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.
Welcome to DEV, @tatjanaburdett!
Hello Everyone!
My name is Tatjana and I'm currently a nurse and an aspiring front end web developer. I've been learning for about 3 weeks as of today, however I know HTML and CSS from previous times in my life, so my focus now is JavaScript. I'm also a hobby musician 🎶, photographer 📷, and yoga instructor. I'm currently using TeamTreehouse and a variety of other resources (freecodecamp and books) to learn how to code.
👽 Hi!
Great "Explain Like I'm Five" example for generating random numbers, @yechielk.
In order to explain that we have to understand what computers are good at, and what they're bad at.
Computers are good at following instructions. Computers are bad at making things up.
Computers need clear, unambiguous instructions, and "make up a random number" is very ambiguous. Which number? How should I find it? How do I know if it's random? etc.
What we can do is give a computer a set of instructions to do some complicated math procedures and arrive at a seemingly random number (take this really large number, multiply it by another large number, divide it by this third number, etc, etc). Butthe problem with giving a computer a set of instructions is that anyone who follows the same instructions will get the same number, which is why we say it's only pseudo-random.
In order to get a truly random number we can use an outside input. You remember part of the instructions was to multiply some large number? What if we chose that number not by telling the computer directly, but by using a number from a source that changes often and chaotically? For example, we could look at the humidity level in Croatia, the position of the DOW, even the color of a lava lamp at a given moment.
By adding in a random chaotic input we can ensure that even if someone else follows the exact same set of instructions as you, they will always get a different number.
Big congrats on the new gig, @jarodpeachey!
I just got hired for my first part-time remote web development job! 🎉🔥
So true, @sarahob!
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@flabbet is getting ready for first-time Hacktoberfest contributors. Love it!
PixiEditor is a lightweight Pixel art editor. The project has started in late 2017, I am building it since. A few months ago I released a beta version, which gained some attention and more people are working on it, I am super happy about it, but it is still far from the desired state! I have big plans for it and I need more people that could help a little and learn a lot in the process.
I am preparing it for this year's Hacktoberfest, so it's a friendly place for first-timers and advanced coders. The project is written in C# and WPF, however, we have plans to migrate to Avalonia before the next major version.
If you are interested I highly recommend joining our Discord :)
See you next week for more great comments ✌
Top comments (2)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and comments with us this week on DEV, @tatjanaburdett , @yechielk , @jarodpeachey , @sarahob , and @flabbet !
Woohoo! Made it! 🥳🤗