It’s more like asking a carpenter to build a hammer as their practical carpentry interview. It’s probably good they know about hammers, but what you actually want to know is if they can build cabinets.

You joke, but Rails actually does make Integer do too many things lol. I’d argue they’re useful things, but it does so by patching the core Ruby Integer class :p

Strings became ubiquitously used for a reason, they map really clearly to the way we think as humans. Most importantly, when you’re debugging, seeing string data is much friendlier than whatever data your symbols map to (usually integers, from enum structures)

No, obviously it’s not the most efficient thing in the world, but it hardly matters, and you’re not getting anyone to stop because you’re “technically right”.

The JetBrains AI plugin wants to be activated so badly, but legal says we can only use GitHub copilot. The copilot plugin is really good so I don’t mind, but we all know the data is going to OpenAI regardless of the plugin. Data sovereignty will only be achieved by running these services locally.

This right here. Get good at navigating code of questionable quality that you didn’t write. If you can’t do it, start questioning your tools, and mastery of those tools. For the big boy jobs, you should be working with existing code much more than writing new code. Learn to get excited by tweaking existing systems with a few well placed, well researched changes, instead of being The Asshole that adds a new abstraction wart.

To me, a corporation cannot maintain quality code because requirements are ill defined, and there is no “done” state. With those two conditions present, unable to be changed, it’s not possible to form a coherent codebase. Those who try will make things worse, because their abstractions won’t fit in a year or two.

This is exactly the “messy code” people then leave behind. Bad code can come about for other reasons too, of course, but this is one of the more annoying reasons, because someone wrote it with self-righteousness, as if they were the only people to truly SEE the problem. Sigh.

It’s fine, this is how enterprise works. You can learn to navigate and make a living from it. You MUST internalize and accept that it is NOT the same as maintaining code for an open source library or whatever people think it’s going to be.

You have to listen to your heart, at least once in your career, to learn that grass on the other side is covered in just as much dog shit as it is over here.

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It took me a long time to really grok iterative methods like this, but once it clicks, you will absolutely know and feel like you have unlocked a new super power.

It starts with completely understanding that you are just passing functions as arguments, and those functions are being invoked, in a loop, for each item in the collection. Once you have that concept internalized, you should then learn the difference between filter, map, reduce, etc. The general difference boils down to: 1. How the iterator function changes the value being iterated over (most don’t) 2. What does the iterator function itself return (i.e. map itself, not the function passed into map. map and filter both return a new list, reduce returns the data structure being reduced into)

I would skip trying to understand reduce at first, though it’s the method you can implement all other such iterative functions with. The derivations like map and filter are just easier to start with.

And again, seriously, it took me like 2 years to completely internalize all of this, even after CS classes.

It’s always been one of my favorite ways of describing the job :)

It’s a huge faff, you will get a different answer from every person you ask. They’re used interchangeably, and it just doesn’t matter.

To entertain your prompt. Real world engineers (structural, etc.) aren’t entrusted the title because they “care” about what they build, it’s because they have to be correct, and as such, they follow extremely rigid process and take the time to never be wrong. Obviously I do not have real world structural engineering experience, but I think we can all agree on this from an outside point of view.

That’s not how software works most of the time, and it’s even heavily discouraged in a lot of the industry. We learn from failure, and the consequences of software failing are nil compared to the consequences of a bridge failing. This is a huge superpower of software, not a weakness, or some sign of deficiency. It is the key reason software evolves so quickly. Software engineers (or developers, alchemists, whatever) are allowed to fail, learn from mistakes, and improve. They can test completely new, never been done ideas, nearly for free, and nearly instantly.

Again, I don’t really care though what the industry wants to call it, developer or engineer. It doesn’t matter and it’s all made up anyway.

The one that comes with the IDE, because I don’t really care.

I’ve heard it much better described as a “distributed monolith”, which makes complete sense to me. It’s what you get when you “break up” a monolith into “services”, but the spaghetti is still there, it’s just distributed across services now. You have to actually eliminate tight coupling, define the correct boundaries, and vigilantly respect them. All of which should happen from within the monolith first, ideally, where you still have the massive luxury of one codebase to deal with as you make the huge refactors necessary before completely decoupling into services. Even better, do this required prerequisite work and discover that your monolith is actually… fine.

Like everyone has mentioned, because you want the data to persist across program runs. By all means, use in-memory state for truly ephemeral things like caches. You will need both for any real world task.

One more reason to use a database, even if the persisted set of data is small, is the query engine. SQLite is absolutely perfect for such small tasks. Writing SQL to query the data can save you from tons of wastefully repetitive app code.

lazygit is seriously so good, it’s a shame so many people write it off because it’s not some beautiful Apple GUI. it’s an extremely efficient productivity tool.

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YAML comes with its own unique pains in the ass https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell

These things actually matter, come up often enough to actually be annoying, and are a bit difficult to explain and learn into people. You’re basically fine if you just string quote everything that you can, but nobody does that.

I wish every language had a gofmt, this is such a non-debate (tabs are indentation, spaces are alignment)

MULTI-TRACK DRIFTING!! Which also kills the other lever guy, bonus!