I will frame the question in terms of a specific C# objective that I am working on right now but I imagine the question is a pretty general one related to the Dunning-Kruger effect, in a way - how do you know how to build an application when you don't know all the issues you are supposed to prevent?

There is a message hub and I am developing a consumer for it. The original plan was to just create a few background services that get initialized alongside the application, that have a loop to load new messages/events and then process them.

Some time has passed and it feels like I am knees deep in Wolverine, Quartz, Hangfire, MassTransit, transactional outbox and all manner of different related things now. The potential issues are dealing with downtime, preventing loss of messages by storing them in a separate table before processing them, and everyone on the planet has a different idea on how to prevent and solve them and none of them sound simple and straightforward.

Honestly at this point I don't know enough about which problems are going to appear down the line and if I need to use third party libraries, but I am guessing they exist for a reason and people aren't supposed to just manually create their own amateurish implementations of them instead? But how do you know where to draw a line when you don't know exactly the problems that you are supposed to be solving?
What are the problems with having a table for the message queue over a whole 3rd party library for it, or what's wrong with the MS BackgroundService class? How are you supposed to know this?

Excellent new tool to learn Git!

I’m versed enough in SQL and RDBMS that I can put things in the third normal form with relative ease. But the meta seems to be NoSQL. Backends often don’t even provide a SQL interface.

So, as far as I know, NoSQL is essentially a collection of files, usually JSON, paired with some querying capacity.

1. What problem is it trying to solve?
2. What advantages over traditional RDBMS?
3. Where are its weaknesses?
4. Can I make queries with complex WHERE clauses?

Learning by doing is hard to beat when it comes to building software.

I am starting a home lab to have a safe environment to try things out. Any ideas on what I could run that is completely useless but fun to set up?

@learn_programming
@homelabs

im trying to understand 'dynamic tables' [snowflake] and they kiiinda just sound like materialized views + automation on cache results?

How can I define lines so when I click on the screen, my program knows whether I clicked on A B or C?

Hi, I have this function that is supposed to upload a file stream to another page:

async function getData() {
    const vocadata = await fetch('http://localhost:3000/upload/',
        {
            method: "POST",
            headers: {
                "Content-Type": "multipart/form-data",
            },
            body: data,
        });
    console.log(vocadata);
};

The problem is though, no matter what URL I enter in the first argument, it always posts the request to /. How can I fix this?

I've been stuck in this mindset where I can't think of any good website ideas, or game ideas, or anything really. I want to get out of this mindset by thinking, "What should I make?", or "What do I need to make?".

I still follow peoples advice on "go take a walk and think about it for a bit" and "you'll get one soon" and things like that. Those don't seem to work.

All I need is advice on how I can make myself come up with ideas for projects that would let me do something with my free time. Any help would be appreciated!

I know stuff like SDL and RayLib exists, but I already have my own X11 and Windows API stuff working, and otherwise those libraries like to obscure things from the user in the name of "ease of use", sometimes even missing features (force feedback and proper XInput are the ones that are often skimped out on for whatever reasons, and only SDL has them to my knowledge). While I'll implement libevdev eventually, it has the issue of needing access to the devices.

While I found some reference to game inputs in X11's input extensions, I cannot find any user guide on them, since they're instead pointing me to SDL and co.

I not only have hard time finding tutorials, but even if I do, I have a hard time getting them to not crash, let alone working. I don't know what's the reason, but I have a suspicion that some of these are now AI generated, hence the issues of them not working or outright crashing.

I know newer APIs exist. They're way too complicated for my usecase.

I've heard about WebGPU, but I don't want to touch it with a 10 meter long pole, due to its name. I'll have a lot of time convincing people that WASM isn't a web-only thing, and me using it for scripting won't mean my game engine is either Web-based, nor that it has any Web-capability, and I only stayed with it due to my inability of finding a well-supported scripting VM without "Web" in its name.

If you ask: My game engine is currently using CPU rendering, and used to use SDL2 for displaying the output. I decided to move away from them. Managed to find some basic OpenGL tutorials when I first write my replacement for the SDL2 window handling. The Windows API is well documented on that regard, I even was able to find X11 documentations (this one even required me to find code already implementing such things, since documentation on some features was scarce). However, it somehow became increasingly difficult to find them.

