• 0 Posts
  • 76 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle



  • Pyro@lemmy.worldtoProgramming@programming.devDead Man Switch
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    6 months ago

    Thor from Pirate Software (a game studio) does this. He has his set up so that if he doesn’t log into a specific server for a year, the source code to his game will be automatically published.

    You could do the same thing. Just grab a super cheap server that checks the last login date and sends out emails.



  • Perhaps try making a simple web chat application. I recommend it for a myriad of reasons:

    • You’ll get to touch upon all the layers of a web app (DB/backend/frontend) in a manageably small way.
    • You’ll be able to make multiple choices to learn different technologies - like which database type to use (SQL/document), which message passing method to use (requests/sockets), which frontend framework to use (Solid/Svelte/HTMX/etc), and so on.
    • Getting a minimum working system is very fast. You can easily spend less than a day completing this, even as a novice.
    • Once completed, there are many extra goals you can set yourself. Try adding roles, commands, enable sending pictures, embedding metadata for links, etc. You need only look to your favourite chat app for your next idea!












  • I get the advantage, and if I could change our schema with a click of my fingers I would, but it’s not that easy. We do use the native date type in our schema, but the dates we store in there are in local time. It’s bad, I know. It was originally written by a couple of people about 15 years ago, so software standards were a lot more lax back then.

    We already have many customers with lots of data that are currently using this product, so it’s unfortunately non-trivial to fix all of their data with the current systems we have in place.

    We developers often want to fix so many things but we’re often told what to do based on what the business cares more about, rather than what we actually want to fix. That’s why we always end up building shit on top of shit, because the business doesn’t want to pay us to rewrite 15-20 years worth of legacy code despite in doing so it would make the product an order of magnitude better in every conceivable way.


  • I think what they meant is requiring that only UTC time should be in the database. This prevents ambiguity when pulling dates/times out as with many poorly designed systems it’s not possible to know whether a date represents UTC time or local time.

    At my work we store local time in our database and I hate it. We only serve customers in our country, which only has one time zone, so that’s fine for now. But we’ve definitely made it harder for ourselves to expand if we ever wanted to.