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Derek F

 Open Office Hours

A place where we can informally discuss whatever comes to mind...
Derek F
Jun 28, 2023 22:47
and I managed to shift a date 2 days into the past using nothing but typecasting and the date() method on Datetime.
Derek F
Jun 28, 2023 22:45
...I just spent an entire month wrestling with Dates/Datetimes
Derek F
Jun 9, 2023 02:56
yep, they're back
Derek F
Jun 8, 2023 16:24
and it looks like our friendly, neighborhood spam campaign might be returning
Derek F
Jun 7, 2023 02:16
@Kasper Today, I'm going to show you how to bulkify your triggers through interpretive dance.
Derek F
Jun 6, 2023 21:52
That, or it's just a very conveniently timed bug/issue
Derek F
Jun 6, 2023 21:49
and a question on Academia SE that has maintained its top hot network question for over 24 hours appears that it may have spooked SO management into removing featured meta posts from the sidebar on every SE site.
Derek F
Jun 6, 2023 21:47
what appears to be a hasty dictum from the c-suite to stop using AI detector tools or else has gotten 2 main posts on SO's meta (and the "official" statement is getting ratio'd pretty heavily). This was also where the post on our meta came from. Reports of more public disparagement of volunteer mods (though I haven't really looked to see if those are substantiated).
Derek F
Jun 6, 2023 21:41
oof, stackoverflow (the company) not having a good week.
Derek F
May 16, 2023 00:16
@Kasper only in SELECT though, semi-joins and anti-joins aren't changing (based on the one question that I've seen regarding this change so far)
Derek F
May 14, 2023 16:06
I do imagine this will spark a wave of questions with people trying to avoid nested for loops though.
Derek F
May 14, 2023 16:06
Unrelated: Salesforce allowing us to do multiple levels of parent-child subqueries in Summer '23 is neat. I don't think I have any immediate applications for it in mind, but it's nice to have the option.
Derek F
May 14, 2023 16:00
2 stars out of 5
Derek F
May 14, 2023 16:00
@Kasper From what I got from google translate, it was pretty much a generic curse with explicit suggestions involving female family members. I'm afraid that it happened suddenly enough that I didn't get the full effect. Kinda like if a football (soccer ball) whizzes past you from behind. You can tell that there could've been an impact, but you didn't see it coming (so you weren't bracing for it) and it missed, so you're just left with a feeling of "huh, that could've been bad".
Derek F
May 8, 2023 16:34
I had to give a tl;dr on what a checksum was in one meeting, but that's about it.
I mean, sure, the "Project Manager(s)" and art/design team aren't going to really understand the infrastructure bits, but it's also a far cry from trying to work with elderly folks who haven't used a mouse before.
Derek F
May 8, 2023 16:25
@Kasper I think pretty much everyone on the front and back end teams is IT (or rather, programmers). There are some people who don't really have a background in tech, but taking part in this community requires a certain level of computer proficiency, so even the non-programmers aren't gonna be left completely clueless.
Derek F
May 8, 2023 16:20
@Moonpie eh, the novelty of the spam campaign wore off after about the second or third day
Derek F
May 2, 2023 13:41
On the entire project, around 10 people. On the back-end (my area of concern) there's 4 or 5 (myself included).
Derek F
Apr 27, 2023 17:56
A "site rewrite" is also a bit of a running joke in this particular community. This is something like the 5th or 6th attempt at doing a rewrite (and my second shot at leading it).

I don't remember why all of the other attempts went nowhere (except my previous attempt), but it was probably some combination of: not having a solid plan, not having a reliable development environment that people could set up, and not having strong enough leadership to keep things on track and scope creep at bay

It ended up with people doing a lot of talking, but not much in the way of doing. Then over time the…
Derek F
Apr 27, 2023 17:35
Part of that is understandable. Most of them have families and hobbies/interests outside of this particular site, so the amount of time they'll be able to dedicate to this is less than that of a college student.

I have delegated work to people (2.5 weeks ago). I suppose I could ask them to draft the design doc for the bits I've asked them to work on, but at the same time, the things I leave to others are things that won't see much/any progress for weeks/months or longer.
Derek F
Apr 27, 2023 17:24
Probably that they have no vision or plan beyond "we're re-writing the site". Most of them do have professional software experience, so I'm sure they know the basics like "we need a database", "check user's authorization before letting them in to the admin area", and "we need a page to let people search for other users".

But nobody else has put much thought into the specifics.

