I decided to start doing small “devnotes” on developer stuff I’m doing so I can refer to them later (and also because I feel like I could use more technical content on this blog)
Today is about PostgreSQL. I haven’t used it much beyond standard ANSI sql stuff. You won’t always have a graphical interface to access your database, sometimes you need to ssh to prod and query the database from the shell.
I have a small mobile app that I wrote using React Native (henceforth RN) back in 2017, currently deployed on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Shortly before my US trip, I got an email from Google telling me about a required action:
By August 1, 2019, all apps that use native code must provide a 64-bit version in addition to the 32-bit version in order to publish an update.
The topic of the mythical “10x programmer” has been the topic of discussion recently on tech twitter, due to a thread listing out the supposed signs of being such a mythical beast.
10x engineers
Founders if you ever come across this rare breed of engineers, grab them. If you have a 10x engineer as part of your first few engineers, you increase the odds of your startup success significantly.
OK, here is a tough question.
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
– Winston Churchill
I already typed the above quote into the post, then realized I had already used it before. Whatever, just goes to show, I’m no stranger to failure.
I was reminded of this quote because recently I prepared a demo for a project that didn’t push through. At first I was annoyed at the wasted effort, but I realized that I had wisely taken the demo project as an opportunity to learn/sharpen some skills.
I wish I had a more concise way to describe it, but I really don’t.
Some time ago this guy I follow on Twitter, visakanv wanted to know how to do a certain search: he wanted to know who a given famous person follows on Twitter, and among those, finds the one who follow him (visakanv), so he could network through them. I might not be explaining the concept too well, here’s the thread.
I mentioned before that as an engineer, I’m not fond of marketing.
Image credit: Dilbert.com (Disclaimer: Liking the Dilbert comics is not an endorsement of Scott Adams’ politics)
It’s not that I can’t be good at salesmanship either. I have a good grasp of communication skills and think I have a decent chance of writing good copy. My main issue is that I’ve been exposed many times to sales/marketing practices that just seem dishonest downright or scummy.
If I could give some advice to someone starting out in their software development career, it would be this: Don’t stay in the same place too long. The first company I worked at, I stayed with them for thirteen years, which I now feel was way too long. I have to admit, the work was hard and challenging, but I was young and had a lot of energy and was willing to work the long hours.
Another repost from my Quora answers, this time some info for anyone looking to move into programming.
What are the pros and cons of making your career in programming?
Pros:
It is a very rewarding career financially. Software development often ranks in the top 10 highest-earning careers in most countries There is a lot of scope - you could be developing web applications, mobile applications, embedded applications, client-side, server-side, data analysis, artificial intelligence, games, etc It is very difficult to be bored.
Given my recent misgivings about Quora, I thought it might be a good idea to cross-post some of my answers from there into this blog, with some edits even. So here’s the first one! (stuff in italics were added during the cross-post)
How can you read and study a large software project source code?
Attacking a large, existing codebase that you are unfamiliar with can be a daunting endeavor.
I had some free time the other day so I randomly decided to post in the PH subreddit’s regular afternoon random discussion thread, asking for questions about software development. I ended up typing some longish answers, I thought I’d copy them over to the blog in case anyone was interested. TBH I meant more like StackOverflow type questions with specific technical problems, but I ended up answering mostly career-related questions, which is fine, but disclaimer: I don’t claim to be an expert, these are just my opinions on things.
Last October I participated in #Hacktoberfest, sponsored by DigitalOcean and Github. It’s a “celebration” to promote open source activity, and basically you just need to submit 5 pull requests to any github repository, and they give away swag to anyone who completes the activity. Microsoft held a [counterpart celebration] where they only require you to submit 1 pull request to any Microsoft repository.
I’ve always wanted to start participating in Open Source, but it’s a bit difficult to find a good place to contribute (other than logging issues of course).
A while back I started a Twitter trivia bot as a weekend project. That bot is still up and running on Twitter, you can check it out there!
