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"It's my birthday! I'm a hundred!"
Imagine being the ruler of that city and letting him get "cured" instead of having him infodump / give daily reports about this.
Sometimes my mom calls a fanny pack a strap-on. This is like that.
This reminds me of the time my group played a kobold campaign. We found a halfling scout and dealt with him. Then we made an improvised catapult and launched his corpse into the middle of his camp. And then we snuck in and wiped the rest of the halfling party while they were trying to figure out what was happening.
One of the guys in our party put skills in cooking and rolled a nat 20 making halfling jerky. A few sessions later a wizard or whatever granted us a wish, and we wished for our supply of nat 20 halfling jerky to never run out.
So now we're rolling around the countryside raising hell and handing out halfling jerky to everyone because it is now the most powerful diplomatic tool in our arsenal. We never told anyone what it was made out of and pretty much any NPC who didn't want to kill us on sight got a piece.
I don't remember what happened to the party. I think our GM gave up in disgust after a while. Good times.
Authority is a privilege and a responsibility, not a virtue or a right. If you are in a place of authority your life should be harder, not full of fawning sycophants that give you an ego boost.
Pretty sure One-Who-Goes-Bankrupt-Running-A-Casino is a Ferengi insult.
The final project in my instrumentation class was to tune a PID controller for a hot/cold mixing valve. I (CS/ENG) was paired up with an engineering student and a lot of it was throwing parameters in, seeing if weird shit happened, and then turning down or up based on the result. I had a programming final and something else I was supposed to be studying for, so I just started doing a binary search with the knobs. We got the thing tuned relatively fast and my partner acted like I was a wizard.
The people that want to restrict reproduction are acting like eugenicists? I'm shocked. This is my shocked face.
"Captain's Log, supplemental."
I've been a dev for 20+ years and yeah, learning a new repo is hard. Here's some stuff I've learned:
Before digging into the code:
- get the thing running and get familiar with exercising it: test happy path, edge cases, and corner cases. We're not even looking at code yet; we're just getting a feel for how it behaves.
- next up, see if there's existing documentation. That's not an end-all solution, but it's good to see what the people that wrote the thing say about it.
Digging into the code:
- grep is your very best friend. Pick a behavior or feature you want to try and search for it in the codebase. User-facing strings and log statements are a good place to start. If you're very lucky, you can trace it down to a line of code and search up and down from there. If you're unlucky, they'll take you to a localization package and you'll have to search based on that ID.
- git blame is also your very best friend. Once you've got an idea where you're working, use the blame feature on github to tie commits to PRs. This will give you a good idea of what contributing to the PR looks like, and what changes you'll have to make for an acceptable PR.
- unit tests are also a good method of stealth documentation. You can see what different areas of the code look like in isolation, what they require, and how they behave.
- keep your own documentation file with your findings. The act of writing things down reinforces those things in your mind. They'll be easier to recall and work with.
- if there's an official channel for questions / support, make use of it. Try to strike a balance here: you don't want to blow them up every five minutes, but you also don't want to churn on a thing for days if there's an easy answer. This is a good skill to develop in general: knowing when to ask for help, knowing when an answer will actually be helpful, and knowing when to dig for a few minutes first.
There's no silver bullet. Just keep acquiring information until you're comfortable.
That would be pretty easy.
return "Why are you even trying to do it this way?\n$link_to_language_spec\nThis should be closed.;
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groucho
joined 2 years ago
There was a senior dev at my first job that we called Lord Voldemort and he was the king of ungreppable variable names. Short, full of common characters, and none of them actually described what they were doing. I swear he only used characters that appeared in C++ keywords, so looking for
fowould invariably tag every for statement in the file.He also had hooks set up to notify when anyone was in his area of the code and you'd always get a two-hour phonecall where he'd slowly wear you down and browbeat you into backing out your changes. Every time I pulled a ticket in his codebase I'd internally shudder. He was friends and/or had dirt on the CTO so he just remained in that role and made everyone's life hell.