Dos32.bas with Visual Basic was my first intro to programming. There was no useful search so you had to navigate through webrings to get programming tutorials. There were also networks of private vb channels where the hackers hung out, those were always fun to drop in on.
Maybe I’m looking back with rose-colored glasses but I remember Visual Basic being intuitive and approachable for beginners in a way that I haven’t seen since.
The fader text is a nice touch too, that immediately makes me nostalgic.
> Maybe I’m looking back with rose-colored glasses but I remember Visual Basic being intuitive and approachable for beginners
I think those are indeed some heavily tinted glasses. I got a job programming out of HS but took night classes to get a degree in network admin. The first programming class I took was VB (never used it before) and completed the semester project the first day, then added a bunch of extra features the next class and was asked to help teach other students because the guy couldn't keep up with everyone that needed serious help (literally everyone). Still not sure if it was because they were overthinking the structure of programming or if their thought processes just didn't naturally gel with it. Changing the way they thought about it seemed to work best
The positive was finding joy in helping them learn, the negative was the next semester in a networking course we were learning outdated tech and was asked to help again. Instead of paying the school to teach their classes, I continued to spend my work lunch in the server room with the admin guys showing me the ins & outs of networking/servers etc and I helped them with their scripting skills. Never went back to school - it was a complete joke.
Recently there's been cases where searching for a company name will actually return an ad for a competitor. Companies are being forced into a bidding war to win back the top position for exact searches on their own name.
"Forced how"? Because otherwise a web user might buy something "better than Basecamp" and that's unfair?
If Basecamp can't sell to a prospect who knows their name unless basecamp is top search result, why does Basecamp deserve the sale?
Basecamp seems to generate more free advertising from playing the victim in the media than they lose from whatever they complain about.
I'm still on buildbot, but it's definitely showing its age and I'm hoping to move off of it within a year. I've been keeping an eye on Chromium's buildbot replacement, LUCI (https://ci.chromium.org/). It's still light on documentation and the source is very internal google-y (they seem to have written their own version of virtualenv in go). However, based on the design docs it does look like they ran into a lot of the same problems I have with buildbot, specifically the lack of support for dynamic workers, and how underpowered the buildbot build steps can be.
I'm not on buildbot nine (I think the new waterfall UI is a big regression), but what that is describing looks like a statically defined list of workers that scale up and down dynamically. What I'm looking for is the ability to add and remove workers at will, without having to add them to the configuration list and restart the master.
In terms of underpowered build steps, I have several fairly complicated, 1k-2k line build factories, with multiple codebases and hundreds of steps (some custom, some from the stdlib). There's many dependencies between the steps, and many different properties that can be toggled in the UI. All these steps need to be defined up-front in the master, but their actual execution often depends on runtime information, so it becomes a mess of doStepIfs. I think it would be an improvement to give a program on the worker the power to tell the service what it wants to do, rather than the other way around.
One way to scale up / down workers in Buildbot is to have more workers defined in the configuration than actually needed with generic names (e.g. worker1, worker2, etc) and then start / stop them when required.
Agree with you on the waterfall UI regression. It seems console view is preferred than waterfall in the recent versions. It's slower than waterfall UI though.
A recent example of this is buildbot. The current version (8.x) has a very no-frills, utilitarian python/jinja UI which has served me, personally, and many other open source projects well (chromium, mozilla, LLVM, etc). Version 9 is a rewrite two years in the making using angular with the modern JS toolchain for its frontend. I tried out the latest (beta) build, and from what I can see I think it's exactly what you describe: more resources with less functionality. Time will tell whether the final version lives up to its promises but I'm very skeptical at this point.
"Put the secret into your shared/.rbenv-vars file"... and then say goodbye to them! http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2014-0... . I don't think keeping your secrets in a file accessible to the web server is a good idea because of LFI vulns like this.
Some other ideas that I've heard that may be better: store the secrets on a separate "offline" server that only the web server can talk to. Or have the file readable only by root, run a bootstrap script as root that would read the file, drop root privs, and then start the webserver.
Ok. What about your database password? I think that your application will always have files that it should read for configuration files or other passwords...
Usually Fabien gives a high level overview and dives into some of the pieces of the project that he finds interesting. I don't think this is the type of review that focuses on overall C practices unless it's something really unique to the project.
Maybe I’m looking back with rose-colored glasses but I remember Visual Basic being intuitive and approachable for beginners in a way that I haven’t seen since.
The fader text is a nice touch too, that immediately makes me nostalgic.