• Activity
  • Votes
  • Comments
  • New
  • All activity
  • Showing only topics in ~comp with the tag "development". Back to normal view / Search all groups
    1. Game Development Career Advice

      Hi, I'm curious if anyone in this group has achieved success in game development, whether that's carving out a career or earning any amount of income from it. I'm currently working as a software...

      Hi,

      I'm curious if anyone in this group has achieved success in game development, whether that's carving out a career or earning any amount of income from it.

      I'm currently working as a software developer, but my passion lies in game development. I'm all too aware that achieving any measure of success in this field is next to impossible. Hence, I'm reaching out here, hoping to gather insights and advice from those who have walked this path in the past, or those who are currently walking alongside/behind me.

      One of my specific questions is about the types of games I should focus on creating. Specifically, I've heard differing opinions on whether it's more advantageous to develop a series of small games with advertisements for mobile platforms or to invest in larger, premium games for platforms like Steam. Can anyone share their insights or experiences regarding this dilemma? Is there a clear advantage to one approach over the other?

      Currently I am using godot to make a larger scale game, but I am considering switching to defold and making smaller scale games with ads.

      I saw some folks here discuss making games for the playdate. How much should one consider targeting niche platforms like this? Some of the users I saw discuss this seem to have had good success.

      Some general questions: How did you break into game dev? What were you doing before? Do you see game dev as a viable career, only as a source of side income, or is it just a hobby?

      Any guidance or experiences you can share would be greatly appreciated.

      17 votes
    2. PySide vs .NET WinForms for a Desktop GUI App in 2023?

      Hello Folks, For an upcoming side project - a Desktop GUI app, open source, Apache 2.0 licensed, I'm slightly confused regarding what technology to use. Skills wise, C#/WinForms should be my...

      Hello Folks,

      For an upcoming side project - a Desktop GUI app, open source, Apache 2.0 licensed, I'm slightly confused regarding what technology to use.

      Skills wise, C#/WinForms should be my natural choice as that was the primary technology I had worked on before losing employment at my former company few years back and getting into freelancing. But post my freelance experience, I taught myself things like open source and Python as it came with the territory, and now PySide2 is also a running candidate in this race.

      The goal here is to be as much ubiquitous as possible - that my app should be easy to just "download, extract and run" by as many people as possible. A couple decades ago, a .NET GUI library targeting Microsoft Windows platform would have been the clear choice here as most people used Windows OS and targeting that platform meant being ubiquitous.

      But over the last few years, I've observed that Windows OS has been continuously losing its market share to Linux Distros and Mac OSX, mostly due to some incorrect decisions and strategic blunders by the former than some ground breaking or revolutionary innovation on part of the latter. This means .NET or WinForms is no longer the ideal choice today if you want to be cross-platform and ubiquitous.

      This lead my research to some other toolkits like the Java Swing library, for example. It's old but classic, not a bad choice at all in this case, platform independence is Java's biggest selling point. However, the app I'm making is non-trivial and slightly performance intensive, and Swing GUIs are known to be sluggish on PCs unless you ensure a good supply of RAM by tweaking the JVM settings. I'm also not very experienced in Java to be able to handle those situations in case they arise.

      I also considered Lazarus IDE/Object Pascal, it is also not a bad choice. It is open source, used as the primary course language across many Universities in Europe and most importantly, still maintained and developed. But guess I will have to teach myself a whole new paradigm along with a programming language in case I go this route.

      Finally, Python is something I've almost settled on for this project. It's a language that I'm very fond of and it has helped me survive through the tough times in the freelance market. It also has a vibrant ecosystem and rich repository of user contributed packages at PyPI.

      Now, I've worked on the default Tkinter library in past but somehow felt that it's quite limited in terms of making the GUI more flexible and "tweakable", especially a non-trivial one having several container widgets, syntax editors, menus and drop-downs, trees and list views, etc. PySide2 is, from what I understand, a better choice in this regard as it is comprehensive and based on the time-tested Qt interface. It is not only very easy to code and maintain but also very easy to port across various platforms.

      What do you think? In which direction should I go here?

      18 votes
    3. Just got an Nvidia 4090 GPU, looking for local LLM + general generative AI software recommendations

      I was fortunate enough to grab a discounted 4090 while on my travels and just got everything installed. Already having a lot of fun pumping all my games to max settings, but I'm also interested in...

      I was fortunate enough to grab a discounted 4090 while on my travels and just got everything installed. Already having a lot of fun pumping all my games to max settings, but I'm also interested in running generative AI stuff locally to really take advantage of all that VRAM.

