What are you coding?

[SharkyUK]

Those books are about £7 on ebay now (the gems ones), I might pick a few up just for nostalgia

Go for it! One of my favourites, not shown in the photo, is the Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash. I'm not sure how easy it is to grab a copy these days but I spent hours reading and dissecting that one. Last time I checked, I found copies selling for upwards of 150.00 GBP! I'm holding on to my copy! I believe the source code for the book is hosted in a github repo online and that there is a downloadable ebook version.

EDIT: https://www.jagregory.com/abrash-black-book/

 

[Rroff]

You also don't need to go to 27 layers of abstraction, which seemed to be a common thing some years ago. Again, this is a misuse - rather than a flaw - of OOP. In reality, a lot of modern software development uses a mixture of paradigms. It's not necessarily a case of one versus the other. A modern software programme might use OOP for domain modeling/system architecture, functional concepts for data transformations/state management, and procedural code in other places.

I think this is one of the issues - abstraction and OOP for the sake of OOP rather than it being a benefit.

Personally I massively utilise C style structs rather than classes where I can - in my opinion it makes for cleaner, easier to read, easier to optimise code which can be ported to other platforms or alternative libraries, etc. relatively easily if required.

 

[SharkyUK]

I think this is one of the issues - abstraction and OOP for the sake of OOP rather than it being a benefit.

Personally I massively utilise C style structs rather than classes where I can - in my opinion it makes for cleaner, easier to read, easier to optimise code which can be ported to other platforms or alternative libraries, etc. relatively easily if required.

Yes, I totally agree. There was/is a lot of time where OOP is being used to tick boxes and introduces levels of unnecessary abstraction and complexity (when there is simply no need).

That's one of the things I love about coding; one shoe size does NOT fit all.

Personally, I use OOP a lot but that has largely been guided by the projects I have worked on. My personal stuff is a mixture of hacks, paradigms, and bugs. Lots and lots of bugs.

 

[ic1male]

Been having fun these past few days faffing about with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery. I nearly fell on the floor in amazement at how you can use the DOM to manipulate elements without refreshing the page.

 

[SharkyUK]

I have been working on my path tracer again over the last few days - mainly tracking down a couple of long-standing bugs and finally getting them fixed. Hours and hours and hours of debugging... to finally find it was a stupid mistake that I had overlooked thousands of times. That's usually the way these things go.

 

[Noxia]

I find myself spending more time wondering if there’s any value in learning certain things or just relying on good old Claude instead.

Whilst I generally like to understand how stuff works, the constant doubt about “is this just going to be prompted at some point” takes out the pleasure I previously got learning new stuff.
Even though I arguably only really do it from a hobby POV, sometimes I’m sat there thinking do I really need to know this for my needs when there’s some 12 year old vibe coding stuff it would take me years to learn how to do.
Then I get conflicted, because if my only goal is for fun then why would that matter (feels like some kind of FOMO) but there’s also the part of me that knows a lot of it would be useful in my job, which then further feeds into the previous doubt around prompts.

I could learn about AI but I don’t think I have the aptitude for it for when it gets into the maths etc. it’s a weird time, in one hand I’ve got the ability to create far beyond my current level of understanding, on the other, that same tool constantly tempts me towards asking questions to get what I want without understanding the output.
Feel like I’ve missed the boat but also that it’s a great opportunity all at the same time.
Probably will impact there too but I wonder if I should focus on the cyber stuff instead. I find it as interesting as creating stuff, and it’s a wide field that could satisfy my need for a balance of technical and non technical tasks. Plus I’m arguably already working in the best place to get exposure.

 

[OspreyO]

FOMO. Fear of missing out.

Do it if it makes you happy. Reason enough.

 

[ic1male]

Do it if it makes you happy. Reason enough.

That’s the only reason I’m doing coding, it’s a new hobby for me. Realistically, I’ll never get a job doing it as I’m past 50. Just wish I’d been given the opportunity at school and then uni instead of doing what the teachers wanted.

 

[OspreyO]

Nothing is as fun when it's a Job

 

[SharkyUK]

Nothing is as fun when it's a Job

I think I'm one of the lucky ones. I love programming both as a job and a hobby.

Spent the last week writing a Tetris-like game for the web browser - just plain HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. I haven't written a Tetris clone in over 20 years! Beware, it won't well play on a mobile or tablet device as I haven't implemented touch controls!

Github repo here, online version here. There may be bugs!

