I don’t think it’s overhyped, at least I’ve never heard anyone hyping it up so much. I would be happy to recommend you other books if you want :)

I also don’t think it’s a big deal if you didn’t like the book. I don’t think even Knuth himself would be upset, really.

Also, if you remember enjoying hacking, maybe pick that up again? There’s a massive shortage of security engineers at all times.

First of all, you can totally do it! The field is massive, but also full of very bad programmers, and seeing how you were able to write a coherent text of three paragraphs, that already puts you ahead of the curve. Determination and perseverance is key.

I would suggest to play to your strengths. Java is still Java. Most of the progress since the 1990s was in the libraries and tooling, which only recently have become passable. The language itself also evolved somewhat, but there’s nothing that you won’t pick up in a couple of days of working with it.

Start with [1], work through all the boxes that are unfamiliar to you, practice a little on a pet project, or an open source project, and you’ll land a job in no time.

[1] https://roadmap.sh/java

You likely have a mental model of Subversion, so what I would suggest is to try to forget as much of it as possible first, as Git is very different.

Take a tutorial that is aimed at Git beginners, e.g. [1]. This will help you start building a new mental model as well as get first practical experience.

After that, read the official docs starting wtih the object model[2]. The reason why many people struggle to get into git, especially after using other VCS, is that it was built from the ground up, without much regard of the established conventions and terminology. Linus Torvalds once mentioned that he used his experience designing file systems when developing git.

So the object model of git is very simple, but also not intuitive. However, once you understand it, everything will start making sense, including the xkcd you’ve linked.

[1] https://gitimmersion.com/ [2] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Git-Objects

I didn’t use yaml much while it was gaining popularity, and therefore didn’t pay much attention. But this article really made me pay attention and now I distrust anything that uses yaml in any capacity.

https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell

yes, calling it a heist specifically is extremely colourful in the wrong way

I can’t imagine how normal people use any software at all. When something doesn’t work for me, often I can figure out what could’ve gone wrong. For instance, there might be bug in the JavaScript form handler, and I can just bypass it. Or an app doesn’t invalidate its cache properly, so I just need to flush it manually.

I switched to Proton from Express when the latter was bought out by Kape.

Proton works perfectly so far for me. Their desktop software was a bit meh, but they’ve since improved it. Otherwise I have no notes.

Ah yes, that’s Android for ya.

The T in “ninja” is silent. Silent and invisible.

Is that a real problem? I’ve never considered that a python package manager should be or could be faster.

To be fair, I don’t use python professionally.

I would argue that having distinct match and search helps readability. The difference between match('((([0-9]+-[0-9]+)|([0-9]+))[,]?)+[^,]', s) and search('((([0-9]+-[0-9]+)|([0-9]+))[,]?)+[^,]', s) is clear without the need for me to parse the regular expression myself. It also helps code reuse. Consider that you have PHONE_NUMBER_REGEX defined somewhere. If you only had a method to “search” but not to “match”, you would have to do something like search(f"\A{PHONE_NUMBER_REGEX}\Z", s), which is error-prone and less readable. Most likely you would end up having at least two sets of precompiled regex objects (i.e. PHONE_NUMBER_REGEX and PHONE_NUMBER_FULLMATCH_REGEX). It is also a fairly common practice in other languages’ regex libraries (cf. [1,2]). Golang, which is usually very reserved in the number of ways to express the same thing, has 16 different matching methods[3].

Regarding re.findall, I see what you mean, however I don’t agree with your conclusions. I think it is a useful convenience method that improves readability in many cases. I’ve found these usages from my code, and I’m quite happy that this method was available[4]:

digits = [digit_map[digit] for digit in re.findall("(?=(one|two|three|four|five|six|seven|eight|nine|[0-9]))", line)]
[(minutes, seconds)] = re.findall(r"You have (?:(\d+)m )?(\d+)s left to wait", text)

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/regex/Matcher.html

[2] https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/regex

[3] https://pkg.go.dev/regexp

[4] https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Ahades%2Faoc23 findall&type=code

The bot account itself. It appears to have been merely trolling, and the article seems to think it’s actually a bot.

This is obviously fake, but I wouldn’t doubt thousands of such bots actually exist.

Despite this design, it is possible to write useful programs.

Interestingly, this applies to C++ too.

to be fair, the way it’s worded I can parse as “a language for web programming”, instead of “a programming language for the web”

Absolutely! I’m just wondering if everyone has that one language in their hearts :)

that one unit in Civilization you forgot about and never upgraded in 500 years

Advent of Code is a fun collection of programming challenges ranging from trivial to moderate. It starts every year in December (obviously), but all the past challenges are still available: https://adventofcode.com/