      Do you have any newbie-friendly Windows 11 software to recommend for getting started? Thanks!

      20 votes
    4. Newbie here looking for advice on how to get into Programming/CS by building a project

      Been lurking for a week on tildes now and I am really glad this place exists. The crow here is exactly what I have been missing on Reddit for a while now. Having said that, the whole Reddit...

      Been lurking for a week on tildes now and I am really glad this place exists. The crow here is exactly what I have been missing on Reddit for a while now.

      Having said that, the whole Reddit situation has some-what motivated me to get the balls rolling on an idea that I have had for a while and I am looking for advice on the same.

      I have often heard this phrase "Learn programming by building" but whenever I dive in to the resources, I fall flat due to the information overload and the general abstractness that the field has (I appreciate abstractness but here it demotivates me) and I have never found a proper resource that I could follow to actually build something instead of just blindly following tutorials and playing with them.

      So, my question is how do I translate "learn by building a project" into a practical framework.

      I know of 100 days of swift and I really like that approach however I don't think I want to start with swift or build an iOS app right now.

      24 votes
    5. Looking for smallish feature suggestions for an open source project

      I'm thinking about increasing the level of my open source contributions a bit. Instead of searching blindly until I stumble upon an issue that: A) Piques my interest B) I feel somewhat qualified...

      I'm thinking about increasing the level of my open source contributions a bit. Instead of searching blindly until I stumble upon an issue that:
      A) Piques my interest
      B) I feel somewhat qualified to implement

      I figured I'd check with the tildes community. Is there any Open Source software that you use that is missing a feature/capability? Can you give a brief description of it (bonus points for links to an issue tracker with an open ticket :))?

      Can't of course promise anything will come of it, but if I do pick up your suggestion at least I'll give you a ping if I make any progress!

      7 votes
    6. Trying to become a junior developer in Brazil is an uphill battle

      They ask for years of experience, skills that no Jr would know since, well, it is a Jr and the process to apply for jobs are surreal. Thousands of tests, interviews that goes nowhere and lots of...

      They ask for years of experience, skills that no Jr would know since, well, it is a Jr and the process to apply for jobs are surreal. Thousands of tests, interviews that goes nowhere and lots of ghosting. And the pay is not that good. No wonder after 2 or 3 years of experience a lot of develpers starts working for companies outside of Brazil.

      Last one to contact me sent me a test to do it in 1 week. I went above and beyond and learned a lot of things. Before this, i had some small projects in Go and Python. Now i needed to learn Docker, tests, github actions, Postgresql and other things. Not everything was mandatory, but i did my best and did it all. I finished in 5 days since i have a day job.

      Here is the result: https://github.com/crdpa/conservice

      Showing the data in the browser was not necessary, but i think it was a nice touch and well made. If this does not land me a job as a junior developer i don't know what else could.

      I'm glad i already have a job in another area, but me and my SO are separated by a 4 hour drive and i'm tired. I want to work from home to be near her and our dog. Paying rent in two places is becoming a burden.

      I would be happy if you guys could test the application i made. It only needs docker.

      And do you guys have any tips from now on?

      7 votes
    7. A few easy linux commands, and a real-world example on how to use them in a pinch

      This below is a summary of some real-world performance investigation I recently went through. The tools I used are installed on all linux systems, but I know some people don't know them and would...

      This below is a summary of some real-world performance investigation I recently went through. The tools I used are installed on all linux systems, but I know some people don't know them and would straight up jump to heavyweight log analysis services and what not, or writing their own solution.

      Let's say you have request log sampling in a bunch of log files that contain lines like these:

      127.0.0.1 [2021-05-27 23:28:34.460] "GET /static/images/flags/2/54@3x.webp HTTP/2" 200 1806 TLSv1.3 HIT-CLUSTER SessionID:(null) Cache:max-age=31536000
      127.0.0.1 [2021-05-27 23:51:22.019] "GET /pl/player/123456/changelog/ HTTP/1.1" 200 16524 TLSv1.2 MISS-CLUSTER SessionID:(null) Cache:

      You might recognize Fastly logs there (IP anonymized). Now, there's a lot you might care about in this log file, but in my case, I wanted to get a breakdown of hits vs misses by URL.

      So, first step, let's concatenate all the log files with cat *.log > all.txt, so we can work off a single file.

