Obscerno

Obscerno, 7 months ago

Hey high five, also a local newspaper guy! I bumbled into it maybe 7 years ago. It doesn’t pay well (it’s pretty rural) but it totally aligns with my principles. It’s rough in the newspaper industry these days but it’s also an interesting challenge. Your competition is basically Facebook and Google.

I totally agree though. Certain small businesses are happy to have a skilled programmer. My boss gives me a lot of leeway to follow my principals when it comes to user privacy and stuff.

Obscerno, 8 months ago

Man, Unicode is one of those things that is both brilliant and absolutely absurd. There is so much complexity to language and making one system to rule them all ends up involving so many compromises. Unicode has metadata for each character and algorithms dealing with normalization and capitalization and sorting. With human language being as varied as it is, these algorithms can have really wacky results. Another good article on it is eev.ee/blog/2015/09/12/dark-corners-of-unicode/

And if you want to RENDER text, oh boy. Look at this: faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/

Obscerno, 9 months ago

I say learn Clojure… but only because it is really really neat.

Can’t help with the job thing though, unless you want to work at a tiny little newspaper as their only programmer for not a whole lot of money.

Obscerno, 10 months ago

We use too many libraries. This may be an actual unpopular opinion though. I find that the more a library tries to do, and the more dependencies it has itself, the more hesitant I am to use it. It just feels like a tower of cards ready to fall at any moment.

I’m not a very trusting person and work alone though so this might just be an emotional decision. But it is nice having a project be composed of code that does just what is needed and nothing else. It makes it easier to fix bugs and especially to maintain the code.

I do use libraries, but only if they’re absolutely necessary or if they’re very focused and don’t try to do a million things. It’s not about size but complexity.

Obscerno, 9 months ago

The difference is I trust the language. That’s one source I have to trust. With libraries I have to trust a ton of sources.

What I do is look around at existing utility functions and then adapt them to my needs. The difference is I know exactly what I’m adding, and I know it doesn’t have dependencies, and when changes are made, I know what they are because I made them.

Obscerno, 10 months ago

Classic talk; one of my favorites. I’ve watched it multiple times and it always goes way over my head. Always makes me think of LISP.

Obscerno, 10 months ago

What about a non-breaking space?

Edit: I just realized you addressed that in the post.

Obscerno, 10 months ago

This is such a weird fix! Good work finding it!

Obscerno, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I’m on Ubuntu, but from what I remember to get it working in my local environment I just:

• Installed the module.
• Added the following to the php.ini file:

<span style="color:#323232;">    [xdebug]
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    zend_extension=xdebug
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    xdebug.mode = debug
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    xdebug.start_with_request = yes
</span>

• Restarted the apache server.
• Installed the PHP Debug extension for Visual Studio Code.

And now I just hit F5 and select “Listen for Xdebug” and I’m ready to go.

Obscerno, 10 months ago

WHAT?

Obscerno, 10 months ago

Ooh rust just became more appealing to me.