Yeah, it’s a bit on the extreme side for me. 10-20 is what I prefer. I find that if I follow that rule the code is easy to come back to later because the things a function does are more clearly defined. I can look at a higher level function and it’s filled with function calls like readX, createY and doThis. I don’t have to look at as many blocks of code and try to remember what the intent was.

It’s a highly opinionated book but it is full of good advice that in my opinion goes too far. Using a metaphor here, I think he wanted to get people to the moon but knew that he needed to give guidance to get to mars because people would look at whatever he wrote and think it’s too much.

The book has several chapters discussing the SOLID design principles and showing how to apply them. You’ll be a better programmer for reading it. “Uncle Bob” the person can be a bit problematic so I don’t particularly like telling people to give him money. Try getting the book from the library or a second hand store. There are also videos out there of him speaking at conferences that may give a good taste of the material. He has a blog too.

There is a school of thought that break and continue are just goto in disguise. It helps that these two are more limited in scope than goto and can be considered less evil. If you read the book Clean Code by Robert Martin (it should be required reading for all developers), you’ll see that he doesn’t like functions to be very long. I think his rule is no more than 4 lines. I try to keep mine around 10 or less with a hard stop at 20 unless it can’t be avoided because I’m switching over a large enum or something. If you put your loops into functions then you can just use return instead of break.

I did have a discussion with a teacher once about my use of early returns. This was when I had returned to school after many years as a professional programmer. I pointed out that my code has far less indentation than theirs and was simpler because of it and that it is common in the world outside of education. I got all of my points back he has deducted.

You’re going to hear some good and bad advice from your teachers. Once you have a job check out what the good developers are doing and just follow them.

The answer is always “laid off”. They don’t usually verify because the former employer will only verify that you worked there and your start and end date. They don’t want to open themselves up to slander lawsuits.

Find a job you love and you’ll never work another day in your life. I believe that was Churchill.

I enjoy the line of work I’m in. I don’t always enjoy the companies that I do it in. Some are much better than others. It’s fine to like or even love where you work as long as you realize that you’re in what could easily become an abusive relationship at any time. Do your time and do it well but don’t go out of your way to do it. That’s what I strive for.

In my experience a PIP is just a nice way to say it’s not working out, go ahead and start looking elsewhere, you can stay on a while longer until you do find something else. With all of the tech layoffs over the last 18 months, they might as well just dispense with PIPs too.

I read his book “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” about Oumuamua. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ʻOumuamua it was well thought out and examines the object from many angles. He never says it was aliens. He only says that everything we know about it says it isn’t natural and could be aliens. He does say that it passed through so quickly that we really didn’t get a great look at the object and have to make some guesses about it based on observations.

While lua ships a standalone interpreter, it is very much designed to be embedded directly into an application. This is done by invoking some C apis to load the interpreter into the application’s memory space. OP wants to do that rather than invoking another process and reading the output. When embedding into a host, the host can provide its own objects to be manipulated by the user script allowing for a much better extensibility experience.

I thought this was going to be another story about a developer being banned for life. I’m glad it was only the app. Be on your best behavior now OP. Google has ways of linking old and new accounts and then banning all of them. They’ve even been known to kill business accounts that hired banned developers whether those developers were still employed or not.

I generally have a view model per screen. I define a screen as a view that takes up most or all of the screen at one time. Each of your navigation items is one screen. Each bottom sheet I would count as a screen. There’s some flexibility in the definition. For instance if you have a dialog or bottom sheet that just has some small amount of information, it may not be worth creating a full separate view model. In the other hand, I find it useful to create mini view models for list items. YMMV there.

For me it’s about power consumption. I wish there were more powerful arm based socs available. x86 is so inefficient compared to anything risc based that it feels wasteful.

Does the orange pi 5 also require active cooling? That’s one of my bigger hangouts about the RPi5.

The recruiter won’t care much about why you want to leave a job. Their primary focus is to get you into a new job in order to collect a fee from the employer. The recruiter will ask you some basic screener questions while very likely not understanding what it is they are asking. If this is an internal recruiter the questions likely came from the hiring manager. If it is a staffing agency, you’re lucky if the recruiter even has a direct relationship with the company. More likely they’re one of a dozen+ companies trying to find a warm body for to put in front of the company. I often receive several LinkedIn messages for the same job in my local area from various staffing firms.

One thing you should do is take a look at your list of negatives and turn them into positives that you have to offer a new employer. For instance, the item about many senior engineers joining and leaving can be turned into, “I have been exposed to a broad range of coding styles and architectures from working with many codebases built by knowledgable developers. Supporting and maintaining them in a production environment has allowed me to see what works well, what doesn’t, and to better my own style.” Be prepared to give one or two examples of how you were influenced by the good and the bad. If I were interviewing you, I would ask for them.

Regarding your first two bullet points, you probably shouldn’t be interviewing for junior positions with four years of experience. Make sure that you’re interviewing for mid-level positions. It’s rare to be asked why you want to leave your current position. If it happens just say that your company is in a hiring freeze and that you’re doing the work of a mid level programmer but are unable to be promoted and that you need the extra income to purchase a house.

I used to work for a ttrpg company. A dice parser is not a small undertaking. You’re basically writing a calculator with an embedded random number generator. It’s fun but not an easy first project. My advice would be to keep it simple to start with and have your command interface (repl) just accept simple roll commands like roll dex and that handler knows how to make a dex roll. Simple roll commands like roll d6 are also easy to parse out with just a regex. Honestly, I think you would be better off writing a gui app and give it a retro hacker look than going with some type of terminal. Typing on phones is a pain vs tapping buttons.

Breaking change. It’s gone from plain text to a markdown formatted text (possibly). There’s changing an interface (obviously a breaking change) and then there’s changing the semantics of a function. I just dealt with a breaking change where a string error value changed for an account registration api call. Previously it returned EMAIL_IN_USE and now it returns EMAIL_TAKEN. Same data type but it broke the client code. Changing values or formats is a breaking change. In your case the documentation says don’t rely on this function for anything but once the output is in the wild any monkey can start using it for anything and it can’t be certain that some code documentation will be consulted before deciding to depend on it.

It’s always fun when someone comes up with a new idea of how to write code and it is something smalltalk did in the 80s.

There was a time when at least once a month on that “other site”’s android channel that you would see a post about someone getting their account permanently banned. Sometimes it was because they made a spammy app while in high school or college but had turned over a new leaf and were using a new Google account. Sometimes it was a company who had employed someone who had been previously banned but only ever signed into the play console under a company email but probably also signed into their personal mail on the work machine. How true are the claims? I can’t say.

I wish I could say that Google is better at that. It’s basically the same story but with even less humans to talk to when you’re flagged for doing something wrong or in the case of Google your former college roommate whom you haven’t seen in 10 years did something wrong. It’s the price all mobile devs pay unless they only want to distribute to a small subset of users who have liberated their phones.

The only reason I can think of is for more on device ai. LLMs like ChatGPT are extremely greedy when it comes down to RAM. There are some optimizations that squeeze them into a smaller memory footprint at the expense of accuracy/capability. Even some of the best phones out there today are barely capable of running a stripped down generative ai. When they do, the output is nowhere near as good as when it is run in an uncompressed mode on a server.

The back gesture is fine until it takes me out of an app. I hate that. Sometimes I trigger it unintentionally because I’m trying to swipe in an app but the system picks it up instead.