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.
Starting off Top Comments with a movie quote on this post about being a hipster in tech is exactly what we needed this week, thanks @booyouon !
This reminds me of a quote from the dead poet society “ medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. ” :)
Weekly Wins keep us going. Congrats, @cenacr007_harsh !
My last post on Dev crossed 10k views for the first time 🤗
Sometimes we all need to be explained things like we're five. Thanks for the great walkthrough, @glsolaria !
To extend the lego block analogy and make the explanation unnecessarily more complicated for applications running with managed memory models (e.g. C# and Java)...
Imagine there is an invisible robot vacuum cleaner (i.e. the garbage collector) that runs around automatically picking up lego blocks.
Nobody is really sure when the robot will run and what it will pick up.
Sometimes it will not pick up some of the blocks even when you know it has run (e.g. when memory is pinned) and sometimes the block could be collected but the robot just doesn't feel like picking it up on that run.
To frustrate you further, when you go looking for leaked blocks, sometimes they are chained together and the root block actually stopping a bunch of other blocks from being collected is a block you least suspect.
I forgot to mention that it is also a Heisenberg robot so when you go looking for leaked blocks, the robot starts behaving differently.
So in conclusion, not only do you trip over the blocks in the dark but you might get super lucky and trip over the invisible robot vacuum too!
Stress during coding can be a huge roadblock to a successful launch, day, or project. Meditiation really is a great way to help relieve the pain - good tip, @qwby !
I would add to that: Meditation.
It helps relief stress and anxiety, can make you more focused, you’ll have more patience and experience a whole lot of other positive effects.
@jonsilver really adds to this post on things to master before working with React.js! Thanks for the comment!
I'd go a lot further than a basic knowledge of Javascript. You need to intimately understand Javascript fundamentals like lexical scopes and closures, and referential equality vs value equality, so you can understand why function-based components and hooks work the way they do. Most Javascript developers have no idea about these concepts until they're forced to relearn by diving into React, which can be a much more painful introduction to the craft than learning Javascript properly beforehand.
See you next week for more great comments ✌
Top comments (8)
I would challenge this idea: Medicine, law, business, engineering; all of these can be their own form of art. There's poetry in law, beauty in engineering and love in business; they, just as programming, just happen to be in the unfortunate position of doing something "useful".
To the artist, this usefulness is little more than a side effect of a misunderstood art, and I find it sad how we have been convinced that our art is cold, rational and calculating, only a means to an end with no intrinsic value of its own.
I envy the painter, who's painting cannot cut trees nor process their wood; the poet, who's poems can't reap wheat nor bake bread. They are no more artists than we are, only that their art is freer than ours.
I agree! Like the others, programming is an art form that can bring beauty in peoples lives.
In fact, some have taken it literal and use programming with the intention of being art! At algoraves for example, the musician codes live in order to produce visuals+music for people to dance to:
Here’s an algorave performance in Tokyo
Great work @booyouon , @cenacr007_harsh , @glsolaria , @qwby , & @jonsilver !
Thanks Gracie.
Thanks :)
Thanks a lot :)
Thanks for the shout-out, @graciegregory ! 😁❤️
@prostadine The writing style is so engaging.