The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

  • My badges

  • Twitter Updates

  • My Flickr Stream

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,862 other subscribers

Archive for the ‘Conferences’ Category

Lots of interesting programming learning games links via b0rk on Twitter

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/06/25

Every once in a while, b0rk (Julia Evans, of [Wayback/Archive] wizard zines fame) asks interesting questions like below that results in lot of cool links.

I have blogged assemblies of them before (see for instance Lots of interesting git links via b0rk on Twitter) and this one is no different:

[Wayback/Archive] Julia Evans on Twitter: “what are some helpful programming learning games? thinking of things like mystery.knightlab.com for SQL, and flexboxfroggy.com, and ohmygit.org especially interested in games that have helped you learn something”

The response was overwhelmingly good (I tried to indicate when games are not free or not playable from a web browser). I summarised it below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Conference Topics, Conferences, CSS, Database Development, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Event, Games, git, Multi-Threading / Concurrency, Power User, RegEx, Scripting, sh, Sh Shell, Software Development, Source Code Management, SQL, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

delphi – What is the meaning of the bScan parameter value 0x45 in keybd_event? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/06/06

From a long time go and a project that got cancelled, but maybe in the future I will need a similar thing again: back in the days not all raw key codes were readily documented or converted correctly from winuser.h to other environments (0x45 is the keyboard raw scan code value for VK_NUMLOCK of the Num Lock key).

[Wayback/Archive] delphi – What is the meaning of the bScan parameter value 0x45 in keybd_event? – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] David Heffernan and [Wayback/Archive] kludg):

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, Software Development, Windows Development | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

User Inyerface – A worst-practice UI experiment

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/05/22

Forgot that this site has been there for like 6 years now: [Wayback/Archive] User Inyerface – A worst-practice UI experiment.

Related: [Wayback/Archive] How I experience the web today

Via among others:

 

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Power User, Software Development, User Experience (ux) | Leave a Comment »

Lots of interesting git links via b0rk on Twitter

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/05/22

A few years back [Wayback/Archive] 🔎Julia Evans🔍 (@b0rk) / Twitter asked for tips on learning git which resulted in a wealth of resources.

Related: [Wayback/Archive] xkcd: Git

So the below are for my link archive.

Yes, I have removed most of not all Unicode emojis as they are a pain for visually impaired to listen to from screen readers.

Future

Later I want to categorise all these, maybe using categories like these:

  • Videos
  • Stories/narrations
  • Levels (beginner/intermediate/advance)
  • Direction (inside-out vs outside-in)
  • (Rough) reimplementations
  • Perspectives from different version control systems
  • Failures: learning from or preventing them

I need to contemplate about that for a while.

--jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Algorithms, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Event, git, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »

Watch “Felienne Hermans: How patterns in variable names can make code easier to read” on YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/05/21

A while ago, various sources pointed me to the great video below by [Wayback/Archive] Felienne Hermans: How patterns in variable names can make code easier to read – YouTube.

I responded to the first Tweet with a series of tweets describing my two pet-peeves that I see going wrong when teaching new programmers how to name things (the examples are in Delphi, but I have seen similar shortcuts being taken in C#, VB.NET, and JavaScript being taught in both courses and conference sessions).

The two pet-peeves are:

  • avoid abbreviations as those are context sensitive; given software development already mixes technical context (it’s software development!) and domain/semantic context it makes it extra hard to decipher abbreviations
  • if you want/need to mix technology and semantics in names (most often you do), start with the most meaningful semantics and end with the least meaningful technology
    • if you don’t need technology in your names, at least put the most meaningful semantics and end with the least meaningful technology

Both very well amend what Felienne – a university professor – states in her research backed video:

“Their results show that ‘linguistic code smells’ actually increase cognitive loads,” she said. “Your brain has to work harder to process code that has these type of code smells. So that’s not what we want.”

