Thanks, this might come in handy. Currently, 4 years in the business. Working for an S&P500 company at the moment, but I am considering running my own thing or joining a startup as the next stop.
I would love to learn if many of these ideas are applicable in the S&P500 world, and if not, why that is the case. A little outside of my first-hand experience for me to have an opinion there.
I am personally not a fan of TODOs, use tasks instead. TODOs are embedded in codebase - difficult to work with, that's why we have Jira where you can manipulate, filter and aggregate tasks. The only acceptable case of TODOs in my opinion is to leave them as suggestions to a future person in the case of refactor. Then you could have a task that says something like "Refactor feature xyz and solve TODOs".
The way I use them, is for annotating possible extension points or refinements that would improve things, but are more of the "nice to have" kind, or stuff someone coming across might want to take care of later. Many of these don’t warrant real issues in a tracker, as they would just clog the backlog and get eventually deleted anyway.
The codebase is only hard to work with in the ways it's meant to be - they are very easy to find with `git grep` and they are right next to the code in question so are easy to see when you're working on it. Conversely, they are hard to just 'lose' when some PM decides to have a "JIRA cleanup", which is also by design.
Don't let "AI" make you jump at shadows. Maybe, but probably not.
The first commit was pretty fully-formed, which without "AI" glasses on just means someone did a whole bunch of work before exposing/releasing their work.
I feel that LaTeX is still a good option for broad use, as it is the default that "everyone" knows. It may happen that Typst will be forgotten in 10 years, I doubt that will happen with LaTeX.
No one tells you that they delete inactive accounts. I used to have over 300 solved problems htere. Now it is all gone, all the effort, but the skill remained of course.
A few years back (10 maybe?) they had a disk crash, and there was a notice that for people with 100 or more problems solved they'd do an extra effort to recover their solutions and add you back, not sure if it was only posted on the main website. I was lucky to get my account back at the time
Ah okay, I was active there 9-12 years ago, so it migh been before the crash. I remember checking it, however, 7 years ago, and I was still able to log in.
So, I gather that you treated your solutions as throw-away code, rather than keeping them? Kind of surprising, considering that some problems build off of each other, or otherwise benefit from sharing code; you never know when the code for one solution could be useful later. For example, a prime number generator/tester is necessary for many of the problems.
(I have all my solution code, in source control no less, so if I ever lost my account, I could just run them all and re-enter the solutions.)
> So, I gather that you treated your solutions as throw-away code, rather than keeping them?
I kept the code that I found clever or useful, but I had a very borderline approach to archiving my stuff in general back then. I was still in high school.
I remember there were data loss, but my account appears to have been recovered. You may try to login again, and with luck, like me you will get back your history.
I still have the code for the first 50 problems in GitHub. The last commit was thirteen years ago. I don’t know why I checked these in rather than treating them as throwaway code like I did for so many other things, but I’m glad I did as I’m sure my PE account is gone now too.
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