this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
48 points (92.9% liked)

Programming

17000 readers
139 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

When you're on a website or an app, you look at something (a post, or a part of a UI), and your brain just starts calculating how this was made in your own language.

Like brain, stop, I'm tired, I don't need the calculations right now.

top 11 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I can't imagine how normal people use any software at all. When something doesn't work for me, often I can figure out what could've gone wrong. For instance, there might be bug in the JavaScript form handler, and I can just bypass it. Or an app doesn't invalidate its cache properly, so I just need to flush it manually.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's the same for people who don't understand basic electronics or mechanics. Any problem just becomes "it's broken" and the only solution is to take it to an expert and pay for their time, or toss it and buy a new one. It's expensive to be ignorant.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

To be fair, mechanic items, and especially electronic ones were far more repairable back then.

You could see, desolder and solder components without issue. Nowadays most of the electronics are inside chips, and only the components that need to be physically big (like those responsible for the power supply) are human sized. Sure, there are some small SMD that can be manually diagnosed and replaced, but even then you often need a lot of skill and equipment.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

100% and if it's a website I'll likely lose a few hours digging around to see how it's done.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

For me it's just the brain doing unnecessary calculations to see how this ui element was made. Why unnecessary? because when it calculates, it's the time after work where it starts calculating, like brain, you're tired, stop it.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

Yes, but for games (I'm a game programmer)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Maybe I'm a bad programmer, or maybe I'm just busy and tired, but honestly I don't often care enough to investigate until I need to build something similar.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 week ago

It's not you investigating, it's just the brain calculating and coding how it was made in the language I learned.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

I don't know if its true, but I think this is a curse every kind of designer and developer has for their domain of work.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Yup. My background is computer science transitioned to IT Infra.

My sister sent me a screenshot of a Spotify one-liner error, white text on black background, captioned "they wrote a lazy error". I immediately recognized that the actual problem was the load balancer in the front end trying and failing to connect to the backend/middleware in the first error, then in the second it recognized a failed health check and reporting that no back ends were available. Root cause is probably networking issue or actual server crash.

I also have a bonus that in high school I had watched a ton of videos on VFX/SFX and knew a rough way around After Effects and compositing (before I jumped into CS I had considered this as a career path), so now when I watch TV and movies I can also see some of the "layers" they use to compile the on screen effect.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

aaaand then I dream about it, and wake up at 3 am with an epiphany as to how it could be done. Too bad it never works for my own projects...