I like programming and anime.

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  • 9 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Fairly substantial price increase. I will admit a major draw of this small truck was the affordability. I think some trims are up as much as $2k. Wonder what kind of effect this will have on demand and the order banks.

    I mean, these trucks were on back order for a long time, which suggests that demand was way higher than supply. Yes, affordability was a major draw, but I’m not at all surprised at the price hikes here.

    I’m hoping other manufacturers see this and come out with their own compact trucks. There are rumors Toyota is working on one, for instance.





  • Most of us have bad memories of over-complex hierarchies we regret seeing, but this is probably due to the dominance of OOP in recent decades.

    This sentence here is why inheritance gets a bad reputation, rightly or wrongly. Inheritance sounds intuitive when you’re inheriting Vehicle in your Bicycle class, but it falls apart when dealing with more abstract ideas. Thus, it’s not immediately clear when and why you should use inheritance, and it soon becomes a tangled mess.

    Thus, OO programs can easily fall into a trap of organizing code into false hierarchies. And those hierarchies may not make sense from developer to developer who is reading the code.

    I’m not a fan of OO programming, but I do think it can occasionally be a useful tool.




  • Ehhh, I don’t quite agree with this. I’ve done the same thing where I used a timestamp field to replace a boolean. However, they are technically not the same thing. In databases, boolean fields can be nullable so you actually have 3-valued boolean logic: true, false, and null. You can technically only replace a non-nullable field to a timestamp column because you are treating null in timestamp as false.

    Two examples:

    1. A table of generated documents for employees to sign. There’s a field where they need to agree to something, but it’s optional. You want to differentiate between employees who agreed, employees who disagreed, and employees who have yet to agree. You can’t change the column from is_agreed to agreed_at.

    2. Adding a boolean column to an existing table. These columns need to either default to an value (which is fair) or be nullable.




  • Story time:

    There was a long data pipeline that produced wrong results. The wrong results were subtle but reproducible. Each run was about an hour long in dev, and there was no intermediate data set. It takes some input, runs for an hour, and produces an output.

    The code was inherited and was a bit of a mess. Instead of digging through the code, I re-ran the pipeline through from about 6 months ago when we knew there was know bug. It was about 100+ commits since that time.

    Mind you, the bug could’ve been anywhere in the codebase as far as I was concerned.

    Took about a day of git bisect to narrow it down… to nothing. I found out that running code from the first commit from 6 months ago also produced incorrect data. Oops. That’s weird though because the code was running correctly back then.

    A few days of debugging later, and I eventually found the culprit: a dependency package got bumped a couple weeks back. Some sort of esoteric parser had a bug but didn’t fail. It incorrectly parsed some data after the bump. Going back a version fixed the bug.

    So yeah, git bisect killed about a day of my time.