Hey high five, also a local newspaper guy! I bumbled into it maybe 7 years ago. It doesn’t pay well (it’s pretty rural) but it totally aligns with my principles. It’s rough in the newspaper industry these days but it’s also an interesting challenge. Your competition is basically Facebook and Google.

I totally agree though. Certain small businesses are happy to have a skilled programmer. My boss gives me a lot of leeway to follow my principals when it comes to user privacy and stuff.

I to this day still have to Google tons of stuff, even very simple things; sometimes it’s just hard to remember that function’s name or whatever, it’s no big deal.

Programming didn’t click for me until I actually built something. Just a little command line game. Eventually after a certain point I realized: oh my god I can do anything! (with enough time)

You’ll get there, but try working on something bigger with zero stakes where you can feel out how code you write in one place ripples out to other places.

Man, Unicode is one of those things that is both brilliant and absolutely absurd. There is so much complexity to language and making one system to rule them all ends up involving so many compromises. Unicode has metadata for each character and algorithms dealing with normalization and capitalization and sorting. With human language being as varied as it is, these algorithms can have really wacky results. Another good article on it is https://eev.ee/blog/2015/09/12/dark-corners-of-unicode/

And if you want to RENDER text, oh boy. Look at this: https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/

Yeah I think redirecting new potential users is something the higher ups at SO would recoil against, even though it’s valid. I wonder if that’s why they’re pushing AI so much, to retain new programmers until they have problems worth asking humans.

I’m surprised at how negative the reaction to SO is here! It just takes a while to get the site, which unfortunately doesn’t work if you jump right in without lurking. If you ask questions the moment you run into trouble, you kind of project a disrespect for the answerer’s time by not trying to solve it yourself first. If you ask as a last resort and list what you’ve tried, people are waayy nicer, even if your question sucks.

I think the real problem is that people’s expectations aren’t properly primed going in. The site could do a much better job about that. If you ask only as a last resort, you end up solving most of your problems yourself, and SO is REALLY good at helping you do that, in a way that leaves most other sites in the dust, in my opinion.

The difference is I trust the language. That’s one source I have to trust. With libraries I have to trust a ton of sources.

What I do is look around at existing utility functions and then adapt them to my needs. The difference is I know exactly what I’m adding, and I know it doesn’t have dependencies, and when changes are made, I know what they are because I made them.

We use too many libraries. This may be an actual unpopular opinion though. I find that the more a library tries to do, and the more dependencies it has itself, the more hesitant I am to use it. It just feels like a tower of cards ready to fall at any moment.

I’m not a very trusting person and work alone though so this might just be an emotional decision. But it is nice having a project be composed of code that does just what is needed and nothing else. It makes it easier to fix bugs and especially to maintain the code.

I do use libraries, but only if they’re absolutely necessary or if they’re very focused and don’t try to do a million things. It’s not about size but complexity.

Classic talk; one of my favorites. I’ve watched it multiple times and it always goes way over my head. Always makes me think of LISP.

This is such a weird fix! Good work finding it!

WHAT?

I’m on Ubuntu, but from what I remember to get it working in my local environment I just:

• Installed the module.
• Added the following to the php.ini file:

    [xdebug]
    zend_extension=xdebug
    xdebug.mode = debug
    xdebug.start_with_request = yes

• Restarted the apache server.
• Installed the PHP Debug extension for Visual Studio Code.

And now I just hit F5 and select “Listen for Xdebug” and I’m ready to go.