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tterrace

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Dos32.bas with Visual Basic was my first intro to programming. There was no useful search so you had to navigate through webrings to get programming tutorials. There were also networks of private vb channels where the hackers hung out, those were always fun to drop in on.

Maybe I’m looking back with rose-colored glasses but I remember Visual Basic being intuitive and approachable for beginners in a way that I haven’t seen since.

The fader text is a nice touch too, that immediately makes me nostalgic.

I'm not on buildbot nine (I think the new waterfall UI is a big regression), but what that is describing looks like a statically defined list of workers that scale up and down dynamically. What I'm looking for is the ability to add and remove workers at will, without having to add them to the configuration list and restart the master.

In terms of underpowered build steps, I have several fairly complicated, 1k-2k line build factories, with multiple codebases and hundreds of steps (some custom, some from the stdlib). There's many dependencies between the steps, and many different properties that can be toggled in the UI. All these steps need to be defined up-front in the master, but their actual execution often depends on runtime information, so it becomes a mess of doStepIfs. I think it would be an improvement to give a program on the worker the power to tell the service what it wants to do, rather than the other way around.

I'm still on buildbot, but it's definitely showing its age and I'm hoping to move off of it within a year. I've been keeping an eye on Chromium's buildbot replacement, LUCI (https://ci.chromium.org/). It's still light on documentation and the source is very internal google-y (they seem to have written their own version of virtualenv in go). However, based on the design docs it does look like they ran into a lot of the same problems I have with buildbot, specifically the lack of support for dynamic workers, and how underpowered the buildbot build steps can be.

https://github.com/luci/recipes-py/blob/master/doc/user_guid...

A recent example of this is buildbot. The current version (8.x) has a very no-frills, utilitarian python/jinja UI which has served me, personally, and many other open source projects well (chromium, mozilla, LLVM, etc). Version 9 is a rewrite two years in the making using angular with the modern JS toolchain for its frontend. I tried out the latest (beta) build, and from what I can see I think it's exactly what you describe: more resources with less functionality. Time will tell whether the final version lives up to its promises but I'm very skeptical at this point.

"Put the secret into your shared/.rbenv-vars file"... and then say goodbye to them! http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2014-0... . I don't think keeping your secrets in a file accessible to the web server is a good idea because of LFI vulns like this.

Some other ideas that I've heard that may be better: store the secrets on a separate "offline" server that only the web server can talk to. Or have the file readable only by root, run a bootstrap script as root that would read the file, drop root privs, and then start the webserver.

Usually Fabien gives a high level overview and dives into some of the pieces of the project that he finds interesting. I don't think this is the type of review that focuses on overall C practices unless it's something really unique to the project.

Here's a neat (and totally unpythonic) way to bring that down a bit:

    python -m timeit --setup "from collections import namedtuple; Point = namedtuple('Point', ['x', 'y']); p = Point(x=0, y=0); get_y = Point.y.fget; get_x = Point.x.fget" "get_x(p) + get_y(p)"

I tried this once as well and I might have stuck with it if chrome had a quick "add to js whitelist" button. Instead you have to fiddle around in the settings menu which just takes way too long.

Swipe to navigate is a terrible design antipattern. I can always tell when I'm reading a blog on blogspot because it'll dump me to the adjacent article when I'm scrolling or trying to zoom in on an image. I dumped chrome on ios because they didn't get it right either.

This was a neat article about a hackathon, and it seems like you're ignoring the whole point of it to push a holy war against coffee. Also, you broke the several-month long streak during which I hadn't seen the word "brogrammer" used, so thanks for that as well.

How I coded in 1985 13 years ago

That's really fantastic that he was able to save his work from 28 years ago. I really wish I had the foresight to do the same from only five years ago, though I expect the result would be less like unearthing buried treasure and more like finding what stinks in the fridge.

It definitely depends on the language. The author mentions spring security so I'm assuming he's using java, where it's a massive PITA to manually hunt down and attach the sources to the 50 jars you have in lib/. Maven probably has something that will automatically do this but if your legacy project is just using ant then you're pretty much stuck.