Developers - what are you playing with?

[Guest]

I reckon there are technical folk and software developers here.

What have you been learning this holiday? What frameworks, libraries or languages?

I've gone back down to the low level primitives, like drawing filled triangles.

[blobloblob]

I'm doing a spreadsheet. It's got dropdown boxes and vlookups so I'm feeling quite smug.

[The XYY Man]

3 minutes ago, phantominvestor said:

I reckon there are technical folk and software developers here.

What have you been learning this holiday? What frameworks, libraries or languages?

I've gone back down to the low level primitives, like drawing filled triangles.

That's a very subtle "PS4 and six cans of Pepsi".

Well done...!

 

XYY

                                                                                                               

The dog's kennel is not the place to keep a sausage - Danish proverb

[bendy]

VR beheadings and general Spanish Inquisition techniques.

I thought it was quite smug but someone had already beat me to it.

Bastards.

[The Generation Game]

5 minutes ago, The XYY Man said:

That's a very subtle "PS4 and six cans of Pepsi".

Well done...!

 

XYY

 

                                                                                                               

 

The dog's kennel is not the place to keep a sausage - Danish proverb

 

?

[spyguy]

49 minutes ago, phantominvestor said:

I reckon there are technical folk and software developers here.

What have you been learning this holiday? What frameworks, libraries or languages?

I've gone back down to the low level primitives, like drawing filled triangles.

Pencils or crayons?

[The XYY Man]

4 minutes ago, spyguy said:

Pencils or crayons?

Ah howay spy - get with times man..!

Kid's got an Etch-a-Sketch...

 

XYY

                                                                                                               

The dog's kennel is not the place to keep a sausage - Danish proverb

[thecrashingisles]

54 minutes ago, bendy said:

VR beheadings and general Spanish Inquisition techniques.

I thought it was quite smug but someone had already beat me to it.

Bastards.

Nobody expects to be beaten to the Spanish Inquisition...

[ThePiltdownMan]

Working on upgrading my home server to Windows Server 2016 Nano which is the new edition where MS have stripped the OS back to its absolute minimum. It doesn't have a UI as such beyond text based menus to change the IP address and open up the firewall. It is so lightweight and boots so rapidly now, the whole installation is about 700Mb. It's running as a Hyper V host for some VMs.

[MrPin]

17 minutes ago, ThePiltdownMan said:

Working on upgrading my home server to Windows Server 2016 Nano which is the new edition where MS have stripped the OS back to its absolute minimum. It doesn't have a UI as such beyond text based menus to change the IP address and open up the firewall. It is so lightweight and boots so rapidly now, the whole installation is about 700Mb. It's running as a Hyper V host for some VMs.

Och Mon! You're a nerd!

[spyguy]

28 minutes ago, ThePiltdownMan said:

Working on upgrading my home server to Windows Server 2016 Nano which is the new edition where MS have stripped the OS back to its absolute minimum. It doesn't have a UI as such beyond text based menus to change the IP address and open up the firewall. It is so lightweight and boots so rapidly now, the whole installation is about 700Mb. It's running as a Hyper V host for some VMs.

Hooray. MS have invented unix!

[dgul]

Swift - ios is a bit of a pain and I thought it might speed things up a bit over obj-C.  Difficult to get the enthusiasm up, though.  Hate Apple stuff.

[bendy]

52 minutes ago, thecrashingisles said:

Nobody expects to be beaten to the Spanish Inquisition...

until they hit waterboarding - that's also been done!!!

[ThePiltdownMan]

41 minutes ago, spyguy said:

Hooray. MS have invented unix!

They are definitely in that direction You can run linux console apps on windows now, and they're porting powershell and .net core to linux.

[davidg]

28 minutes ago, ThePiltdownMan said:

They are definitely in that direction You can run linux console apps on windows now, and they're porting powershell and .net core to linux.

Powershell, powershit more likes.

[goldbug9999]

Dragon age origins

[The XYY Man]

VIC-20 16K Expansion Pack - and why POKE 7680 doesn't appear to work anymore...

 

XYY

                                                                                                               

The dog's kennel is not the place to keep a sausage - Danish proverb

[chronyx]

I opened Solitaire just to see if Windows still came with it.

 

It does.

[mooncat69]

I need to catch up on AngularJS, .NET Core, Docker, Ionic, Xamarin etc.

[Turned Out Nice Again]

I spit on your Frameworks

[spyguy]

9 hours ago, davidg said:

Powershell, powershit more likes.

Do you use powershell as a command shell, sort of like its was originally intended too?

On my super duper multicore i7 powershell takes a couple of second to complete command lines.

These days, there's no one in MS who, after looking at stuff, goess - This is sh1t. Make it faster FFS.

[gilf]

Bought loads of Raspberry Pi stuff before christmas and have been messing around with those. 

First project was to build a train service indicator board, the initial idea really was just to display panel of led's based on if the train was on time, slightly delayed or late. Although it morphed a bit and ended up with a full on LCD display, which changes colour and displays arrival times. Written in Python and uses the national rail API. 

