Tech stuff you've been learning recently

[Sebastian Cobb]

I spent friday fucking around in sumologic for work. It's a log management tool (you may have heard of logstash/kibana, it's like that but more powerful).

Anyway I made a hench dashboard that gives us stats on errors and the ratio of errors to overall use, it will be used to alert us to things going wrong (usually down to a third party) and react to it before things get reported by users/the business.

Makes a change to do something proactive, I'm usually the guy who has to run around with sellotape and string fixing stuff when it's bust.

[mobias]

I'm currently trying to get to grips with map creating and editing for Farming Simulator. My first project is making a digital recreation of a farm in Northern Idaho. Even the guys that do this for a living from home and know the software inside out can take up to six months to make maps for the game, so it may take me some time. The learning curve is enormous, frustrating but also fun and its giving me a taste of working as an environment and general world designer in the games industry, which what I quite fancy as a career change.





This is what goes on behind the scenes in Farming Simulator. If anyone is interested in the material density or horizontal width variance of wheat I'm your man.

[Twed]

I've been using Ember.js in a couple of projects and am really quite fond of it. I know React is #1 these days but that's not comparing like for like and I'm finding Ember to be really quite elegant. When convention doesn't fit it is perfectly customizable, too.

I can see the point of a full React stack for a large product with a huge team, but for me putting together a reasonably simple front-end on top of my own backend it's a godsend. And by fuck does it beat Angular's messy, ugly arse.

[Consignia]

I spent of all yesterday trying to retro-fit a Dojo based application into a React framework for a proof of concept. After hours of using bridging libraries and messing around with bones of react, I stuck the entire old application in a string into a eval statement. Jobs a good 'un 👍.

I've tried several times to get into React, but I just don't get on with it. There's just so much tooling involved in it, and indeed most modern JavaScript development, I just find it difficult to pick it up. Really should take the drop with it or something similar, as I am falling behind the curve on it a bit.

[Twed]

Try Ember. It comes with a full stack of tooling for the front end by default.

I admire the purity of React, but unless I could devote all my working hours to it the time spent setting up a full stack along is prohibitive.

[Consignia]

Yeah, just followed this tutorial: https://guides.emberjs.com/v3.1.0/getting-started/quick-start/ , and it seems pretty nifty. No JSX, so that's a big thumbs up from me.

[Twed]

That quick start has become my go-to for convincing people.

[doppelkorn]

I'm trying to figure out how to make a little animated header for my website. Not sure whether to do a GIF or try and animate it using JavaScript or even if it's possible in CSS. It's just a little pixel art image of an old-school monitor with my name being typed across it.

[Consignia]

Yup:

https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/typewriter-effect/

I'd do it in that rather than a gif if possible.

EDIT: Adding this (http://aleclownes.com/2017/02/01/crt-display.html) you can make quite a funky crt effect:

https://codepen.io/anon/pen/ZobQKm

[Sebastian Cobb]

I've been using Ember.js in a couple of projects and am really quite fond of it. I know React is #1 these days but that's not comparing like for like and I'm finding Ember to be really quite elegant. When convention doesn't fit it is perfectly customizable, too.

I can see the point of a full React stack for a large product with a huge team, but for me putting together a reasonably simple front-end on top of my own backend it's a godsend. And by fuck does it beat Angular's messy, ugly arse.

I was quite impressed with bootstrap when I just needed a page with a videojs player in it and a button to call an api endpoint and handle the response.

[Z]

I've been using Ember.js in a couple of projects and am really quite fond of it. I know React is #1 these days but that's not comparing like for like and I'm finding Ember to be really quite elegant. When convention doesn't fit it is perfectly customizable, too.

I can see the point of a full React stack for a large product with a huge team, but for me putting together a reasonably simple front-end on top of my own backend it's a godsend. And by fuck does it beat Angular's messy, ugly arse.

