React is awesome in that regard, its dead simple and I love it. This azure stuff is all ubuntu but yeah just normal pain points of learning things I don't really get like nginx but I'll figure it out.

Nginx was probably the hardest thing for me to understand when I was first exposed to it. I begged someone at a meetup to walk me through it.

The trick is the location section. If you give up, I'll let you in on the trick. You will kick yourself for not seeing how obvious it is.

If it was so obvious he might have already stumbled onto the solution himself. It's only after we find simple solutions that we think "wow thats so obvious... why didn't I think of it before!".

My answer was better than the typical advice given:

Guess I'll never be a SysAdmin.

humble brag: I need to get a 97% to get an A, but if I only want an A-, I'll need get to a 77% or better on my stats final.

Failing that, I have an option to take an optional final that covers my lowest midterm. Is it even worth it to go from an A- to A? This is more so for my personal ego since I'm not looking to go to grad school. But I heard having good GPAs will get you interviews?

Do you currently have a 4.0?

If not, probably doesn't matter much.

Only reason I cared at all in my last semester after I already had a job lined up was to keep 4.0

This my first quarter as a CS major. My cumulative from my previous major is a 3.0. However it's possible I'll get my first 4.0 this quarter. I never got a 4.0 before outside of community college. So this will be sweet if I can do it for this quarter and next quarter that way I can put on my resume that I have a CS gpa of 4.0.

Though I'm not sure if I can get a 4.0 next quarter since I'll be taking two algorithm classes. So it will be hard.

node peeps / suzzer,

what is your preferred way of interacting with a postgres database? ie, ORM or other type of database mapper?

If you have a possibility of 4.0 CS GPA definitely go for it. Should be helpful on resume applying for internships.

It's been a while but in the past we've written our on lightweight ORM mapping POJOs to DB tables using naming conventions. It basically handled mapping java objects to collection tables (IE - Students, Classes, Locations, etc) and simple mapping tables linking two objects - by mapping a Java HashMap to the table. Anything else required a custom query. But that covered almost everything we need. It was even database agnostic to run on Oracle, Sybase, postgres or MySql.

ORMs are so heavy and have so much crap - and you usually only need like 10% of what they do.

Nowadays I only talk to APIs, so someone else deals with that.

Oh yeah - the whole thing was based on Spring dependency injection. It was pretty clever in that it didn't need any configuration as long as the naming conventions matched, but still allowed customization. It used introspection to peek into the POJOs to create the DB query, and an Apache Commons util to convert the DB ResultSet into a collection of objects. Only the HashMap<->mapping table part required some declaration in the Spring config files.

Sequelize is supposed to be pretty good.

20% of the time use knex/bookshelf.js (you also get very easy migration management with knex) in cases where the node code is creating the model. A good example of using these two libraries is in ghost (the blogging CMS in node). 70% use node-postgres for complex queries ( I mostly write analytics api's in node which is why this is high). 10% use groovy/gradle and liquibase for managing schemas and migrations on databases where there's intersection between python, java, and javascript to the same databases.

Wondering if you guys may have any useful inputs on my situation here... hopefully this doesn't take too long to explain haha. Anyway, after poking around in the programming world (specifically wanting to learn python), I got re-inspired to take it up as a hobby again.

Unfortunately, I just had one crappy laptop that I wiped and upgraded to Windows 10 to make it decent. Note, it's actually a pretty nice and powerful machine, but it's huge, heavy, and the battery lasts like ~1 hour... I've tried to install Ubuntu multiple times, but it never seems to play nicely with this laptop's video driver (it's the Lenovo with the Nvidia Optimus Quardo something-or-other in case you're familiar...). Oh well.

Anyway, so then I started reading about Chromebooks. I did want a thinner, lighter, (and good battery!) quicker laptop just for playing around when traveling, and these seemed to fit the bill nicely. Then I read that it was very easy to install Linux onto them, and people were successfully doing all their programming stuffs with em - awesome, so that's 2 important use cases! Purchased.

My chromebook (the Toshiba 2015 version 2 or something?) was working amazingly for a while. Specifically, I wanted to learn machine learning with python, and I was training a neural network that took 20 mins, and it ran totally fine. Recently, after making some changes, every time I run the program, about 10-15 mins into it it reboots the machine.... ****. Quick googling suggested possibly bad RAM? If so, ****. (and of course this happens ~40 days after buying from Amazon, which has a 1 month return policy)

I transferred the code onto my Lenovo, and it's freezing in weird places now where it should be able to get past these functions basically instantly (just some matrix multiplications in a pre-processing step). I didn't really want to be using this laptop anyway though, so didn't care much about debugging this issue (and it's way way before where the rebooting happens on the Toshiba).