The tech stack, technical infrastructure and architecture, development environment and tooling, software architecture, database schema has all been me up to this point.
Derek F
Apr 27, 2023 16:57
@Kasper It only allows you to reply to a single message, and I broke my Dynamics story into a new message. Discord/Slack, SE chat is certainly not. My last experience with Dynamics was in like 2016 or 2017 (using Dynamics Great Plains 2013, I think)
Derek F
Apr 25, 2023 18:39
@DavidReed Thanks for taking a look at it (and I think google translate did well enough to get the point across). I know it's just something that's gonna happen sometimes (a low-probability event, like finding an olive in a jar that still has a pit). Mostly was just a "well, that escalated quickly" moment.
Derek F
Apr 25, 2023 17:00
The data model seems really bloated (and hard to follow).
I also remember the time where I found a bug in their REST API, and after a month or two of back-and-forth, their response was
"yep, that's a bug. We're not going to fix it. Just upgrade to the new version, lol"
Derek F
Apr 25, 2023 16:58
@Kasper My limited experience with Dynamics was... not good
Derek F
Apr 25, 2023 16:57
It's going slowly.
In the 9 months since that project started, the only people who have contributed work are me and our graphic designer.

I do have a good time when I'm writing some code for it, but continually chasing people down and being mostly stuck on writing specs and documentation is not so fun.
Derek F
Apr 16, 2023 17:27
@Kasper Rewriting the codebase for a particular site where the bulk of the code hasn't changed since it was first written (in PHP 3) in like 2001.
Derek F
Apr 16, 2023 17:24
@Kasper Nope, this is the first time I've seen that project. I'll probably thumb through it later.
Derek F
Apr 14, 2023 17:21
Sure, the bytecode it boils down to probably looks identical...
but _less typing_
Derek F
Apr 14, 2023 17:21
almost half as much typing, even with the unnecessary : List<Account> in there (which would bring it under half of the chars if it were removed)
Derek F
Apr 14, 2023 17:13
when you could do it like val acctsToWorkOn: List<Account> = accountList.filter { it.Name.length() > 40 }
Derek F
Apr 14, 2023 17:11
why do something like
```
List<Account> acctsToWorkOn = new List<Account>();
for(Account acct :accountList){
if(acct.Name.length > 40){
acctsToWorkOn.add(acct);
}
}
```
Derek F
Apr 14, 2023 17:09
Man, I start working in Kotlin for like 2 days this week, and I'm already pining for some of its features when I return to Apex land here.
Derek F
Apr 7, 2023 20:56
@DavidReed no prob. After helping manage a forum in the mid 00s, spam is definitely one thing I do not suffer
Derek F
Mar 31, 2023 15:38
ha!
didn't think this would be how I earned the Vox Populii badge (vote 40 times in one day)
Derek F
Mar 31, 2023 14:31
I've just been keeping an eye on the active questions view over the past few days so I can flag + downvote (yep, you can do both) right away
Derek F
Mar 29, 2023 14:51
that, or we have enough contributors active to just flag it into oblivion within 3 minutes
Derek F
Mar 29, 2023 14:15
The system seems to have picked up on it though, so it only takes 4 or 5 spam flags for it to get burninated (compared to like ~11 flags for the first one I saw this morning)
Derek F
Mar 29, 2023 13:32
3-4 different new users spamming the same thing
Derek F
Mar 29, 2023 13:31
Well, I think the events of this morning marks the most concentrated spam campaign that I've seen on the stackexchange network
Derek F
Mar 13, 2023 13:23
A part of me is thinking "your manager just wants a box that can be ticked"
A cert is simple and easy for management to understand.
Derek F
Mar 8, 2023 18:55
Nope, I don't have any myself.
Though I did rediscover my personal trailhead account (and long expired playground org) when I was researching a question about the JWT flow recently.
Derek F
Feb 28, 2023 03:15
Other way around, actually. It was blocking things it shouldn't have.

Linux, by default, doesn't allow you to act as a router (that is, recieve packets on one interface, and then send them out a different interface). Being able to do that is kinda one of the primary functions of a VPN. Linux _can_ do that, but you've gotta flip a switch to make it happen.
Derek F
Feb 26, 2023 01:09
Fixed my vpn again. Forgot to enable packet forwarding (though that does beg the question of how it was working before I broke it again).
Derek F
Feb 24, 2023 20:12
That is, assuming people looked at the forecast and brought their work laptops home
Derek F
Feb 24, 2023 00:49
Nah, it's not that the cars get hit (though that probably does happen on occasion)
it's that the plows push snow to the side of the road and those cars end up being half-buried.

It takes a fair amount of time and a lot of effort for the owners to dig themselves out before they can actually drive their cars to wherever they need to go.
Derek F
Feb 21, 2023 02:12
RIP the poor souls whose only options for parking are on-street.
Derek F
Feb 21, 2023 02:11
If this storm ends up dumping 2' (~51 cm) of snow though, it might take a day or two for cities to clear it all.
Derek F
Feb 21, 2023 02:09
It's going to impact people and businesses (and travel will be generally advised against), but it won't shut cities down completely.
Derek F
Feb 20, 2023 20:11
@Kasper Also RIP Bing Chat. Somehow, I'm not surprised people went straight to full troll.