Hey programming thread. Long time no see. I just applied to a position as a Python developer at a place. I noodled around with Python quite a bit, uh... 10ish years ago and barely any since then. It's been all C# and SQL. Are there any good resources for reminding me how to even so I don't make a fool of myself in a potential interview?
edit: Something a little more advanced and structured as a refresher than say... W3schools, but not quite as dry as just reading the language documentation pages.
Tofystedeth on
+1
Options
AkimboEGMr. FancypantsWears very fine pants indeedRegistered Userregular
Hey programming thread. Long time no see. I just applied to a position as a Python developer at a place. I noodled around with Python quite a bit, uh... 10ish years ago and barely any since then. It's been all C# and SQL. Are there any good resources for reminding me how to even so I don't make a fool of myself in a potential interview?
edit: Something a little more advanced and structured as a refresher than say... W3schools, but not quite as dry as just reading the language documentation pages.
For base language stuff, I think I remember codecademy being a good place. Also, if you're coming back to the language, I think looking through the major version release logs, and reading up on the new features, is a good idea.
Oh, and I know you said no official docs, but they're honestly really quite good, even if dry.
AkimboEG on
Give me a kiss to build a dream on; And my imagination will thrive upon that kiss; Sweetheart, I ask no more than this; A kiss to build a dream on
I would like to announce that my team at EchoCorp has just invented the "sort-of sort" algorithm, where things look mostly sorted unless you look too close at the data.
I would like to announce that my team at EchoCorp has just invented the "sort-of sort" algorithm, where things look mostly sorted unless you look too close at the data.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
my web application now has enough users that i can no longer mindlessly hot patch it in production environment. i hate this! send me back to writing irrelevant userless software
0
Options
KakodaimonosCode fondlerHelping the 1% get richerRegistered Userregular
my web application now has enough users that i can no longer mindlessly hot patch it in production environment. i hate this! send me back to writing irrelevant userless software
I mean. You still can... Just call it "agility" and "moving fast" and you're good.
0
Options
OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
my web application now has enough users that i can no longer mindlessly hot patch it in production environment. i hate this! send me back to writing irrelevant userless software
I mean. You still can... Just call it "agility" and "moving fast" and you're good.
my web application now has enough users that i can no longer mindlessly hot patch it in production environment. i hate this! send me back to writing irrelevant userless software
I mean. You still can... Just call it "agility" and "moving fast" and you're good.
"move fast and break things"
*removes Facebook's DNS records from the internet*
my web application now has enough users that i can no longer mindlessly hot patch it in production environment. i hate this! send me back to writing irrelevant userless software
I mean. You still can... Just call it "agility" and "moving fast" and you're good.
"move fast and break things"
*removes Facebook's DNS records from the internet*
I guess they were self aware in that regard, at least for a little bit.
3ds: 4983-4935-4575
0
Options
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
my web application now has enough users that i can no longer mindlessly hot patch it in production environment. i hate this! send me back to writing irrelevant userless software
If it's not already load balanced across multiple instances, probably time to do that if you're at the level of not being able to production patch. Once you've got that just implement basic rolling deploys. If you're really lucky your stuff is already deployed to something that supports rolling deploys out of the box like ECS or Kubernetes.
Ear3nd1lEärendil the Mariner, father of ElrondRegistered Userregular
So I had a fascinating conversation with our QA person and the team lead in the team stand-up yesterday. And by 'fascinating', I mean 'infuriating'.
QA: Ear3nd1l, I don't see your changes on the QA server.
Me: I see them and sent you a screenshot when you mentioned it on Friday.
QA: Well, I don't see them.
Me: Did you refresh the page?
Team Lead: Wait, why does he have to do that? We can't expect the users to refresh the page to see changes to the application.
Me: Wait.. what? We absolutely can expect them to refresh the page. How else do you expect code changes in an SPA to show up for them? Besides, when we do our production deployments, we do them over a weekend. So when the user comes to the app on Monday, they will have refreshed the page anyway.
Team Lead: No, we can't expect that.
Me: I don't know what you expect me to do about that.
QA: Wait, I see the changes now. Never mind.
How else do you expect code changes in an SPA to show up for them?