      Then, let's split the file in two: hits and misses. There are a few different values for them, the majority are covered by either HIT-CLUSTER or MISS-CLUSTER. We can do this by just grepping for them like so:

      grep HIT-CLUSTER all.txt > hits.txt; grep MISS-CLUSTER all.txt > misses.txt
      

      However, we only care about url and whether it's a hit or a miss. So let's clean up those hits and misses with cut. The way cut works, it takes a delimiter (-d) and cuts the input based on that; you then give it a range of "fields" (-f) that you want.

      In our case, if we cut based on spaces, we end up with for example: 127.0.0.1 [2021-05-27 23:28:34.460] "GET /static/images/flags/2/54@3x.webp HTTP/2" 200 1806 TLSv1.3 HIT-CLUSTER SessionID:(null) Cache:max-age=31536000.

      We care about the 5th value only. So let's do: cut -d" " -f5 to get that. We will also sort the result, because future operations will require us to work on a sorted list of values.

      cut -d" " -f5 hits.txt | sort > hits-sorted.txt; cut -d" " -f5 misses.txt | sort > misses-sorted.txt
      

      Now we can start doing some neat stuff. wc (wordcount) is an awesome utility, it lets you count characters, words or lines very easily. wc -l counts lines in an input, since we're operating with one value per line we can easily count our hits and misses already:

      $ wc -l hits-sorted.txt misses-sorted.txt
        132523 hits-sorted.txt
        220779 misses-sorted.txt
        353302 total
      

      220779 / 132523 is a 1:1.66 ratio of hits to misses. That's not great…

      Alright, now I'm also interested in how many unique URLs are hit versus missed. uniq tool deduplicates immediate sequences, so the input has to be sorted in order to deduplicate our entire file. We already did that. We can now count our urls with uniq < hits-sorted.txt | wc -l; uniq < misses-sorted.txt | wc -l. We get 49778 and 201178, respectively. It's to be expected that most of our cache misses would be in "rarer" urls; this gives us a 1:4 ratio of cached to uncached URL.

      Let's say we want to dig down further into which URLs are most often hitting the cache, specifically. We can add -c to uniq in order to get a duplicate count in front of our URLs. To get the top ones at the top, we can then use sort, in reverse sort mode (-r), and it also needs to be numeric sort, not alphabetic (-n). head lets us get the top 10.

      $ uniq -c < hits-sorted.txt | sort -nr | head
          815 /static/app/webfonts/fa-solid-900.woff2?d720146f1999
          793 /static/app/images/1.png
          786 /static/app/fonts/nunito-v9-latin-ext_latin-regular.woff2?d720146f1999
          760 /static/CACHE/js/output.cee5c4089626.js
          758 /static/images/crest/3/light/notfound.png
          757 /static/CACHE/css/output.4f2b59394c83.css
          756 /static/app/webfonts/fa-regular-400.woff2?d720146f1999
          754 /static/app/css/images/loading.gif?d720146f1999
          750 /static/app/css/images/prev.png?d720146f1999
          745 /static/app/css/images/next.png?d720146f1999
      

      And same for misses:

      $ uniq -c < misses-sorted.txt | sort -nr | head
           56 /
           14 /player/237678/
           13 /players/
           12 /teams/
           11 /players/top/
      <snip>
      

      So far this tells us static files are most often hit, and for misses it also tells us… something, but we can't quite track it down yet (and we won't, not in this post). We're not adjusting for how often the page is hit as a whole, this is still just high-level analysis.

      One last thing I want to show you! Let's take everything we learned and analyze those URLs by prefix instead. We can cut our URLs again by slash with cut -d"/". If we want the first prefix, we can do -f1-2, or -f1-3 for the first two prefixes. Let's look!

      cut -d'/' -f1-2 < hits-sorted.txt | uniq -c | sort -nr | head
       100189 /static
         5948 /es
         3069 /player
         2480 /fr
         2476 /es-mx
         2295 /pt-br
         2094 /tr
         1939 /it
         1692 /ru
         1626 /de
      
      cut -d'/' -f1-2 < misses-sorted.txt | uniq -c | sort -nr | head
        66132 /static
        18578 /es
        17448 /player
        17064 /tr
        11379 /fr
         9624 /pt-br
         8730 /es-mx
         7993 /ru
         7689 /zh-hant
         7441 /it
      

      This gives us hit-miss ratios by prefix. Neat, huh?

      13 votes
    8. In which a foolish developer tries DevOps: critique my VPS provisioning script!