What about Vue.js? I found Ember a bit too far removed from React (which I started with) to be immediately useful but Vue is really quick to get going and it's devtools are a lot more immediately intuitive (to me at least). Feel like there's a better chance of using stuff you've learned by yourself with Vue to use professionally too and vice versa; whereas Ember seems like a bit of an outlier.

For extremely simple frontends I'm tending to lean towards just using Knockout atm tbh.

[Twed]

Bootstrap never feels quite right to me. I'm petrified at the prospect of ever having to customize it. I think I'd use some simpler, grid-only framework if it ever had to end up looking like it wasn't Bootstrap.

I have only heard of Vue, I will check it out.

[Consignia]

Bootstrap is awesome because of this:

http://code.divshot.com/geo-bootstrap/

[Sebastian Cobb]

Bootstrap never feels quite right to me. I'm petrified at the prospect of ever having to customize it.

That's how I feel about most FE frameworks. I never feel I know enough about them to make them do what I want so it always feels like I'm tricking them into doing what I want, which is usually something really simple.

One of the last jobs in my last job was to upgrade a few web apps to render in modern browsers using Common Controls, a closed-source j2ee framework that hasn't been supported in about 10 years. It was hellish and largely involved me having to write loads of javascript hacks to modify the dom elements after they'd loaded.

I try and stick to the backend as much as I can.

[Twed]

That's how I feel about most FE frameworks. I never feel I know enough about them to make them do what I want so it always feels like I'm tricking them into doing what I want, which is usually something really simple.

Bootstrap isn't a framework though, and barely any frameworks have any default visual style at all. They expect you to template your own output (often using something like Bootstrap).

[Consignia]

It's really cliché to quote this blog post, but really does sum up my frustrations with modern web development: https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2016-d3a717dd577f .

I just find the tooling a complete spaghetti mess to get into. I was looking at a colleague's Vue experiment the other day, and I thought just installing yarn would be all I needed to run it. But then running Yarn build, I was told I needed Python (a different version to the one I already had installed) and a C++ compiler (I was running on Windows). This was just to run a basic web app that was little more than a page with a map and an elastic querier on it. Not to mention all the freaking dependencies it required to run (830 modules in the node_modules directory). I could do a decent hash of something similar in plain JavaScript without so much cruft.

I'm not discounting the advantages a well structured application framework and build tool brings, but I feel the current web development ecosystem is not mature in the way say Java's is. I'm not trying to be dismissive, which is why I plan to get to grips with a few of these in the future, so I can make a better judgement than just agreeing with that article above.

[Twed]

The article is a little disingenuous though. Most of what is mentioned is entirely optional and then it gets really desperate and starts attacking functional programming because Flow is written in OCaml.

[Consignia]

Definitely. I think the writer stretches the joke beyond credulity, I was pretty loathed to post it. It just sticks in my head everytime I'm discussing web development with people, it's like a Tourette's of mine to bring it up.

[Z]

Bootstrap was meant to be a tool you build upon yourself, providing the skeleton of a style guide to strip and expand upon, or whatever.



Have to say, maybe it's just because I've gotten better, but I find the general range of frontend development environments are an awful lot easier to follow in the last 12 months or so than it was for the whole time I was dabbling up to that. If you just focus on a project instead of literally everything that's going on, it's all very easy to follow and a lot easier to debug/google issues than it used to be too.
Not a huge fan of Flow, mind. The amount of time it takes doesn't seem to really justify the positives derived from it for me at least.

[Twed]

Bootstrap was meant to be a tool you build upon yourself, providing the skeleton of a style guide to strip and expand upon, or whatever.



Have to say, maybe it's just because I've gotten better, but I find the general range of frontend development environments are an awful lot easier to follow in the last 12 months or so than it was for the whole time I was dabbling up to that. If you just focus on a project instead of literally everything that's going on, it's all very easy to follow and a lot easier to debug/google issues than it used to be too.
Not a huge fan of Flow, mind. The amount of time it takes doesn't seem to really justify the positives derived from it for me at least.

I attempted to use it and the tooling felt flimsy. It also seemed to add a lot of overhead in using other libraries, some coming with their own ridiculous Flow-compatible packages. Same goes for Typescript.