Some sites poll for new versions and either auto-refresh or ask the user if they want to refresh.
True, I suppose I should have worded it "How else do you expect code changes in our SPA to show up for them?" This app is an architectural mess, so the idea of trying to add auto-refresh to is makes my head hurt.
To be fair to team lead, it's kinda a solved problem.
0
Options
Ear3nd1lEärendil the Mariner, father of ElrondRegistered Userregular
edited November 2021
Guys, my point isn't that it can't be done, but instead that our application does not support it and would require significant work to an application that is already held together by duct tape and chicken wire.
This is something that he knows. He's just being intentionally difficult.
They pretty much are emulating a desktop application, imo.
I just thought of this. Instead of having to re-implement everything a desktop application does in a browser, why not just use a desktop application and give the user a remote desktop link? I guess the connection would be laggy, but boy it probably would save a ton of work. May have scaling issues too and cost might be an issue. Whatever, it's an idea, haha
TelMarine on
3ds: 4983-4935-4575
0
Options
OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
They pretty much are emulating a desktop application, imo.
I just thought of this. Instead of having to re-implement everything a desktop application does in a browser, why not just use a desktop application and give the user a remote desktop link? I guess the connection would be laggy, but boy it probably would save a ton of work. May have scaling issues too and cost might be an issue. Whatever, it's an idea, haha
When it's Discord's web app, sure, that makes sense as an SPA. Or Google Docs. Gmail is...questionable IMO.
When it's Chase's interface where half the links don't lead to new pages and they break the back button, fuck off with that shit.
0
Options
Ear3nd1lEärendil the Mariner, father of ElrondRegistered Userregular
If the router in your SPA is set up properly, it shouldn't break the back button. I know that the routers in Angular, React, Vue, and Svelte handle the history correctly. I've never used Ember, so I can't speak to that one.
I usually use the Chase mobile app, so I've never noticed that their routing doesn't work. That's unfortunate for such a large company.
0
Options
OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
Fly out boxes that are not valid URLs need to die.
They pretty much are emulating a desktop application, imo.
I just thought of this. Instead of having to re-implement everything a desktop application does in a browser, why not just use a desktop application and give the user a remote desktop link? I guess the connection would be laggy, but boy it probably would save a ton of work. May have scaling issues too and cost might be an issue. Whatever, it's an idea, haha
Because that's rife with security vulnerabilities?
They pretty much are emulating a desktop application, imo.
I just thought of this. Instead of having to re-implement everything a desktop application does in a browser, why not just use a desktop application and give the user a remote desktop link? I guess the connection would be laggy, but boy it probably would save a ton of work. May have scaling issues too and cost might be an issue. Whatever, it's an idea, haha
Because that's rife with security vulnerabilities?
We did this at my first job to hold users over who wanted something easy to deploy while we developed a web version of our desktop product.
It is SO much more complicated and expensive to configure Remote Desktop servers than it is to just throw stuff on a web server. You need a lot more server resources; multiple simultaneous users start burning through RAM. The application UI is laggier, too.
So at work I'm being asked to get information out of a database generated using Ruby on Rails, and I was introduced today to the idea that Ruby will do fun things like have an array [this is the stuff in the array] get translated into a column with numbers 0 - 6, and no way to easily retrieve that like 5 = "the".
Any advice for getting a grip on this as I try to answer questions like "how many people did xyz over the course of the past year?" The last place I worked had a much larger database, but it also actually had all of the information present in the danged database. Is this just a matter of needing to keep a separate browser window open with the Ruby code? Is there a way I could set things up nicely in VS? I haven't worked with Ruby at all, and so far I've just been using Postico and Postgres and furrowing my brow when I found IDs that didn't seem to have any tables associated with them.
Also they've got like 3 other places where individual features store their own pertinent information and I'm very much going to recommend we squish all this together into something more manageable. One thing I was thinking was maybe just tossing it all onto Redshift? I just want to be able to access all of this stuff via SQL and not by writing custom shell scripts and looking at things in a browser.
So at work I'm being asked to get information out of a database generated using Ruby on Rails, and I was introduced today to the idea that Ruby will do fun things like have an array [this is the stuff in the array] get translated into a column with numbers 0 - 6, and no way to easily retrieve that like 5 = "the".