      I'm attempting to provision two mirror staging and production environments for a future SaaS application that we're close to launching as a company, and I'd like to get some feedback on the...

      I'm attempting to provision two mirror staging and production environments for a future SaaS application that we're close to launching as a company, and I'd like to get some feedback on the provisioning script I've created that takes a default VPS from our hosting provider, DigitalOcean, and readies it for being a secure hosting environment for our application instance (which runs inside Docker, and persists data to an unrelated managed database).

      I'm sticking with a simple infrastructure architecture at the moment: A single VPS which runs both nginx and the application instance inside a containerised docker service as mentioned earlier. There's no load balancers or server duplication at this point. @Emerald_Knight very kindly provided me in the Tildes Discord with some overall guidance about what to aim for when configuring a server (limit damage as best as possible, limit access when an attack occurs)—so I've tried to be thoughtful and integrate that paradigm where possible (disabling root login, etc).

      I’m not a DevOps or sysadmin-oriented person by trade—I stick to programming most of the time—but this role falls to me as the technical person in this business; so the last few days has been a lot of reading and readying. I’ll run through the provisioning flow step by step. Oh, and for reference, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

      First step is self-explanatory.

      #!/bin/sh
      
      # Name of the user to create and grant privileges to.
      USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT=
      
      sudo apt-get -qq update
      sudo apt install -qq --yes nginx
      sudo systemctl restart nginx
      

      Next, create my sudo user, add them to the groups needed, require a password change on first login, then copy across any provided authorised keys from the root user which you can configure to be seeded to the VPS in the DigitalOcean management console.

      useradd --create-home --shell "/bin/bash" --groups sudo,www-data "${USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT}"
      passwd --delete $USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT
      chage --lastday 0 $USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT
      
      HOME_DIR="$(eval echo ~${USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT})"
      mkdir --parents "${HOME_DIR}/.ssh"
      cp /root/.ssh/authorized_keys "${HOME_DIR}/.ssh"
      
      chmod 700 ~/.ssh
      chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
      chown --recursive "${USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT}":"${USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT}" "${HOME_DIR}/.ssh"

sudo chmod 775 -R /var/www
      sudo chown -R $USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT /var/www
      rm -rf /var/www/html
      

      Installation of docker, and run it as a service, ensure the created user is added to the docker group.

      sudo apt-get install -qq --yes \
          apt-transport-https \
          ca-certificates \
          curl \
          gnupg-agent \
          software-properties-common
      
      curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -
      sudo apt-key fingerprint 0EBFCD88
      
      sudo add-apt-repository --yes \
         "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
         $(lsb_release -cs) \
         stable"
      
      sudo apt-get -qq update
      sudo apt install -qq --yes docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io
      
      # Only add a group if it does not exist
      sudo getent group docker || sudo groupadd docker
      sudo usermod -aG docker $USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT
      
      # Enable docker
      sudo systemctl enable docker
      
      sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.27.4/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
      sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
      sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/docker-compose /usr/bin/docker-compose
      docker-compose --version
      

      Disable root logins and any form of password-based authentication by altering sshd_config.

      sed -i '/^PermitRootLogin/s/yes/no/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
      sed -i '/^PasswordAuthentication/s/yes/no/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
      sed -i '/^ChallengeResponseAuthentication/s/yes/no/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
      

      Configure the firewall and fail2ban.

      sudo ufw default deny incoming
      sudo ufw default allow outgoing
      sudo ufw allow ssh
      sudo ufw allow http
      sudo ufw allow https
      sudo ufw reload
      sudo ufw --force enable && sudo ufw status verbose
      
      sudo apt-get -qq install --yes fail2ban
      sudo systemctl enable fail2ban
      sudo systemctl start fail2ban
      

      Swapfiles.

      sudo fallocate -l 1G /swapfile && ls -lh /swapfile
      sudo chmod 0600 /swapfile && ls -lh /swapfile
      sudo mkswap /swapfile
      sudo swapon /swapfile && sudo swapon --show
      echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
      

      Unattended updates, and restart the ssh daemon.

      sudo apt install -qq unattended-upgrades
      sudo systemctl restart ssh
      

      Some questions

      You can assume these questions are cost-benefit focused, i.e. is it worth my time to investigate this, versus something else that may have better gains given my limited time.

      1. Obviously, any critiques of the above provisioning process are appreciated—both on the micro level of criticising particular lines, or zooming out and saying “well why don’t you do this instead…”. I can’t know what I don’t know.