Vertex:

#version 120

void main() {
	gl_TexCoord[0] = gl_MultiTexCoord0;
	gl_Position = ftransform();
}

Fragment:

#version 120

uniform sampler2D tex;

void main(){
    vec4 texSlmp = texture2D(tex, gl_TexCoord[0].st);
    gl_FragColor = vec4(texSlmp.r, texSlmp.g, texSlmp.b, 1.0);
}

All I get with this is a black screen.

I cannot seem to get tutorials for anything older than OpenGL 3.3, and for my usecase, I could go lower, except everyone tells me "OpenGL is obsolete, try Vulkan instead".

gl_TexCoord[0] seem to be all zeros if I modify the fragment shader to try to output gl_TexCoord[0].st, so its content would be displayed as color information, which I did for a different test. Also I can't find anything on how do I "pass" textures (or other values) to the shaders in the official docs, nor any of the tutorials I could find explains how that actually works.

EDIT: Target version is OpenGL 2.1/GLSL 1.20

EDIT2: I updated the shaders to GLSL 3.30, but then my DuckDuckGo search results suddenly turned bad about the subject, and in/out still doesn't work between vertex and fragment shaders (values taken from the vertex shader is all zero).

For context, I am trying to do a save system for a game.

Learn about Local Storage, Session Storage, Cookies, and IndexedDB with working code examples

I just spent an hour searching for how I could have gotten an

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot set properties of null

javascript. I checked the spelling of the element whose property I was trying to set and knew that element wasn't null because the spelling was the same in the code as in the HTML. I also knew my element was loading, so it wasn't that either.

Turns out no, the element was null. I was trying to set " NameHere" when the element's actual name was "NameHere".

Off by a single space. No wonder I thought the spelling was the same—because all the non-whitespace was identical. (No, the quotation marks slanting in the second NameHere and being totally vertical in the first NameHere wasn't a part of the error, I am typing them all vertical and either Lemmy or my instance is "correcting" them to slanted for the second NameHere. But that is also another tricky-to-spot text difference to watch out for!)

And what did not help is that everywhere I specifically typed things out, I had it correct with no extra spaces. Trying to set " NameHere" was the result of modifying a bunch of correct strings, remembering to account for a comma I put between them, but not remembering to account for the space I added after the comma. In short, I only ever got to see " NameHere" written out in the debugger (which is how I caught it after like 30 repeats of running with the debugger), because everywhere I had any strings written out in the code or the HTML it was always written "NameHere".

I figured I'd post about it here in case I can help anyone else going crazy over an error they did not expect and cannot figure out. Next time I get a similar error I will not just check spelling, I'll check everything in the name carefully, especially whitespace at the beginning and end, or things one space apart being written with two spaces instead. Anyone else have a similar story to save the rest of us some time?

I understand the basic principle but I have trouble determining what is the hard line separating responsibilities of a Repository or a Service. I'm mostly thinking in terms of c# .NET in the following example but I think the design pattern is kinda universal.

Let's say I have tables "Movie" and "Genre". A movie might have multiple genres associated with it. I have a MovieController with the usual CRUD operations. The controller talks to a MovieService and calls the CreateMovie method for example.

The MovieService should do the basic business checks like verifying that the movie doesn't already exist in the database before creating, if all the mandatory fields are properly filled in and create it with the given Genres associated to it. The Repository should provide access to the database to the service.

It all sounds simple so far, but I am not sure about the following:

• which layer should be responsible for column filtering? if my Dto return object only returns 3 out of 10 Movie fields, should the mapping into the return Dto be done on the repository or service layer?

• if I need to create a new Genre entity while creating a new movie, and I want it to all happen in a single transaction, how do I do that if I have to go through MovieRepository and GenreRepository instead of doing it in the MovieService in which i don't have direct access to the dbcontext (and therefore can't make a transaction)?

• let's say I want to filter entries specifically to the currently logged in user (every user makes his own movie and genre lists) - should I filter by user ID in the MovieService or should I implement this condition in the repository itself?

• is the EF DbContext a repository already and maybe i shouldn't make wrappers around it in the first place?

Any help is appreciated. I know I can get it working one way or another but I'd like to improve my understanding of modern coding practices and use these patterns properly and efficiently rather than feeling like I'm just creating arbitrary abstraction layers for no purpose.

