LacciMay 11
This is really important advice, especially for anyone dealing with mental health struggles or a chronic illness.
Show threadNilaJonesMay 11

@Lacci

Yes!

One of the most important things I learned in computer science major was the projects tend to get stuck at the 90% completion stage, for reasons. One of the reasons is, that's the easy part

I've taken this forward in my non-computer life, to tell myself, I will just do the easy 90%. Or sometimes the easy 70%. The rest might be nice to do, but it's not as necessary

It takes 2 minutes to wipe down the kitchen counters and get them 90% clean. The other 10% would take what, half an hour?

Show threadNatasha Nox 🇺🇦🇵🇸May 11
@NilaJones @Lacci Unoptimized code that somehow works is still code that works. 
Show threadLeonardo Ferreira Fontenelle
@Natanox @NilaJones @Lacci famously, worrying too soon with code optimization is a recipe for disaster
May 11 at 1:13pmMoshidon
Show threadNatasha Nox 🇺🇦🇵🇸May 11
@lffontenelle @NilaJones @Lacci Wish some parts of the FOSS community were more… relaxed about this as well. Although it's probably a very bad time to bring this up, given the flood of AI garbage…
Show threadLevkaMay 11

@lffontenelle @Natanox @NilaJones @Lacci

"Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown." -- Rebecca Solnit, *A Field Guide to Getting Lost*

Show threadsylvieMay 12

@lffontenelle your daily reminder that knuth did not say "never optimize", knuth said to optimize where it actually matters (and, *obviously*, you should not write a program in a stupid way that would make it slow), stopping for 5 minutes to think 'is this approach horrible or is it passable?' is not premature optimization, it is getting 80% of the way with 20% of the effort

my game uses sorted arrays because i dont know how to write a "real" hashmap and there is very little benefit compared to what im doing, while not performing a linear search every time is basically free

Show threaddivVerentMay 16
@Natanox @NilaJones @Lacci @lffontenelle Do not care about performance optimizations. Optimize for maintainability first.
Show threadNatasha Nox 🇺🇦🇵🇸May 17

@divVerent @NilaJones @lffontenelle @Lacci *do not care too much

There are still unnecessary sins, like throwing binary data in managed lists. Which funnily enough is something AI likes to do. *Not* doing that doesn't require more work though.

Show threaddivVerentMay 17
@Natanox @NilaJones @lffontenelle @Lacci Also common among Java devs is just annotating your class a bit to be serializable, rather than building a binary or text format.

Config files in XML are bad enough, but nothing beats java.lang.Serializable network packets. And nowadays you won't even get a CVE for that...
Show threadNatasha Nox 🇺🇦🇵🇸May 17
@divVerent @NilaJones @lffontenelle @Lacci Just so I understand it correctly: Instead of using a proper networking scheme they just design whole classes so they can be shoveled into network packages through some functionality meant for file transfer and yolo it?
Show threaddivVerentMay 17
@Natanox @NilaJones @lffontenelle @Lacci Yes. Precisely this.

The main issue is that deserializing may give you any class - not just the class you want. It can in some cases even call code during deserializing, at which point it's getting highly dangerous.