• 9 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Its a tough problem. You have to find something that you want to exist; like an app or a website or a game. For example, try making a GUI for managing SSH keys. You know, like the ones github makes you create in order to clone and push to a repo. Make a visual representation of those keys (stored in the .ssh folder), and tools to add/delete them.

    Along the way you’ll find tons of missing things, tools that should exist but don’t. Those are the “real” projects that will really expand your capabilities as a developer.

    For example, I was coding in python and wanted to make a function that caches the output because the code was inherently slow.

    • but to cache an output we need to know the inputs are the same
    • hashes are good for this but lists can’t be hashed with the built-in python hash function
    • we can make our own hash, but hashing a list that contains itself is hard
    • there is a solution for lists, but then hashing a set that contains itself is a serious problem (MUCH harder than hashing a list)
    • turns out hashing a set is the same problem as the graph-coloring problem (graph isomorphism)
    • suddenly I have a really deep understanding of recursive data structures all because I wanted to a function that caches its output.




  • I agree, and here’s a few different avenues of examples:

    1. If trying to get past interviews, Leet code and hacker rank can be great. They’re not so great for real world problems, but not bad.

    2. Advent of code is a good middle ground between theory and practice in my opinion.

    3. To really learn real world problem solving, I’d recommend implement a specification, without looking at existing implementations. For example, make a basic regex engine (formal Regular Expressions not PCRE expressions), or try to implement the C Preprocessor, or the JS event loop.













  • Cool, this is exactly what I was hoping to learn but couldn’t find. It sounds like its still a pretty manual process, but thats okay. If thats how it is righ now, then thats exactly what I want to know.

    I’m considering making tools (GUI local app, but also website AUTH frontend/backend tooling) to try and make systems like this more commonplace and standardized. I didn’t know about revocation keys, so I’m glad I heard about that before trying to build my own.






  • This could actually be a pretty big deal

    1. The Eclipse foundation has been making alternatives to VS Code’s “killer apps” (Docker, Python, Go, C++, SSH, Live share, etc). AKA the closed source ones exclusive to VS Code offical that make all forks of VS Code a huge downgrade. The Eclipse foundation is also running the extension store that powers VS Codium.
    2. “why not just use VS Codium?” (With the killer extensions made by Eclipse)
      • VS Codium is great, but because of manpower limits, they always have to be “downstream” of VS Code. They can’t rewrite any of the core systems.
      • As someone who contributes to VS Code, and loves VS Codium, many issues I have with VS Code have been open on github for +7 years, with hundreds of comments and thumbs-ups. We can’t even sort the file explorer view by last-edited and folders-first (but we can do folders-first alphabetical). Thats been open since 2017.
      • Theia looks like it could finally be the hard fork I’ve been waiting for. A hackable editor, trying to be open source, where all my extensions work, and the community can actually make a PR, get it merged, and extensions are not excessively sandboxed.
      • Will it be that? Only time will tell, but the Eclipse foundation has a pretty good record. They’re definitely prepared for long term support.