Alternatively if you can point me to a good open source projects that's easy to read and has examples of a complex app with these layers that are well organized, I can take a look at it too.

Besides some of the very, very obvious (don't copy/paste 100 lines of code, make it a function! Write comments for your future self who has forgotten this codebase 3 years from now!), I'm not sure how to write clean, efficient code that follows good practices.

In other words, I'm always privating my repos because I'm not sure if I'm doing some horrible beginner inefficiency/bad practice where I should be embarrassed for having written it, let alone for letting other people see it. Aside from https://refactoring.guru, where should I be learning and what should I be learning?

So I have struggled with classes and objects but think I'm starting to get it...? As part of a short online class I made a program that asked a few multiple choice questions and returns a score. To do this there are a few parts.

1. Define some inputs as lists of strings ((q, a), (q2, a2),...). The lists contain the questions and answers. This will be used as input and allows an easy way to change questions, add them, whatever.

2. Create a class that takes in the list and creates objects - the objects are a question and it's answer.

3. Create a new list that uses that class to store the objects.

4. Define a function that iterates over the list full of question/answer objects, and then asks the user the questions and tallies the score.

Number 2 is really what I am wondering about, is that generally what a class and object are? I would use an analogy of a factory being a class. It takes in raw materials (or pre-made parts) and builds them into standard objects. Is this a reasonable analogy of what a class is?

Let's say I am making an app that has table Category and table User. Each user has their own set of categories they created for themselves. Category has its own Id identity that is auto-incremented in an sqlite db.

Now I was thinking, since this is the ID that users will be seeing in their url when editing a category for example, shouldn't it be an ID specific only to them? If the user makes 5 categories they should see IDs from 1 to 5, not start with 14223 or whichever was the next internal ID in the database. After all when querying the data I will only be showing them their own categories so I will always be filtering on UserId anyway.

So let's say I add a new column called "UserSpecificCategoryId" or something like that - how do I make sure it is autogenerated in a safe way and stays unique per user? Do I have to do it manually in the code (which sounds annoying), use some sort of db trigger (we hate triggers, right?) or is this something I shouldn't even be bothering with in the first place?

Just started as in, I'm about an hour into a 4 hour intro video. Seeing two basic ways of manipulating things and don't understand the difference.

If I want to know the length of a string and I just guess at how to do it I would try one of these two things,

1. Len(string)
2. string.len()

What is the difference between these types of statements? How do I think about this to know which one I should expect to work?

I am really struggling to include proper testing practices into my code and would appreciate any advice on how to get going. I work in web dev so my I am interested in how to properly implement a suite of tests for websites and incorporate into it a CI/CD pipeline.

I find a lot of tutorials teach the most basic types of unit tests, 90% of the time most instructors teach how to write a test to sum two numbers, but when it comes to writing real unit test I find it hard to know what I should be testing. I learnt some cypress and have gotten better at including end-to-end testing because that makes more sense to me, but I still feel I am way short of where I should be.

How can I move forward? Did anyone else find themselves in my situation and find good resources to help them learn? Thx

I asked some LLM chatbots to give me some silly ideas to try. Below are a few of my favorite responses.

From Perplexity.ai

Six Degrees of Wikipedia: Creating a program that finds the shortest path between two random Wikipedia articles using graph traversal algorithms. This applies graph theory concepts to explore connections in a large knowledge base.

Emoji Encryption: Using hash tables and cryptographic algorithms to create an encryption system that converts text to emojis. This could be an interesting way to explore cryptography concepts in a fun, visual way.

From Gemini.google.com

Procrastination Station: This website creates increasingly elaborate and ridiculous tasks to distract you from what you actually need to do. Dishes? Nah, fold your socks into origami cranes!

Dramatic Password Validator: Forget boring error messages. This program rejects weak passwords with Shakespearean insults or movie villain monologues.

From Chatgpt.com

3. Time Travel Email Service: Build a data structure that allows you to send emails to yourself in the past, with time complexity considerations that are totally ignored because it’s time travel.

4. Mood-Driven Random Number Generator: Implement an algorithm that generates random numbers based on the mood of the user, using sentiment analysis on real-time facial expressions.