I saved the [Wayback/Archive] tweets in the [Wayback/Archive] ThreadReader as this text (slightly edited for formatting):

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Agile, Code Quality, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Software Development, Systems Architecture | Leave a Comment »

The Global Delphi Summit: June 13+14 in “Amsterdam” (actually the H20 venue in Purmerend)

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/03/15

Cool event – for me even relatively close (about 60 minutes driving) – [Wayback/Archive] The Global Delphi Summit taking place this year on June 13 and 14.

The speaker line-up is great as are their sessions. The main web-site pages are:

Via [Wayback/Archive] Delphi Summit 2024 – GDK Software

If you come from abroad, consider spending a few extra days. Purmerend has a nice old Dutch city center with roots going back as far as the 1100s. The map File:Waterland 1288.jpg – Wikimedia Commons shows it situated in between various lakes which in the 1600s all became land by pumping out the water and transforming them into polders. There are scenic routes over many of the dikes surrounding these polders.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Conferences, Delphi, Delphi Summit, Development, Event, Software Development | Comments Off on The Global Delphi Summit: June 13+14 in “Amsterdam” (actually the H20 venue in Purmerend)

Via Chris Oldwood on Twitter: the real meaning of various C++ character types wchart_t, char, tchar and varchar

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/02/21

A while ago there was this great thread of various C++ character types:

And since most above talk about character width:

–jeroen

Posted in C++, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Fun, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Daniel Feldman.yaml on Twitter: “What does JIRA stand for? Wrong answers only” / Twitter

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/12/08

The response to [Wayback/Archive] Daniel Feldman.yaml on Twitter: “What does JIRA stand for? Wrong answers only” were so great!

Just a few that I liked very much:

  • It’s a recursive acronym for “Jira isn’t really agile”
  • Just Issues Rarely Addressed
  • jumbled information, reported arbitrarily
  • Jumping
    Into
    Real
    Agony
  • Just Individual Redtape Actions

–jeroen

 

Posted in Agile, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Fun, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Case insensitivity helps with accessibility and inclusivity in both software development and software use.

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/06

We should do more to increase the accessibility of both software developers and users of software.

[Wayback/Archive] Serge Lachapelle 🇺🇦🇸🇪 on Twitter: “Quote of the day from @Vintharas. Don’t think of it as accessibility in your product design. Think of it as inclusivity. #a11y #i9y

which refers to both a11y – (computer) accessibility and i9y – inclusive design.

An important aspect there is to support case insensitive environments for both software developers and software users.

This sounds strange, as it makes systems less strict, but with the diversity of people not doing so makes it less accessible and decreases inclusivity.

It all started with reading [Wayback/Archive] /Fay-lee-nuh/ on Twitter: “Totally agree with this, case sensitivity does not add a lot apart from errors. Also note that some languages (Arabic, for example) do not have uppercase letters! So the whole idea of “case sensitive” to some people is new (and thus can make learning to program a lot harder)”.

Parts of the responses there and in the tweet Felienne quoted, were from people still insisting on case sensitivity or even limiting identifiers and filenames to US 7-bit ASCII.

I totally disagree, so I wrote a long thread in response, starting with [Wayback/Archive] “@Felienne @guido_leenders Sentence 2 in your first tweet should be an eye opener to everyone….” archived at the ThreadReaderApp as [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @jpluimers on Thread Reader App:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in accessibility (a11y), Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

The JavaScript bookmarklets that saved me a lot of time documenting the Embarcadero docwiki outage

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/09/28

Winter 2022, the Embarcadero docwiki (their most active site which contains all documentation for all their products) was down. Twice. First for a week, then parts of it for almost a week, then only parts of the Alexandria got up in a stable way.

Back then I published The Delphi documentation site docwiki.embarcadero.com has been down/up oscillating for 4 days is now down for almost a day.. The product and library documentation for the most recent version got back up in a week, but the Code Examples and older product versions took much longers.

Usually once learns way more about a system when it is failing then when it is working. That was the case this system as well.

Documenting the failing system took considerable time, but would have taken way more if not for these two JavaScript browser bookmarklets:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Bookmarklet, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Web Browsers | Leave a Comment »