[Z]

I attempted to use it and the tooling felt flimsy. It also seemed to add a lot of overhead in using other libraries, some coming with their own ridiculous Flow-compatible packages. Same goes for Typescript.

Flow was only at all usable for me with Nuclide on Atom. Even then it seemed hell bent of forcing me to give up with the sheer range of warnings.
I haven't gone near TypeScript much at all but I imagine it works far better with VSCode than Flow does with Nuclide.

[doppelkorn]

As a complete web development cretin, I've struggled literally all evening making a page that's LITERALLY text in screen-width coloured boxes. Four of them. In the end I binned off Bootstrap because it was putting in secret 15px margins on the left and right and I wasn't confident I could turn them off without breaking something.

The page I'm building is "inspired by" this, basically http://somepeopleiknow.se/

Anyway, getting there now...

Thanks for the typewriter text tips BTW xx

[doppelkorn]

"ale clownes"?

[Z]

These days, if you want to make an absurdly quick and simple layout, the best bet is surely to just learn flexbox or CSS Grid, surely? You can have total control of the CSS yourself then.

Oh, and use a pre-compiler because writing straight CSS is a misery.



Right now I'm looking into Twine to see what kind of ways I can export the scripts. Might have an idea for an engine of my own to use with it...

[Zetetic]

I've (mostly) worked out how to change the health status LEDs on a 2011 N36/N40/N54L HP microserver.

(GPIO pin 188 controls the blue LED, GPIO pin 187 controls the orange LED. These are also controlled as the lines for port 4 on the SMBus controller.

I've still not found the red LED, and it's not a great idea to randomly fiddle with GPIO pins, as a lot of them can be used for something else.)

[Sebastian Cobb]

I've got one of them microservers (N54L), it's not really doing much more than being a glorified nas/torrent client/vpn.

At one point it was going to be htpc, and it did an alright job with kodi but I was disappointed that it lost v-sync on things like netflix so I fucked it off for a raspberry pi to do kodi + diy ambilight stuff and a firestick.

Part of me wants to sack off the windows server 2008 build that's on it and put either vmware or a minimal arch + virtualbox install on it so I can play about with various os's. I'd have to plug a monitor into it and I can't really be arsed.

[Consignia]

It's ugly as sin and quite hacky but given it's done what I want I'm not going to bother to tidy it.

Data Science in a nutshell.

[doppelkorn]

I'm trying to actually do something* in python and I'm falling at the first hurdle.

Trying to install packages using pip or easy_install but from the Terminal on a Mac. This means I have to use sudo, but apparently that is Very Bad because you can't know what's in the packages. So how the fuck am I supposed to install them?

*scrape CaB lol

[Consignia]

Why not set up a virtual environment for python https://realpython.com/python-virtual-environments-a-primer/ ? Should eliminate the need for root command on pip. To be honest I didn't even know pip required root, I thought it would stick everything in user space, but I usually do stuff like that in burnable VMs, so if it all goes tits up, no problem.

[Z]

I've been trying to make some a collection of React components for my personal website lately, but also want the CSS involved to be useful independently as a kind of shitty CSS framework. Finding the balance between classes and simple html hierarchies (cos I'll need to document the CSS after) is really hard but I think there's definitely a benefit to the constraint (i.e. seeing what can be done with shallow hierarchies, reserving usage of before/after elements in case I need them later)

The webpack build scripts are gonna be a fucking nightmare to get down right though, importing the correct CSS fragments to the correct components, compiling them in the right order into a separate CSS file...




Beyond that, I probably mentioned this one earlier but I built geojsons for basically every metropolitan bus route in the USA a few weeks ago. Also got some pretty sweet condensed JSONs of the schedule and stop data to work with them. I've included the copyright from the original sources in my modified files.
Can anyone tell me whether there's any legal aspects I need to consider before I start sharing them with a bunch of sources?
I've also got the scripts to pull the data and build them all, I assume it's 100% okay to share.