Any advice for getting a grip on this as I try to answer questions like "how many people did xyz over the course of the past year?" The last place I worked had a much larger database, but it also actually had all of the information present in the danged database. Is this just a matter of needing to keep a separate browser window open with the Ruby code? Is there a way I could set things up nicely in VS? I haven't worked with Ruby at all, and so far I've just been using Postico and Postgres and furrowing my brow when I found IDs that didn't seem to have any tables associated with them.
Also they've got like 3 other places where individual features store their own pertinent information and I'm very much going to recommend we squish all this together into something more manageable. One thing I was thinking was maybe just tossing it all onto Redshift? I just want to be able to access all of this stuff via SQL and not by writing custom shell scripts and looking at things in a browser.
I might be able to help, but I'd need to know more about how stuff is actually stored and what you are trying to get out of it.
0
Options
admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
It kinda sounds to me like you have a Rails DB that was built by someone who understood neither Rails nor DBs. There’s not much special stuff Rails does when it generates a DB beyond normalizing it a bit more than you might be used to.
Yeah I'm definitely getting the impression that these folks kind of put together the database without totally knowing what they were doing.
Like while discussing it with me they said that it may not be possible to get stuff out via SQL and... it's definitely stuff that should be possible. Easy, even! I just need to know how to walk from the eventID on table A to the userID on table C, but they seemed to not really get how to do that except by writing Ruby scripts. And the thing about some of the IDs being accessible only in Ruby really confounded me, because why even do that? Like why not have the table you know PokemonTypes with ID | Name in the database with everything else? I wasn't certain if it was just a normal part of building the DB this way, since I've never worked with Ruby.
I'll speak further with the person who handled these requests prior to me to figure out what the heck they've been doing to handle this, but I'm happy to have some confirmation that it's actually just very weird. I'm really not much of a DBA, I've mostly worked within databases administered by other folks, but this is really making me want to take the time to learn more so I can avoid... all this.
Edit: Oh and to clarify the other places they store data are not all related to Ruby, they're external databases acting as backends for different but related things using totally distinct formats. They suggested I might want to make a Ruby script to loop through and pull out every individual record I was interested in if there was information in those that I needed to match to information in the main DB...
Yeah I'm definitely getting the impression that these folks kind of put together the database without totally knowing what they were doing.
Like while discussing it with me they said that it may not be possible to get stuff out via SQL and... it's definitely stuff that should be possible. Easy, even! I just need to know how to walk from the eventID on table A to the userID on table C, but they seemed to not really get how to do that except by writing Ruby scripts. And the thing about some of the IDs being accessible only in Ruby really confounded me, because why even do that? Like why not have the table you know PokemonTypes with ID | Name in the database with everything else? I wasn't certain if it was just a normal part of building the DB this way, since I've never worked with Ruby.
I'll speak further with the person who handled these requests prior to me to figure out what the heck they've been doing to handle this, but I'm happy to have some confirmation that it's actually just very weird. I'm really not much of a DBA, I've mostly worked within databases administered by other folks, but this is really making me want to take the time to learn more so I can avoid... all this.
Edit: Oh and to clarify the other places they store data are not all related to Ruby, they're external databases acting as backends for different but related things using totally distinct formats. They suggested I might want to make a Ruby script to loop through and pull out every individual record I was interested in if there was information in those that I needed to match to information in the main DB...
what you have here is not a database, it's an ancient curse
Posts
edit: Something a little more advanced and structured as a refresher than say... W3schools, but not quite as dry as just reading the language documentation pages.
For base language stuff, I think I remember codecademy being a good place. Also, if you're coming back to the language, I think looking through the major version release logs, and reading up on the new features, is a good idea.
Oh, and I know you said no official docs, but they're honestly really quite good, even if dry.
"good enough sort"
I remain pretty proud of my Exclusive And gate.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Quantum gates are also pretty fun.
https://www.quantiki.org/wiki/quantum-gates
I mean. You still can... Just call it "agility" and "moving fast" and you're good.
"move fast and break things"
*removes Facebook's DNS records from the internet*
I guess they were self aware in that regard, at least for a little bit.