 

[Rroff]

to finally find it was a stupid mistake that I had overlooked thousands of times.

I had this happen with a Quake 2 RTX mod I was working on:

When a monster dies and the body is gibbed, the entity for the monster gets modified to become a head gib, when it is a monster it has a think function called every frame which runs AI on the monster but when it dies the think function is modified to point to a function to unload the monster and its next think time is set to a random point in the future - so the head just falls harmlessly to the floor and eventually de-spawns. But I'd accidentally forgot to comment out a single if condition which meant that the think function was never modified, so the head ran around thinking it was a monster and couldn't be killed because it was already flagged as dead!

(Slightly more complicated because the next think was set to a time in the future at which point the normal AI function was called and set the next think to the next frame - hence why in the video gibbed monsters don't immediately exhibit that behaviour which threw me a bit before I worked it out).

A single line that I looked at thousands of times before realising I'd meant to comment it out.

This came about because I was modifying the code so that with certain gore settings monster gibs weren't de-spawned after a set time but would be removed only if the game encountered resource constraints and needed to free up resources.

EDIT: Not using the RTX renderer in that video as at the time I had a GPU which could only do ray tracing at 10FPS LOL.

 

[FredFlint]

I think I'm one of the lucky ones. I love programming both as a job and a hobby.

Spent the last week writing a Tetris-like game for the web browser - just plain HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. I haven't written a Tetris clone in over 20 years! Beware, it won't well play on a mobile or tablet device as I haven't implemented touch controls!

Github repo here, online version here. There may be bugs!

Every programmer should do a Tetris clone, or two

 

[Cromulent]

I haven't done much programming over the last couple of months so I'm going to try and build a simple open source e-commerce platform using Django. It'll be fun and get me back in the swing of things.

 

[Noxia]

I've started doing some stuff in Unity and it's clicking much faster now. There is an annoying bug where if I have GSYNC enabled, when I use the editor player the screen keeps flashing, so I have to disable it just for that.
Enjoying it anyway, I think I need that visual feedback in order to keep motivation, which I don't get from front-end stuff because that never feels like 'proper' programming to me annoyingly.

Also not sure if it's my PC or what but Unity (6xx LTS) feels quite slow/laggy at times, which it shouldn't considering I'm only doing some basic 2d stuff atm. I'm surprised how long it takes to compile these small things I'm doing too, now I get why people opt for certain processors when doing this, though I also suspect it may be related to the SSD I have the project files on.

@Rroff if you don't mind sharing, do you do some kind of coding (or did) work wise? You post quite a lot of stuff about it is all.

 

[Rroff]

@Rroff if you don't mind sharing, do you do some kind of coding (or did) work wise? You post quite a lot of stuff about it is all.

Not work wise, I trained for a career in IT and did work in database / business application development for a couple of years but found it was something I enjoy as a hobby not as a job.

 

[Noxia]

Not work wise, I trained for a career in IT and did work in database / business application development for a couple of years but found it was something I enjoy as a hobby not as a job.

Many such cases I feel.

 

[WoZZeR]

I've spent a couple of years faffing around with a home made website while learning HTML, Javascript, CSS, PHP and MySQL. It is quite absorbing.

Writing a couple of search functions for it at the moment and whilst trying to sort a three dimensional array found this on a programming site:

usort($myArray, function ($a, $b) {
    return $a[2] <=> $b[2];
});

I'm using it to sort an array based on the Levenshtein Number held in $myArray[$x][2]

Blowed if I know how it works, but it does!

 

[ic1male]

Working with HTML/CSS seems to have me running out of desktop space very quickly as I've got windows everywhere, so I dragged another TV in to the room today and got a DisplayPort > HDMI adapter. Now I've got two 4K screens for spreading my coding environment about and I'm like a pig in mud.

 

[SharkyUK]

Working with HTML/CSS seems to have me running out of desktop space very quickly as I've got windows everywhere, so I dragged another TV in to the room today and got a DisplayPort > HDMI adapter. Now I've got two 4K screens for spreading my coding environment about and I'm like a pig in mud.

You can never have enough screen real-estate for developing! I love ultra-widescreens for working as well as playing, and recently dropped my old Samsung QLED into the mix.

 

[ic1male]

You can never have enough screen real-estate for developing! I love ultra-widescreens for working as well as playing, and recently dropped my old Samsung QLED into the mix.

Dude, that room is so tidy! Call yourself a developer? I'm surrounded by empty cans of Coke and Milka choc wrappers.