But today, I thought I’d write about the answer-checking mechanism used by the bot. It was a bit interesting to me because it was the first nontrivial use I had for Django’s unit testing framework. I’m not too keen on unit testing web functionality (something I still have to learn), but this seemed an appropriate first use of a unit test framework for several reasons:
I’ve been working with Javascript for more than a decade. Last week while helping another developer debug a problem, I had to Google how to check if an element exists in a Javascript array, something superbasic, that one would expect most newbies to know. I’m sure I Google some superbasic thing at least once a week. It’s not embarassing or anything, it’s a common occurrence. I’m surely not alone. Just last night a tweet about this crossed my TL:
Someone responded to my post on things to learn in 2019 by asking how one finds the inspiration to learn all of the things. Well, my first answer was that those are just things I find interesting and may look into, but that’s not really an answer for the inspiration part.
Software development is a very wide field, one where the amount of things you can learn increases daily, so it’s almost impossible to keep up with everything.
A while back we were tasked with helping a client’s internal dev team to migrate their repositories from Subversion to Git. The distributed VCS seemed ideal for their situation - they had a very small in-house dev team managing contributions from external subcontractors. The main rationale was that their process of merging contributions from the external developers was extremely complicated and often resulted in conflicts that were challenging to merge. Before this, I hadn’t actually used Git too deeply myself (aside from cloning stuff from Github), and especially not in a team setting, so the training one of our other engineers gave them was a good opportunity for me to become familiar with Git as well.
One of the things about self-identifying as a “Full Stack Developer” or “Solution Architect” is that there’s no shortage of things to learn, and oftentimes it’s good for your career-wise to at least have some passing knowledge of a bunch of technologies. It helps that I really like the field as well. I try to make sure I study or learn at least one new programming language or framework every year (though I am willing to stretch that definition as needed).
Although I still primarily identify as a “Full Stack Developer”, during the past few years I’ve also found myself in a role called “Solution Architect”. The thing about being a solution architect is that there isn’t really a clear definition of the role, what it involves, or the scope of responsibility. I suppose it depends largely on the organization and the project. The role mostly involves making techical decisions on a larger scale, like project-wide or organization-wide, rather than on the micro day-to-day technical decisions involved in a typical software development involves.
This year I had the dubious privilege of having to work with a C++ project again. Although my college education was in C, that was a completely different animal. I did self-study C++ for a bit back even before I was working, mostly because I was interested in game development even back then. I remember trying some OpenGL and/or DirectX stuff back with good old Borland Turbo-C++ during the DOS days and using the Dev-C++ IDE when I shifted to Windows.
For any nontrivial software project of at least moderate team size, there can be a significant cost to onboarding a new team member, especially at later stages when you are rushing to meet deadlines.
The most signifiant cost is of course the communication overhead as described in the Mythical Man Month. Fun story, the CEO of a company once told me they would add more developers to a delayed project to meet the deadline and when I pointed out the increased overhead he said to me that it wasn’t a problem because they would just assign modules to those devs that have minimal dependencies so they don’t have to communicate so much.
Text editors (and by extension IDEs) are a programmer’s best friend. I thought I’d look back at a number of text editors I’ve used over the years. (I grew up with Windows, so I won’t list vim/emacs/nano here, even though I’m at least a bit proficient with vim by now. That is, I know how to exit vim.)
Notepad – of course, the default editor in Windows. The one we turn to when all else fails.
Roy Tang is a:
- programmer, engineer, scientist, critic, gamer, dreamer, and kid-at-heart
- Frustrated writer and sketch artist
- Magic player on weekends
- Randomly amazed
- Software developer since 2003. If you’d like to work with me, take a look at my resume.
roytang.net is a personal site; I post about a random assortment of topics that interest me including software development, Magic the Gathering, pop culture, gaming, and tech life. This site is perpetually under renovation.