I like programming and anime.

I manage the bot /u/mahoro@lemmy.ml

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  • 16 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Just because you can get part of your education remotely or through self-learning didn’t mean “anything can be learned online”.

    And if you were hiring a math tutor for your kid, would you prefer a self-proclaimed expert from watching YouTube videos or would you want someone who got a degree from a credentialed university? And even if you don’t care, why are you surprised that others would be skeptical of the YouTube expert?

    Remote learning can be fine for some things, and self learning through informal channels are also fine, but it’s not a full on replacement for formal education in all cases.








  • Ehhh, I don’t quite agree with this. I’ve done the same thing where I used a timestamp field to replace a boolean. However, they are technically not the same thing. In databases, boolean fields can be nullable so you actually have 3-valued boolean logic: true, false, and null. You can technically only replace a non-nullable field to a timestamp column because you are treating null in timestamp as false.

    Two examples:

    1. A table of generated documents for employees to sign. There’s a field where they need to agree to something, but it’s optional. You want to differentiate between employees who agreed, employees who disagreed, and employees who have yet to agree. You can’t change the column from is_agreed to agreed_at.

    2. Adding a boolean column to an existing table. These columns need to either default to an value (which is fair) or be nullable.


  • Story time:

    There was a long data pipeline that produced wrong results. The wrong results were subtle but reproducible. Each run was about an hour long in dev, and there was no intermediate data set. It takes some input, runs for an hour, and produces an output.

    The code was inherited and was a bit of a mess. Instead of digging through the code, I re-ran the pipeline through from about 6 months ago when we knew there was know bug. It was about 100+ commits since that time.

    Mind you, the bug could’ve been anywhere in the codebase as far as I was concerned.

    Took about a day of git bisect to narrow it down… to nothing. I found out that running code from the first commit from 6 months ago also produced incorrect data. Oops. That’s weird though because the code was running correctly back then.

    A few days of debugging later, and I eventually found the culprit: a dependency package got bumped a couple weeks back. Some sort of esoteric parser had a bug but didn’t fail. It incorrectly parsed some data after the bump. Going back a version fixed the bug.

    So yeah, git bisect killed about a day of my time.