Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

Having worked at four places that have used #cplusplus, I now have a nugget of wisdom worth considering if you’re in a position to hire engineers and are on a C++ project.

C++ is wide enough that it’s a “dialect-y” language. I’ve worked at places that used macros and places that banned them. I’ve worked at places that relied on exceptions and places that forbade them in all contexts except the ones the compiler forces upon you. I’ve worked in places that are comfortable with the implicit casting rules and places that are hyper-paranoid and require you to use explicit everywhere and eschew default operator implementations.

Point is: if you interview someone for a C++ project and their résumé says they know C++, they probably don’t know your C++ and that might introduce friction. Multiply your ramp-up time estimates appropriately.

When you see //clang-format off in the codebase.

https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkx2-gM-WB59b1uNQ1n_T7XbpELLA9FgfWW

Google: “The problems introduced by macros are especially severe when they are used to define pieces of a C++ API… As a consequence, we specifically disallow using macros in this way.”

Also Google: https://github.com/google/flatbuffers/blob/master/src/idl_gen_text.cpp#L223

In which I beat up React to dynamically control (and make interactive) pieces of a statically-rendered SVG image.

https://blog.fixermark.com/posts/2023/beating-up-react-for-fun/

PROTIP for #frc volunteers:

Remember that the audio from the announcer's mike is piped out to Twitch, and it's a volunteer-best-effort to keep that mic cut.

Watch what you say when you don't think you have a mic on you! ❤️

“And constants aren’t CAPITAL_CASE because that’s already been reserved for macros, which we aren’t supposed to use anyway because they’re considered harmful” is the Charlie-Chaplin-complaining-Hitler-stole-his-moustache of my beefs with #cplusplus…

… but oh, it’s in there.

I made a Python driver for a #Brilliant Labs #Monocle AR peripheral.

https://github.com/fixermark/brilliant-monocle-driver-python

https://pypi.org/project/brilliant-monocle-driver/

When I'm debugging.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkwmB6n3s_g

TFW you tell the #frc team you're "just going to clean up the code a bit" and you accidentally a 194-lines-in, 119-lines-out change.

... well, that's what pull requests are for.

Oh nooooooo is #openai gonna be upset that someone trained an AI without their consent off of the AI they trained on... Other people's online-accessible content, used for training without their consent?
Oh nooooooooo!

https://twitter.com/steventey/status/1641267979399704576

Really enjoyed the #lackadaisy pilot. Great work and a fun adventure.

https://youtu.be/vffu6FG4YP4

TBH, a lot of people in the "Don't use cloud analytics" camp are real, real naive about how hard it is to roll your own analytics.

This is a non-trivial problem. So you see the traffic to your site. Do you have the mappings set up to geo-locate IPs by country? Are they up-to-date? How much of that traffic is noise? Do you know? What is "noise?" Do you count hits from aggregator sites? Do you count crawlers? What do crawlers look like? How do you know if your content got re-hosted?

Analytics is not a technical problem; it's a social problem. Google and the other companies that do analytics solve it with people making decisions about definitions and enforcement, not just algorithms.

In which I use #python to push a demo program to a Brilliant Labs #monocle peripheral screen.

https://blog.fixermark.com/posts/2023/controlling-monocle-from-python-script/