I agree. I think we elevated Computer Science’s importance early on in the industry, and that has stuck around. If you’re a University researcher trying to make a better compression algorithm or whatever, then yeah you’ve got a lot of overlap with mathematicians. But if you’re out in the industry building CRUD apps to fit some business use case, all that theory isn’t going to matter much in your day to day.

It’s still just one of those mostly-bureaucratic hurdles where you need a CS degree to get your first job, and you need to be good at math to get the CS degree.

That said, there are definitely crucial moments where regular projects can still hit scalability boundaries, and a solid understanding of math and CS fundamentals can get you through that. Every single developer doesn’t need to know that stuff, but it’s occasionally good to have access to somebody who does.

Depending what you don’t like about math, it might or might not be an indicator. If you like problem solving and understanding why math works the way it works, but hate the rote repetition a lot of schools use to teach it, then you’ll fit right in. That’s how I was at that age. (Disclaimer: I’m old now. They’ve changed the way they teach math a few times I think. I’m not sure if my experience is directly comparable to kids in school these days)

Similarly, don’t look at schools that teach Computer Science and conflate that with what it’s like to be a developer. Most real dev work is totally different. CS fundamentals help at times, but aren’t as big of a deal as CS programs would have you believe. (Again, I think there’s a wider variety of educational options these days too. In my day you had to get a CS degree just to get a recruiter to talk to you, even though it was mostly inapplicable).

Why are you interested in learning lisp? Some hobby that requires it? A potential career? Tell us more about the career and maybe we can share knowledge about how mathematical it is.

Only 8? Those are rookie numbers

Also, there were some candidates who managed to get 95% and above — but would then just be absolutely awful during the interview — we would later discover that they were paying someone to complete the technical test on their behalf.

Yeah my company shot itself in the foot by replacing technical interviews with an online test and hiring a bunch of cheaters. After a while we started doing a zoom interview where we’d go over the code they supposedly wrote and ask them to explain it to us. Even that simple step made it obvious who had or hadn’t actually written the code they were talking about. I’m pretty sure a few candidates had somebody talking in one ear and/or typing to them on a separate screen.

JavaScript is a language that runs on a user’s computer, when they visit a web page. It is often used for dynamic functionality, ie when you click “like” on a comment… JavaScript running in your web browser will make a request to the server letting it know that you liked the post, then the server will respond with a total number of people who liked it or something.

But, the server needs to know how to authenticate which user liked the comment (so you can’t like it twice etc). There are various authentication mechanisms to do this, with their own trade-offs. Over all, there’s secret information that the browser and the server have to share with each other, and we don’t want that information being accessed by the wrong people.

There’s also a common problem with web apps called “cross site scripting”. Basically somebody might craft a cleverly formatted comment that exploits a bug in the web page and causes the attacker’s code to run. One trivial example might be if every time a person read a comment thread, the attackers code caused that person to “like” a request. A more serious exploit would be one that finds out that secret authentication information I mentioned and shares it with the attacker. They can then pose as the victim user and do anything they want as that person. This would be bad.

So, on to the different approaches and their tradeoffs.

• HttpOnly cookies. Basically when you log in, the server gives your browser a cookie vouching for who you are. Each subsequent request to the server will include this cookie automatically. The browser handles attaching it to the request, and the browser hides it from any JavaScript running on the page. One trade off is that it requires some authentication to happen between the user and the service (ie enter your username and password), to generate the cookie in the first place. This is likely what OP’s customers want to avoid.
• bearer tokens: basically, when JavaScript code makes a request to the server, it can optionally add some tokens in the request headers and use those to authenticate the user. I’m assuming OP’s scenario involves his company providing a service that is used by another company’s web site. They want to log in the user on their system, then forward some info along to OP’s system describing that user. They can’t just set an HttpOnly cookie for his domain, since it would be private to him; so instead they store a magic token in the browser’s local storage or somewhere and send that on every request. The down side is that JavaScript has to be able to read that token, so it enables that malicious user we talked about to steal it if they exploit some other bug.

Anyhow, one common solution here is to set very short expiration dates on those bearer tokens. That way if somebody steals it, they can’t use it for long.

Another strategy is to limit what each token can do. OP needs to make it so you can like a comment using one of those bearer tokens, but more dangerous actions like purchasing things, deleting content, etc, should be guarded by a more secure mechanism. Then the damage is mitigated if the bearer token leaks.

Only 20 tickets? Sounds pretty stable

I use a “real name” domain. My last name ends in the letters “in”, so I bought a .in domain, such that the domain name is my last name with a dot in it.

Can’t honestly recommend that approach. It’s a cute gimmick, but when non-technical people ask for your email address and it doesn’t end in a TLD they recognize, their heads explode. I usually give out my gmail address.

Every time it shows up in search results, I’m reminded by their terrible UI that I made the right choice

“I could rewrite this in a week!”

~ junior dev, 3 months ago

How much does your SDK do? If it’s just wrapping calls to an HTTP API, use something like OpenAPI / Swagger to document the API, then auto-generate client libraries based on the OpenAPI specs.

Then if you add any language-specific niceties on top of the auto-generated code (i.e. accessor functions to set up user credentials etc) you have to write tests for those parts in that particular language. But the bulk of the API you can test in whichever language you prefer, then just assume the code generator is doing its job and creating a compatible API in the other languages.

Later on when I want to look productive I’ll delete all those printfs then pay myself on the back for committing a lot of code changes that sprint and for reducing our log storage costs by 75%

Value watching is just printf; change my mind

Is gmail still considered beta?

I appreciate the quick hack, but with a little more foresight you could have just put up a blurry jpeg with that number and changed the prompt so it looks like a CAPTCHA. Nobody would have given it a second thought.

Must be nice working at a place where that ticket doesn’t just get dropped into the dev backlog as-is.

My salary, I guess.

Everybody on my team is required to do on-call once they have enough experience (except for the low budget offshore contractors who I wouldn’t trust to do it anyhow…)

We have 2 people on call at a time, 1 primary and one backup. You do a week on backup, then the next week you’re primary.

There’s no set time limits etc, but if you get sucked into some fire, people are reasonable about letting you take some time off the next day or whatever.

All in all, there are very rarely fires that happen inside or outside of normal working hours. Making the whole team be on call helps incentivize everyone to write more stable code since it’s your own ass on the line.

https://www.techsmith.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Make-a-meme-butterfly.png

Now do communism where the monster is emaciated.

If that’s a 16oz glass of ranch dressing, and you’re planning on drinking what’s left, I’m all for this

Add “play Zelda” to your todo list