The Joys Of Programming

How different can VSCode and Atom be? VSCode is a fork of Atom and you apply your own theme?

DanB wrote:

We teach many of our students with VSCode, it has a really nice functionality where you can embed it in/as a webserver and then view it running on the remote machine via a URL, which is super great for remote and distance learning things.

One of my upcoming personal projects is setting this up on my little RPi4 portable server, and using it as a dev environment from an iPad Pro, once my iPad finally ships.

DoveBrown wrote:

How different can VSCode and Atom be? VSCode is a fork of Atom and you apply your own theme?

VSCode wasn’t a fork of atom, it is completely separate (beyond both using electron). VSCode always felt ‘snappier’ then atom to me, though I never did a real performance comparison. I think it still has more out of the box features than atom, but for me at least I’m always going to want a bunch of extensions anyway, so having to install a few more in one or the other doesn’t matter much.

I still stick with vim for everything though, the work I need to become as quick with things in any other editor / IDE never seems worth the possible benefits, and there isn’t much that I can’t get vim to do. If i were starting out today Im pretty sure vim wouldn’t be my first choice (though I think it still wouldn’t be a bad one).

trueheart78 wrote:

Every time I try VS Code, I miss my custom Vim setup.

I once heard someone call using a mouse feeling like a cache miss, because you have to take a hand off the keyboard, and I so feel that.

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I use vim in WSL w/ some tmux setup (including vim-tmux-navigator), and (I think) VSCodeVim when in VS Code. The vim emulation in VS Code isn't nearly as robust as its namesake, but there is sufficient overlap in functionality that when I feel like using VS Code, I'm not slowed down terribly much.

When I feel like debugging in VS Code, I use VS Code. When I feel like using pdb in the terminal, I do that and edit the code in vim. The presence of lots of choices doesn't require selecting only one of them. Sometimes a Jupyter Lab notebook is a better fit, and so I use that (along with some vim flavoring there as well).

absurddoctor wrote:
DoveBrown wrote:

How different can VSCode and Atom be? VSCode is a fork of Atom and you apply your own theme?

VSCode wasn’t a fork of atom, it is completely separate (beyond both using electron).

You're right. Electron used to be called Atom-shell (being a framework library for Atom) which is where the confusion crept in.

VSCode seems much faster to me than Atom, and just overall nicer? I'm not why that is though. I do code in VSCode, but I still write LaTeX in Atom because the plugins (last I checked) are better.

I’m just thrilled we have decently capable IDE options that aren’t coming with a price tag that is generally a barrier to entry. I love working in Go and Ruby, but both the notable IDEs I see brought up time and time again are paid-only (RubyMine & GoLand, by JetBrains - $89 each for personal use aka still a barrier to entry). I know VSCode can work with these languages, too, I just don’t have the patience to re-setup a tool and change my current workflow, and I don’t know the state of the language plugins.

Yeah atom is a bit of a resource hog and that probably speaks to slightly "sloppy" programming which in turn makes it more sluggish.

I've always felt that atom is more like a rip off of SublimeText, which I would probably prefer to atom if I could be bothered to learn the differences in the key bindings

trueheart78 wrote:

I’m just thrilled we have decently capable IDE options that aren’t coming with a price tag that is generally a barrier to entry. I love working in Go and Ruby, but both the notable IDEs I see brought up time and time again are paid-only (RubyMine & GoLand, by JetBrains - $89 each for personal use aka still a barrier to entry). I know VSCode can work with these languages, too, I just don’t have the patience to re-setup a tool and change my current workflow, and I don’t know the state of the language plugins.

The Go plug-in for VSCode is good. I prefer it to GoLand even though we have licenses at work.

https://people.scs.carleton.ca/~paul...

Free online copy of Computer Security and the Internet: Tools and Jewels

Just tagging. Thought I'd done it long ago but apparently not.

Talk about an embarrassment of tools.

I said talk about it!

On the general career front, I have a question. Has anyone here taken a sabbatical or taken time off of work intentionally? I've been struggling lately with focus and concentration. It feels like possible career burnout. I really enjoy my job overall. I've drifted into mostly management. But I don't have the focus and concentration for the technical aspects. It almost feels like I'm fighting my brain. I'm 46 and haven't really taken a break outside of our moving back and forth to Australia.

My wife and I are financially well off enough that we wouldn't miss my income for a while, so I'm inclined to take a break finally and clear my head. What people seem to often recommend for software engineers if they are close to burnout or experiencing burnout is time away not thinking about work.

