scvnthorpe

[scvnthorpe]

It's funny how schools always painted peer pressure as this shady thing where the cool kids try to aggressively persuade you into doing cool things with them, like they'd want to forcibly wrangle some reluctant nerd along with them to go do crime, have sex and do drugs under a bridge. Nah, they didn't want your nerd ass in there, they'd actively gatekeep these activities from you.

Real peer pressure is the most breathtakingly boring people you know insisting that you should get a boring job and have a baby.

[scvnthorpe]

Painted myself a giant marine descendant of a seabird.

Scruffy brushwork all around particularly around the mouth area (going for something akin to a penguin/leatherback turtle mouth) but it's only up from here and most importantly it kinda speaks to me on some level.

[scvnthorpe]

[scvnthorpe]

The circle has closed. It is now open!

[scvnthorpe]

Finished the piece.

Got kinda lazy with some of the shading/shine work toward the end but I think it's pretty neat.

[scvnthorpe]

‪happy christmas to my favourite story of all time‬

[scvnthorpe]

[scvnthorpe]

I've got some plans coming. Probably? Idk

[scvnthorpe]

I consider it a moral imperative to depict foreign cultures in fiction so it’s clear their lives are equally as tedious and petty as ours. it’s too easy to imagine eg pagan blood sacrifice was as exciting to them as it is to us, or take their theologians’ word for it that God is everywhere and everything, and conclude that people actually lived in a constant state of religious fervor. this happens in classes about Islam a lot

[scvnthorpe]

That really do be how it is having people to care for, I swear...

[scvnthorpe]

I have once again been trying to make music, different vibes this time

[scvnthorpe]

That time I restored a Database view

Recently at work we've been migrating an old database system to a new platform to save money - this kind of shit is what makes your business processes faster, cheaper and more correct - and this has entailed sifting through a lot of tables, views, and views made of tables and views!

As it happens the finance guy who does all the payroll and expenses is a great guy to work with and basically the one person who knows all the relevant business rules, but also basically treats databases like they're excel workbooks. As such you have a bunch of bits stitched to each other and we're just figuring out how to first move everything and then ease into a well-oiled relational model with no duplication and all together on a single database.

While we in the dev team were figuring out how to do this for finance we were recently testing out a modified version of a view built on top of the old version and accidentally deleted the old version and not the modified testing version.

Mistakes are bound to happen, but we needed to figure out how to either restore it or at least figure out how to work without it because finance people love their data views and reports. There are probably clever things you can do with any DBMS to find shit you just dropped and restore it from backup, but I then realised that I'd been tasked with generating all the scripts for the database objects. There had to be a script laying around!

Sure enough I went to dig up the build script for the dropped view, and I ran it.

I queried it, and everything was back in place.

Shit goes wrong sometimes, but having the right failsafes can really make a difference.

Script your shit, use backups, use version control!

[scvnthorpe]

ive found that partially treated mental illness can sometimes look to uninvolved onlookers like faked mental illness.

[scvnthorpe]

A newcomer will reckon Linux to be the hardest set of OS s, but at some point you realise it's windows

[scvnthorpe]

Oh yeah completely unrelated to the general vibe here but I did make a unit of music at some point lol

[scvnthorpe]

I paired in person a lot back in the day and that was great!

Doing so remotely can really onboard you and helps to sand off some of the latency with requirements gathering or code review. Solo is fine but just ain't the same

Do you find you’re able to pair program effectively? Does your answer change when in person vs remote?

[scvnthorpe]

>"How do you keep up with new technologies?"

To be honest, I don't really start out simply looking for 'new technologies'. Hot fuckin take, I know...

When I am playing around with technologies in my spare time - and I am always curious about trying something new! - I will try things that I've heard about, but they're about as likely to be old guard technologies (such as C and C#) as they are the hot new thing. It really depends what I am trying to do with it.

What matters to me most, especially when I'm just trying to get shit done or pursue one of my own crazy ideas, is starting from that idea and then checking around for a tool I'd like to throw at that issue.

Could be an actual thing I wanna make, could just be I want to shitpost and make a slick looking web interface that says "fuck you and die!", whatever.

What matters to me more than anything is getting something working and trying something that's new for me, solving a problem that I need/want to solve. Can be a different paradigm, can be a new architectural pattern, can be making a kind of software I've never really made before!

I don't care as much to simply see a new solution being talked about and then work backwards because that's how you get silly shit like "how do we work blockchain into gaming" which runs off of motivated reasoning. My advice? Stay curious and let the eureka moments happen when they happen. Just because it isn't new doesn't mean it isn't new for you!