      2. Is it worth investigating tools such as ss or lynis (https://github.com/CISOfy/lynis) to perform server auditing? I don’t have to meet any compliance requirements at this point.

      3. Do I get any meaningful increase in security by implementing 2FA on login here using google authenticator? As far as I can see, as long as I'm using best practices to actually ssh into our boxes, then the likeliest risk profile for unwanted access probably isn’t via the authentication mechanism I use personally to access my servers.

      4. Am I missing anything here? Beyond the provisioning script itself, I adhere to best practices around storing and generating passwords and ssh keys.

      Some notes and comments

      1. Eventually I'll use the hosting provider's API to spin up and spin down VPS's on the fly via a custom management application, which gives me an opportunity to programmatically execute the provisioning script above and run some over pre- and post-provisioning things, like deployment of the application and so forth.

      2. Usage alerts and monitoring is configured within DigitalOcean's console, and alerts are sent to our business' Slack for me to action as needed. Currently, I’m settling on the following alerts:
        1. Server CPU utilisation greater than 80% for 5 minutes.
        2. Server memory usage greater than 80% for 5 minutes.
        3. I’m also looking at setting up daily fail2ban status alerts if needed.
      9 votes
    9. Deploying containerized Docker instances in production?

      Hello! After spending many development hours in my past years running on Virtualbox/Vagrant-style setups, I've decided to take the plunge into learning Docker, and after getting a few containers...

      Hello! After spending many development hours in my past years running on Virtualbox/Vagrant-style setups, I've decided to take the plunge into learning Docker, and after getting a few containers working, I'm now looking to figure out how to deploy this to production. I'm not a DevOps or infrastructure guy, my bread and butter is software, and although I've become significantly better at deploying & provisioning Linux VPS's, I'm still not entirely confident in my ability to deploy & manage such systems at scale and in production. But, I am now close to running my own business, so these requirements are suddenly going from "nice to have" to "critical".

      As I mentioned, in the past when I've previously developed applications that have been pushed onto the web, I've tended to develop on my local machine, often with no specific configuration environment. If I did use an environment, it'd often be a Vagrant VM instance. From here, I'd push to GitHub, then from my VPS, pull down the changes, run any deployment scripts (recompile, restart nginx, etc), and I'm done.

      I guess what I'm after with Docker is something that's more consistent between dev, testing, & prod, and is also more hands off in the deployment process. Yet, what I'm currently developing still does have differing configuration needs between dev and prod. For example, I'd like to use a hosted DB solution such as DigitalOcean Managed Databases in production, yet I'm totally fine using a Docker container for MySQL for local development. Is something like this possible? Does anyone have any recommendations around how to accomplish this, any do's and dont's, or any catches that are worth mentioning?

      How about automating deployment from GitHub to production? I've never touched any CI/CD tools in my life, yet I know it's a hugely important part of the process when dealing with software in production, especially software that has clients dependent on it to function. Does anything specifically work well with Docker? Or GitHub? Ideally I want to be avoiding manual processes where I have to ssh in, and pull down the latest changes, half-remembering the commands I need to write to recompile and run the application again.

      10 votes
    10. How much testing do you guys do?

      Pretty straight forward question, but basically I was watching a discussion panel the other day talking about the ethics of Self-Driving cars. A topic came up about people writing crappy code, and...

      Pretty straight forward question, but basically I was watching a discussion panel the other day talking about the ethics of Self-Driving cars. A topic came up about people writing crappy code, and more than that, people not testing their code. And if they do, they do point testing. I am in my last semester of uni and I am working with some companies where we are doing pretty extensive testing, happy flows and a lot of alternate flows, as well as UI/UX testing. I wanted to extend this question to you, do you guys do testing, what type? How much do you focus on it? And if u love it/hate it?

      12 votes
    11. Ask Tildes: What is the best way to get involved with the development of Tildes?

      Hi everyone, I'm a frontend developer and do a bit of backend work as well. I'd really like to contribute some of my downtime to helping build this site. I've checked out the issue tracker on...

      Hi everyone, I'm a frontend developer and do a bit of backend work as well. I'd really like to contribute some of my downtime to helping build this site. I've checked out the issue tracker on gitlab and some of the docs, tech goals and announcement, but I'd like to start getting my hands dirty and contribute some code.

      • Is there a roadmap for development?
      • A feature list to implement?
      • Bugs to fix?

      How can I help out? What's the best way to get started?

      Also for all non-devs, what is the best way that they can start helping out?

      30 votes