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What programming/technical projects have you been working on?
This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?
I started to really get into Nix packaging, and got my first PR merged!
Then I became confident and started packaging another... 1 week later, I am still struggling with single runtime dependency. If anybody finds my confidence, I could use it :p
at $DAYJOB I'm looking into automating some Jenkins job data munching as a side project. Current problem is providing JVM flags while running maven commands. Java world is interesting and clunky to be mild.
At my dayjob, we've been transitioning to Gitlab after decades of virtually nothing. At best was an SVN repository used roughly the same as a file share with backups.
The CI/CD pipelines are very nice, and after a brief fling with Jenkins, ditched it quickly to go all-in on Gitlab.
Exactly what my team did 2 years ago. Had Jenkins and played around. Finally went all-in on GitLab and couldn't be happier. We could do all those things internally, but the cost isn't enough to dissuade us. The pipelines have been terrific. The biggest benefits have been the MR approval process (forcing some oversight on changes) and automated release (pipelines push to test regularly and the release is automated when we are ready; since it's been tested we know things aren't forgotten).
We're actually doing most of those things internally too, with a self-hosted Gitlab instance.
Considering the upgrade for most of of what you listed though. And their price/usermonth is low enough that the productivity gain and elimination of other tools far makes up for it.
Ping me if you need help with Nix, I maintain a few packages and have done some work on the ROCm stack.
I would like to take you up on that. I'll pushchange to my fork so you'll have a context once I get to my machine.
Thank in advance!
I'm a self-taught programmer, I've finished my portfolio: https://rishfolio.vercel.app/ and have been job hunting for a junior position. My skills are kind of all over the place (lil frontend, lil backend, lil gamedev, lil data science), but most concrete projects are in frontend so that's what I've been applying for. Honestly am really anxious about it all. I don't know if I'm even good enough for a junior position and the only real thing I can say I'm good at is learning fast.
But besides that I've been working with Elixir on some small CLI stuff, hoping to get into Phoenix when I'm more proficient. Also improving my CSS skills.
That's quite a clean looking site there. I wish you the best of luck on your job hunt :)
Having gone through the entry level developer hunt (sort of) somewhat recently (although in the US, not the EU), I think the most important thing I learned is to be confident. Do you know who's job it is to filter out incompetent people? The recruiters. Don't do their job for them!
Apply to everything with the utter conviction that you can do whatever they're asking, and it's their problem whether or not that's true. You just need to present the best version of yourself; don't worry about whether or not it meets a bar.
From what I've heard, the US has begun to infect the EU market with the same leetcode infested interview cycles, so a) my apologies b) even for front end roles, it might not be a bad idea to do some practice.
Good luck! That Netflix clone is good enough that I'd give you my password.
Could you ELI5? It sounds really cool but I got fairly lost beyond JSON API and matplotlib.
Plane tracking? I've got an ATC friend who might be interested.
That's really cool, thanks for the breakdown! Any particular reason or just because you can?
Still working on my website, which is programming b/c it involves me writing my own SSG as I write the content. Tight coupling, babeeeee!!!
What’s an SSG?
Static Site Generator, I assume.
Static Site Generator! Takes an input directory with text files or whatev, spits out website with links and stuff! Like Jekyll, Hugo, etc etc.
I'm working on the core of a small match-3 style game after a massive burst of inspiration, because my last attempt at making a game went so excellent that it's just sitting there half-finished collecting dust now, and the thing it totally needed was more complexity than just being a text-based game.
Hooray for human irrationality!
Good news is someone else followed up on that last idea.
And do what makes you happy, it's hardly irrational. I've got 10,000 little barely-written non-compiling projects that hardly even qualify as fully formed thoughts. Some of them I wanna flesh out, because they'd make my life easier...but getting the random thoughts into a text file keeps them from popping into my head frequently helps my sleep at night.
After the recent Lisp discussion, I dove in and started learning Emacs and Common Lisp after putting it off for years. So kind of a double-whammy.
After using vim for a decade, I finally understand the Emacs/Vim holy war. Either one provides fantastic keyboard-focused editing, and with muscle memory each provides immense speed benefits relative to standard text editors. But how they do so is very different, Emacs favoring modifier keys, while vim favors toggling modes and chaining 1-key commands. So far I still prefer the mode toggle of vim, as it feels like it reduces keystrokes, but modifying and coding your own Emacs settings looks like it has much more potential. I'm willing to stick with it to see if it's just my vim bias persisting.
Following Practical Common Lisp has been nice...not quite as good as Rust's intro, but still great. I'm only on chapter 4, but Chapter 3 was a great practical introduction and introduced a lot of stuff that is going to keep me going through it. The demo of the macro system in particular feels like crafting a string with a SQL statement to send to the database, but embedded as a core construct of the language. I've not worked substantially with anything other than bash, python, and SQL variants, so this is a great feature.
I need to get /back/ into Practical CL ... I was chugging along and just kind of, fell off there. But it's a good book, yep!
Have you tried evil? That way you can keep vim's modal editing, and have the amazing emacs editor environment.
I've been using it for a few years, and it's great. I wouldn't want to live without vim's modal editing, but also not without emacs' endlessly modifiable environment.
After reading some more about reverse Z buffers and talking to some colleagues about it, I came to the conclusion that implementing fog shouldn't involve calculating the depth twice (once as if it were forward and once backward). It turns out that because I was experimenting with a ridiculous depth range (something like 0.1 to 20,000), anything greater than ~10 looked almost pure white when displaying the depth as a gray value. Since this is terrain and the camera was up high, there was nothing close to the camera so it looked like all values were at the maximum depth. If I either changed my near plane to something more reasonable, or applied a function to the results, it looked a lot more normal. Lesson learned!
I've been having fun writing some documentation for some of my older libraries for example: https://apostolique.github.io/Apos.History/.
Otherwise I started coding a simple algorithm that can figure out if a level in my game is solvable. Here is what one level can look like: snip. This is done with a flood algorithm: snip. (I released that algorithm as a standalone project: snip.)
The idea is that if the white flood can go through the explosions and reach the end of a level, then the level is solvable. e.g.
I'm really close from being able to release version 1 of my UI library. This will be a pretty big milestone. https://github.com/Apostolique/Apos.Gui. Right now there's an alpha release that I'm testing.
I've been working on a react-native expo mobile app that tracks water streams and displays hydrographs as part of my capstone project. I'm glad everyone on the team has been pulling their weight despite the pandemic and us never having met each other in person! That said, you can still tell those that are leaning into consultancy careers after graduation based on the amount of refactoring needed for some implementations to make the code more testable or to extract implementations into their own components to better separate concerns.
Still, I'm impressed by how much we've accomplished so far, including making the graphs interactive, and how much better I got at problem solving since the beginning of my undergrad. For the first time, I have an actual project idea that I'm not forcing out of my mind just to put something on my CV, now I just need summer to come to have the time to work on it.
I've been working on a small multiplayer CTF-style platformer game during my commute. I typically work on a game for a while and then run out of steam either when I need graphics or when scope creep just crushes me.
This time I wrote down all the things I'd like the game to have in a big-ass list and then wrote a second list of the bare minimum to make it playable and I'm grinding towards a proof of concept/minimum viable product just using the Godot Engine logo stretched and tinted in different sizes/shapes/colours for graphics.
I'm nearly at the point where I can send some binaries to some friends and run a couple of playtest rounds and see if my idea is actually fun or not which is incredibly exciting!
I designed and built a linear power supply for an old Heathkit VFO that I'm going to use with an old Drake 2NT CW transmitter.
(sorry, hardware project :-)