If it's not already load balanced across multiple instances, probably time to do that if you're at the level of not being able to production patch. Once you've got that just implement basic rolling deploys. If you're really lucky your stuff is already deployed to something that supports rolling deploys out of the box like ECS or Kubernetes.
QA: Ear3nd1l, I don't see your changes on the QA server.
Me: I see them and sent you a screenshot when you mentioned it on Friday.
QA: Well, I don't see them.
Me: Did you refresh the page?
Team Lead: Wait, why does he have to do that? We can't expect the users to refresh the page to see changes to the application.
Me: Wait.. what? We absolutely can expect them to refresh the page. How else do you expect code changes in an SPA to show up for them? Besides, when we do our production deployments, we do them over a weekend. So when the user comes to the app on Monday, they will have refreshed the page anyway.
Team Lead: No, we can't expect that.
Me: I don't know what you expect me to do about that.
QA: Wait, I see the changes now. Never mind.
Some sites poll for new versions and either auto-refresh or ask the user if they want to refresh.
True, I suppose I should have worded it "How else do you expect code changes in our SPA to show up for them?" This app is an architectural mess, so the idea of trying to add auto-refresh to is makes my head hurt.
This is something that he knows. He's just being intentionally difficult.
They pretty much are emulating a desktop application, imo.
I just thought of this. Instead of having to re-implement everything a desktop application does in a browser, why not just use a desktop application and give the user a remote desktop link? I guess the connection would be laggy, but boy it probably would save a ton of work. May have scaling issues too and cost might be an issue. Whatever, it's an idea, haha
When it's Discord's web app, sure, that makes sense as an SPA. Or Google Docs. Gmail is...questionable IMO.
When it's Chase's interface where half the links don't lead to new pages and they break the back button, fuck off with that shit.
I usually use the Chase mobile app, so I've never noticed that their routing doesn't work. That's unfortunate for such a large company.
Because that's rife with security vulnerabilities?
We did this at my first job to hold users over who wanted something easy to deploy while we developed a web version of our desktop product.
It is SO much more complicated and expensive to configure Remote Desktop servers than it is to just throw stuff on a web server. You need a lot more server resources; multiple simultaneous users start burning through RAM. The application UI is laggier, too.
Any advice for getting a grip on this as I try to answer questions like "how many people did xyz over the course of the past year?" The last place I worked had a much larger database, but it also actually had all of the information present in the danged database. Is this just a matter of needing to keep a separate browser window open with the Ruby code? Is there a way I could set things up nicely in VS? I haven't worked with Ruby at all, and so far I've just been using Postico and Postgres and furrowing my brow when I found IDs that didn't seem to have any tables associated with them.
Also they've got like 3 other places where individual features store their own pertinent information and I'm very much going to recommend we squish all this together into something more manageable. One thing I was thinking was maybe just tossing it all onto Redshift? I just want to be able to access all of this stuff via SQL and not by writing custom shell scripts and looking at things in a browser.
I might be able to help, but I'd need to know more about how stuff is actually stored and what you are trying to get out of it.
Like while discussing it with me they said that it may not be possible to get stuff out via SQL and... it's definitely stuff that should be possible. Easy, even! I just need to know how to walk from the eventID on table A to the userID on table C, but they seemed to not really get how to do that except by writing Ruby scripts. And the thing about some of the IDs being accessible only in Ruby really confounded me, because why even do that? Like why not have the table you know PokemonTypes with ID | Name in the database with everything else? I wasn't certain if it was just a normal part of building the DB this way, since I've never worked with Ruby.
I'll speak further with the person who handled these requests prior to me to figure out what the heck they've been doing to handle this, but I'm happy to have some confirmation that it's actually just very weird. I'm really not much of a DBA, I've mostly worked within databases administered by other folks, but this is really making me want to take the time to learn more so I can avoid... all this.
Edit: Oh and to clarify the other places they store data are not all related to Ruby, they're external databases acting as backends for different but related things using totally distinct formats. They suggested I might want to make a Ruby script to loop through and pull out every individual record I was interested in if there was information in those that I needed to match to information in the main DB...
Apparently this really only makes sense if you worked at Google around 2010 and would be privy to the issues discussed in the video.
what you have here is not a database, it's an ancient curse