Top 5 DEV Comments from the Past Week

#bestofdev

This is a weekly roundup of awesome DEV comments that you may have missed. You are welcome and encouraged to boost posts and comments yourself using the #bestofdev tag.

Responding to Why I believe university/college is a total scam. @skyandsand acknowledges some major issues, but also offers a comprehensive counter-point:

Chris C • Sep 26 '19 • Edited

100% disagree.

It is not anybody else's fault if you choose to go to a "brand name" University, and then get stuck with brand name loans for the next 20 years.

For-profit schools may be a scam but there are many good state colleges and valuable degrees.

When I keep hearing this from the tech crowd, I always fall back to :

What are we going to have? A future where 90% of the population can code? We can't all be HTML and Python experts. The world needs doctors, lawyers, engineers, psychologists, nurses, and many of the other sectors going to a University produces. Your time in college is what you make of it. I know people who decided to party non-stop, rack up legal costs & fail their classes. They finished school but guess where they are now? Their parents' basement.

It is not 1:1. Nothing guarantees you a good career if you attend school. But it never hurts your chances, either.

I am sick of also hearing about the "Zuckerbergs" and the "Steve Jobs" of the world who dropped out of school and became billionaires. I'm going to save you a lot of headache: That is never going to happen to you. For every "Zuck" who dropped out, there are hundreds who wish they had stayed the course.

4-year schools are not for everyone, of course. That's why we have vocational trades, bootcamps, etc.

Do it at your own pace. Don't feel pressured or rushed into a specific college or method. The education system in the USA is 100% broken and certain things can be fixed (cost of books, one-time access codes, more than $1 Trillion in debt, etc. But discounting higher education altogether seems dangerous.

@matthewbdaly talks about their choice for Which modern fiction presents the most interesting techno-dystopia?:

Matthew Daly • Sep 24 '19

Altered Carbon, both the book and the Netflix series.

It portrays a future where implants called cortical stacks mean that minds can be transferred between bodies. Wealthy people can afford remote backups and clone bodies, while poorer people have to make for with whatever broken down body is available, and the punishment for many crimes is to be stored for a length of time and your body sold off.

Replying to Things you may not know about Chrome DevTools, @emnudge adds a few more great tips:

EmNudge • Sep 25 '19

These are nice tips! To add to a few more:
$0 is the currently selected element in the elements viewer tab
$$() is shorthand for document.querySelectorAll()
You can use the color picker to get a color on any page by clicking on a color box in the css. You can change the color format with the arrows to the right.

@glsolaria commented on C# Async Await, Simply to offer some context about when the example should be used for instruction vs. in practice:

G.L Solaria • Sep 26 '19

I understand why you are using Thread.Sleep (to mimic doing some CPU intensive work) but I fear it will also give beginners the wrong impression about using Thread.Sleep in tasks to delay work. I think instead of ...

public static async Task WorldDomination()
{
    await Task.Run(() =>
    {
        Thread.Sleep(6000);
        Console.WriteLine("World Domination Achieved!");
    });
}

If you need to delay before doing something in a task ...

public static async Task WorldDomination()
{
    await Task.Delay(6000);
    Console.WriteLine("World Domination Achieved!");
}

If you Thread.Sleep in many running tasks, performance may suffer. If you do it to excess, work may have to be queued waiting for all the sleeping threads to wake and finish executing their work. At the very worst you could get out of memory exceptions.

Like I said I understand why you chose to use Thread.Sleep for your example but beginners shouldn't think that using Thread.Sleep in tasks is good practice.

Helping others understand async/await is no mean feat. Good on you for giving it a go.