Now building something for my touring caravan, really just an experiment to use various sensors etc. Using a Sense Hat to record temperatures, pressure and humidity, it also has an LED array on top so I'm using that as a sort of spirit level so you can level the caravan properly. Will add a sensor for propane which will be useful in the caravan to test for gas leaks. The core sensor/leveling stuff is again in Python, but there is a PHP web front end that displays the data, only really because I'm very familiar with it and it was easy to get up and running quickly.

One of the issues with the sense hat is if you use it as a hat, i.e. directly connected to the board then the temp sensors read too high, so having to use an extension cable to separate the two. 

 

 

[JoeDavola]

In my old programming job we had to jump between endless numbers of new frameworks/technology stacks which I found exhausting and quite frustrating as I never felt like I quite mastered any of them. You spend 6 months learning some up and coming framework or product, then they're suddenly not using that any more - so it becomes difficult to progress career-wise because you never have enough time to accumulate any really deep experience. Little bit of this, little bit of that.

In the place I've been working for the last 3 years or so, the technology stack has remained the same so I know it inside out, which is far better from a job satisfaction perspective as I'm building much more useful stuff, and every project has been a success, gone into production, and is still running nicely - however it's quite an esoteric technology stack so I won't be getting any remote consultancy work from it - and I have no prospects for wage increases, earning about £40k.

So I've hit a ceiling wage-wise and I know there's better wages out there in tech but I enjoy the job. In terms of what to learn next - before I learn a framework just for the sake of it - say AngularJS - I need a problem to solve, or at the very least a technology stack/problem domain to learn about that might be a good earner and have long term staying power.

A colleague and I have a PHP site that we occasionally do updates to but the customer isn't really paying us enough for it to be worth it and I'd like to pack that in. I'll be very interested to see what the other developers here are playing with and what they think could be a good thing to sink some time into learning - mate of mine is currently learning Amazon Web Services - administration of cloud hosting seems to be the next big thing.

Difficult to know where to go now, if anywhere, career-wise. I'm quite content, but at 33 feel that this is a bit too young to be putting the brakes on my 'career'. I also suspect where money is concerned, learning more frameworks won't earn me much more wage-wise as I'm still effectively just a coder, with the wage restrictions that can bring. So I guess my choices in terms of ££ are either management or some sort of contracting.

[StainlessSteelCat]

9 minutes ago, JoeDavola said:

In my old programming job we had to jump between endless numbers of new frameworks/technology stacks which I found exhausting and quite frustrating as I never felt like I quite mastered any of them. You spend 6 months learning some up and coming framework or product, then they're suddenly not using that any more - so it becomes difficult to progress career-wise because you never have enough time to accumulate any really deep experience. Little bit of this, little bit of that.

In the place I've been working for the last 3 years or so, the technology stack has remained the same so I know it inside out, which is far better from a job satisfaction perspective as I'm building much more useful stuff, and every project has been a success, gone into production, and is still running nicely - however it's quite an esoteric technology stack so I won't be getting any remote consultancy work from it - and I have no prospects for wage increases, earning about £40k.

So I've hit a ceiling wage-wise and I know there's better wages out there in tech but I enjoy the job. In terms of what to learn next - before I learn a framework just for the sake of it - say AngularJS - I need a problem to solve, or at the very least a technology stack/problem domain to learn about that might be a good earner and have long term staying power.

A colleague and I have a PHP site that we occasionally do updates to but the customer isn't really paying us enough for it to be worth it and I'd like to pack that in. I'll be very interested to see what the other developers here are playing with and what they think could be a good thing to sink some time into learning - mate of mine is currently learning Amazon Web Services - administration of cloud hosting seems to be the next big thing.

Difficult to know where to go now, if anywhere, career-wise. I'm quite content, but at 33 feel that this is a bit too young to be putting the brakes on my 'career'. I also suspect where money is concerned, learning more frameworks won't earn me much more wage-wise as I'm still effectively just a coder, with the wage restrictions that can bring. 

Have you thought of a spell away from NI, Joe? Even six months in somewhere like London (yes I know it has its downsides) might give you some inspiration. The developer community there is massive and in huge demand. 

[JoeDavola]

34 minutes ago, StainlessSteelCat said:

Have you thought of a spell away from NI, Joe? Even six months in somewhere like London (yes I know it has its downsides) might give you some inspiration. The developer community there is massive and in huge demand. 

When I was just out of Uni I liked the idea of venturing elsewhere; now I'm a bit more of a realist and take things like cost of living into account - for example in NI I have a city centre apartment that I rent for just over £500 a month and I can walk to work in 10 minutes. I have my independence (no house-share), and no commute. I wouldn't be able to do that in other cities without spending big ££.

Developers are very much in demand in NI at the moment; although I'd guess the wages must be far lower than somewhere like London. But in terms of giving up the life I have here to live elsewhere, I feel I'd be giving up too much for too little benefit, especially knowing what the cost of living is like anywhere where you'd actually like to live.