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?

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.

Hello, I would like to store these http headers in classes:

Host: developer.mozilla.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Referer: https://developer.mozilla.org/testpage.html
Connection: keep-alive
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
If-Modified-Since: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 02:36:04 GMT
If-None-Match: "c561c68d0ba92bbeb8b0fff2a9199f722e3a621a"
Cache-Control: max-age=0

As you can see, many have unique data (numbers, strings, list of strings). I would like to:

• store a header name
• store list of possible options for that header (or store if it's a number)
• read an input header and store and return the found option / list of options / number
• make adding new types of headers as easy as possible

Is making hard coded classes for every type of header viable? How would this be done in the cleanest way possible?

The project home page.

The Github

Looks just like VS Code and I think it's still built on electron so take that as you will.

I'm trying to make minesweeper using rust and bevy, but it feels that my code is bloated (a lot of for loops, segments that seem to be repeating themselves, etc.)

When I look at other people's code, they are using functions that I don't really understand (map, zip, etc.) that seem to make their code faster and cleaner.

I know that I should look up the functions that I don't understand, but I was wondering where you would learn stuff like that in the first place. I want to learn how to find functions that would be useful for optimizing my code.

When resizing an X11 window with OpenGL content, the image becomes garbled and certain parts of the window, usually at the parts that wasn't originally part of the initial framebuffer.

I couldn't find any documentation on if I supposed to call some extra functions when the window is being resized or not. I otherwise process that even as a system event, so it can be further processed by the program using my API.

I'm writing a specification for a web app that will store sensitive user data, and the stakeholder asked that I consider a number of fairly standard security practices, but also including that the data be "encrypted at rest", i.e. so that if someone gains physical access to the hard disk at some later date the user data can't be retrieved.

The app is to be Node/Express on a VPS (probably against sqlite3), so since I would be doing that using an environmental variable stored in a file on that same computing instance, is that really providing any extra security?

I guess cloud big boys would be using key management systems to move the key off the local instance, and I could replicate that by using (Hashicorp Vault?) or building a service to keep the key elsewhere, but then I'd need secure access to that service, which once again would involve a key being stored locally.

What's your thoughts, experience, or usual practice around this?