So I guess courses of action might be...
1) Figure out what's wrong with the Chromebook.
2) If it's bad RAM, am I screwed?
3) If so, what other options do I have? I was thinking through some things, maybe using the Lenovo (or something else) as a server that I can work remotely from via the nicer/more pleasant chromebook (and this option could give me more computing power too)? Tried chrome remote desktop, but it was too laggy/unreliable.

Crap that was way longer than I hoped it would be. Well, just hoping there's a kind stranger among you that can help Any thoughts?

I'm not too familiar with a chromebook, see if there's some version of memtest86 or something similar you can run on it to test that RAM. memtest86 gold standard, but as the name implies it's for x86 machines and chromebooks can be not-x86 I think. Random rebooting / rebooting under stress certainly sounds like it could be bad hardware of some sort.

Seems absurd Amazon wouldn't replace a computer with an actual hardware fault after only 40 days, to me (here you have 1-2 years for faults, and 14 days for "I thought I might like the color but I actually don't")

as a side note, nvidia with ubuntu should be super-easy - download their closed source driver, from command line if need be. edit: according to wikipedia, optimus is very flaky as of 2013, so who knows if that's still the case or ancient history. Maybe disable optimus in BIOS and hopefully there's an option to always use nvidia / always use onboard intel.

O awesome thanks! I'll def check out this memtest stuff asap (tonight). I made sure to get one with an Intel processor, so I think it'll probably run on that...

ETA: Yea and probably good point wrt Amazon, will look into that again after looking into the problem more.

suzzer, grue, LA_Price,

Thanks for the node DB recs.

One other question: How aggressively do you create private npm modules for company work? Eg, say someones writes code for formatting dates in some weird specific way that the company reports all use. Will you go ahead and just make it a module so that everyone can share it in different projects?

At least in my company, we try to synchronize all date related data at the db level. For example, all date related data gets saved as a unix time stamp. Whoever needs it is free to modify it however they see fit.

I had a wonderful impromptu interview tonight. Learned a lot about myself. Some of the highlights are:

* No one gives a **** about any of my worthless projects no one has heard of.
* If web building isn't my big dream in life, figure out something else to do.
* I'm clearly a terrible programmer, "good luck."
(verbatim)

I'm truly impressed with myself. I took it without saying anything mean back to him or pushing the beer he was smugly drinking into his face.

Conversely, the guy running the meetup asked me if I'd like to give a talk.

Wow what unprofessional bs. How big of an ******* do you have to be to treat someone like that.

wait, the guy sharing a beer with you said, verbatim, "You're clearly a terrible, programmer"?

I'm trying to imagine the kind of person who has the nerve to call someone he has just met a moron. Probably the kind of person that gets in a lot of bar fights.

I got called to apply for a position and they sent me a technical test with the biggest complexity range within the 5 questions they want me to solve (using c# or js).
It basically starts off trivially easy, create a string isNullOrEmpty without calling that . NET function, doesn't really get considerably more complex, but then suddenly culminates in the 5th question to build a "restaurant reservation system" (verbatim) where an arbitrary number of tables with different sizes are to be matched with an arbitrary number of parties of varying sizes to maximize occupation.

I mean still not hugely complicated, but a "system"? I don't think so.

On a sidenote: two other questions just screamed map reduce at me even as a non js dev (sorting/grouping and getting rid of the other junk), but I doubt I'll do those in js as I'd have a really tough time explaining my thought process any further than "that seemed to fit the bill in the ideas I got off the interwebs thingy"

hah, that's like my entire repertoire lol

Yea maybe there's some hacking around I can do with the Lenovo. On my last attempt though the computer would go into perma-freeze mode on bootup, so my hopes were pretty grim. I also do like having Windows for the odd program like Turbo Tax (although it kept freezing up on me this year with Windows 10, JFC I can't get anything right lol). I know I can dual boot, and maybe that's an option to reconsider for the future.

Regarding the memory test. Turns out on chromebooks you can run "memory_test" which I think should be similar. I ran it last night and it looks like everything is fine....



So I'm pretty much at a loss now...