I think it would help me to not think about work for a while. The only thing stopping me, however, is that I'm worried my anxiety would get *worse* when I'm not working. So I'm curious about anyone who has done this and what their experience was.

DSGamer wrote:

Burnout

I got you, dawg.

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Do you have a creative outlet, that isn't programming, that you can spend time on?

DSGamer wrote:

On the general career front, I have a question. Has anyone here taken a sabbatical or taken time off of work intentionally? I've been struggling lately with focus and concentration. It feels like possible career burnout. I really enjoy my job overall. I've drifted into mostly management. But I don't have the focus and concentration for the technical aspects. It almost feels like I'm fighting my brain. I'm 46 and haven't really taken a break outside of our moving back and forth to Australia.

My wife and I are financially well off enough that we wouldn't miss my income for a while, so I'm inclined to take a break finally and clear my head. What people seem to often recommend for software engineers if they are close to burnout or experiencing burnout is time away not thinking about work.

I think it would help me to not think about work for a while. The only thing stopping me, however, is that I'm worried my anxiety would get *worse* when I'm not working. So I'm curious about anyone who has done this and what their experience was.

I'm making a conscious effort to take 4 full weeks of vacation this year to avoid burnout.

Converted my my current home project over to the new null safety changes in Dart. This is my my first time using enforced null safety and null aware operators except for a few small experiments with Kotlin. Pretty painless after a bit of practice and demystifying the new error messages.

https://github.com/mixolyde/blasebal...

I'm someone who rarely gets to write code. I learned Python via a Coursera course that I frequently recommend, about 7 years ago. I got to write a fresh script this week. It felt great. I missed it and I hope to get to do more.

Most of the time when I have a need for a tool, its something better to have a professional write, so it's uncommon to basically automate something for myself and no one else. It's unsophisticated and buggy, but it does the main thing it needs to do and it's mine

I've been doing this professionally for 20+ years, and my favorite programming experiences are still the little personal projects, e.g., scraping a Dark Souls wiki into a plain text file so I could read item descriptions on my Kindle while falling asleep for the night, or writing a daily script to check if the local Cajun lunch spot is serving succotash today.

Well, I have another flavor of favorite experience: inheriting nasty/over-engineered code and making it sensible.

The warm fuzzies I get when I can delete huge chunks of code? *chef kiss*

I enjoy writing tests around other people's code and then showing them all the bugs they left in.

Ted wrote:

scraping a Dark Souls wiki into a plain text file so I could read item descriptions on my Kindle while falling asleep for the night

Damn why haven't I done that? Wikis are so damn annoying on mobile. Either the dark mode doesn't work right, or there's video ads and popups and other nonsense. I just want to check a build or an item or something, and I have to wade through so much bullsh*t I hate wikis now.

'Fandom' wikis, no doubt. They're a blight. Camp the domain, SEO out the wazoo, and let the community provide the content while they shove auto playing videos and other nightmares of the ad world.

Stele wrote:
Ted wrote:

scraping a Dark Souls wiki into a plain text file so I could read item descriptions on my Kindle while falling asleep for the night

Damn why haven't I done that?

The best part was doing this at work; it looked remarkably similar to actually working.

Joking aside, it was in fact a nice brain break between switching tasks/projects.

Mixolyde wrote:

I enjoy writing tests around other people's code and then showing them all the bugs they left in.

What are your rates?

Ted wrote:

I've been doing this professionally for 20+ years, and my favorite programming experiences are still the little personal projects

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muraii wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:

I enjoy writing tests around other people's code and then showing them all the bugs they left in.

What are your rates?

Unreasonable!

Mixolyde wrote:

I enjoy writing tests around other people's code and then showing them all the bugs they left in.

You are an agent of chaos.

charlemagne wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:

I enjoy writing tests around other people's code and then showing them all the bugs they left in.

You are an agent of chaos.

Chaos?
He's...

Spoiler:

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charlemagne wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:

I enjoy writing tests around other people's code and then showing them all the bugs they left in.

You are an agent of chaos.

Kind of the opposite, really. Find and prune dead code, fix bugs, and ensure they don't come back. I increase stability. Bad bosses hate me because I reduce the number of fires they have to put out.

Mixolyde wrote:
charlemagne wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:

I enjoy writing tests around other people's code and then showing them all the bugs they left in.

You are an agent of chaos.

Kind of the opposite, really. Find and prune dead code, fix bugs, and ensure they don't come back. I increase stability. Bad bosses hate me because I reduce the number of fires they have to put out.

I worked with a guy some years ago who maintained his productivity should be measured by the number of lines he removed from the code base