use Entity Framework). One of requirements is that both projects should work when they're on a different host each. I'm not entirely sure what they mean. I can provide a config file to configure host, but it's the weekend and I can't ask for clarification. Has anyone got an idea what they mean? Requirement seems a bit vague to me.

On January 20 2018 19:25 Manit0u wrote:


It depends on what you want to do with your code. With functional programming it's easier to paralellize things. You'll be consuming more peak memory but will be able to traverse graphs asynchronously.

For TSP for example you could either use some form of Scatter-Gather pattern or something like that:

Process starts at node 0.
It goes to next node, stores all the visited nodes in order.
When it finds a branching node it chooses one of the branches at random to proceed and spawns new processes for all the other branches, passing them visited node list up to that point.
Each of the processes then follows this pattern.
When one process reaches the destination you pause it and all other processes compare themselves to it with each visited node.
If a process has more nodes in the list than the process that reached the destination you kill that process (we're no longer interested in this path).
When another process reaches the destination and it has less nodes than the paused process, you pause that one and kill the paused process.
The solution to TSP will be the last process standing.

For most of the processes this won't even be an O(n) problem. And it won't ever be greater than O(n) for any of them.

It's way more efficient than looping because you're checking multiple paths simultaneously. Languages like Erlang and Elixir have really light processes that can communicate with each other even across different machines in the cluster.

This, in my opinion, would be way better than any imperative/synchronous solution you can come up with. But I'm pretty noob at algos and I might be completely wrong. I'm also sure that this could be optimized somehow.

On January 21 2018 12:31 Neshapotamus wrote:


I used to do .NET a lot.

Here is my interpretation.

The first project is an MVC application. (This is the front end application for the web using the MVC framework)

The second project is a Rest service. (This probably also uses a controller to configure rest endpoints)
The second project should use Entity Framework to access data from the database

You can launch(execute) both projects independently. You can think of this as having two "executables" that you can launch from different servers. Since this is a .NET project, it will most likely run in IIS. However, if it is an owin project, then you can launch this in either IIS or as an executable.