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The riskiest dev choice...
How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.
I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)
A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.
The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)
Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.
I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.
And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...
After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....
Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.
Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.
But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.
But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!
Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊1 -
❤️ Swift ❤️
for (i = 0; i < polygon.count; i++) {
// some print statement
} **
This highly advanced and futuristic piece of code made the Swift compiler eat 14+ GB of RAM while trying to syntax-highlight, before crashing my 8 GB-equipped Macbook.
** yeah, "C-style 'for' loopz syntaxx deprecated since Swift 3 blah blah". Let's reinvent an industry-standard for no goddam reason, because Swift is the FUTURE, oh, and because fuck you by the way.3 -
We should buy an island, build futuristic building/homes/everything, and then combine our coding power to create a bunch of crazy awesome stuff10
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Nearly same time as the "don't be evil" got removed from google pages, an old internal video leaked about some futuristic concept, where the AI would try to gather as much data as possible from a user and if not possible, suggest devices with discount (e.g. a scale), that can return that data to the AI or if there's no fitting product, just print or make it based on the previously collected data (favorite color, ..) and suggest that to the user to buy, all since google duplex, anything mentioning google has been outscoring the previous idea 😶
src: https://youtu.be/iqUCX5rPQug2 -
so I started a side project a while ago.
the only thing it could do was to create some files with desired names and extensions. so this was basically a pretty simple editor.
I left this project with no future plans for a month or so until I started working on it again this week. I added comments to the editor, a console user interface.
the ui isn't futuristic. the program runs in the console. it just lists all the files and folders where the program is currently located in. in the beginning it could take user input and that input was the location where the files created in the editor would be saved. then I thought: it would be more interesting if I created a folder in which I saved the files from the editor. so I did this thing.
then I thought, again: hey, this console is pretty boring and stuff. why should I add some special commands? and so I did.
now you can create an empty folder, before you created a folder and saved at the same time the files created in the editor. now you can open another folder in which you can do the same stuff as before. you can get the current location of the folder you are currently in, so you don't get lost in your fancy computer. you can delete a folder completely, set color, reset color.
but one thing that I lost almost ONE FREAKING HOUR ON IT TO MAKE THE USER EXPERIENCE BETTER was the following: when creating a folder, either empty or with the files from the editor, the program automatically opens the folder, not in the console(hey, I didn't thought of that) but in the file explorer from the os. now it only works for windows and windows explorer because I used system(const char*). I know it's not portable or efficient but I just wanted things to work, I will optimise it later.
the thing that made me lose that one hour debugging was figuring out how to open that file.
ok, so I used windows api with GetCurrentDirectory, I knew how to use system, I knew how to form the path that would match up with the folder, I almost knew how to open the folder with system().
the problem was that I had the path complete, but if the folder had white spaces system() wouldn't recognise the freaking command!
so the string with the path would also contain the command used in system() and I would just .c_str() the string so it could work. as an example my wrong way to make the path was this:
"start C:\\path"
can you figure out what is the problem?
you don't?
it's just so trivial.
how cannot you figure it out?
of course you NEED to put "explorer" between the start command and the actual path!
pffft, you idiot! so easy to figure it out.
so yeah, the right way to open a folder is like this:
"start explorer C:\\path to heLL!!"
p.s.: I still don't understand why putting explorer works and without it doesn't. without explorer it just just says that path with the first word before the white space doesn't exist. -
I'm binge watching Person of Interest right now and I would like to know the community feels about it.
I feel that it is still futuristic and we aren't there yet. What do you think?1 -
It seems he is trying to replace HTML with svg and canvas when basic html and css can be used to make beautiful dashboards.
Like i anticipated it is gonna be a ux cluster fuck, where most of the website is an ugly bootstrap contraception and some parts gonna look like futuristic. -
1. Languages will evolve to make as short as possible in terms of lines of code. Shorter syntaxes all the way.
2. Each platform/part of architecture will have only 1-2 languages to code in. There will be convergence of languages. This is more to do with industry usage. Underground new languages will still continue to flourish.
3. Focus will be more on natural language. Both as research item for understanding humann languages better and possible movement of coding languages in the direction of natural languages. Natural syntax as much as possible.
4. Softwares will be self learning. Every interaction will result in the software to evolve as per your usage. That would mean the same software will behave differently for every user. This will be basis user's interaction.
5. Less physical interaction. More to do with what the user thinks. Intuitive.1 -
Soo apparently , UGGGGRHHHH, edge the soo futuristic browser won't fucking render avif, the fuck why , someone explain why?
Client uses edge so now he can't see any images , sth that works soo well everywhere18 -
I have observed too many times that I have the ability to be futuristic about technology, like software, gadgets, etc..and somehow few years or months later..they get rolled out....is that a gift or am missing something I should be doing right now? Advice pls..4
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