This is cool. I had no idea about most of these.

Storage data structures. Database tables are designed for fast read/write. Excel is designed for fast simultaneous parallel computation.

To get a sense of what this looks like, you can read more about their data structures; Databases typically store data in what’s called a “B Tree” and spreadsheets typically store as a format that can be easily converted into a “Directed Acyclic Graph” (although Excel lets you turn off the “acyclic” part if you allow circular references).

Although, with Excel specifically, there’s probably not much difference since it has some database functionality now.

I always leave my project in a state where it doesn’t compile or run (not commits, obvs) so I’m forced back into understanding exactly what I was doing when I left off to fix the error.

In a past career, I was a mechanical design engineer; I’ve probably spent 10,000 hours of my life in SolidWorks. Not once did I feel like a 3d mouse would speed me up or otherwise solve my problems. I trialed a spacepilot for several months and just couldn’t be arsed after awhile. What do others get out of them?

Python is Spanish; a ton of people learned a bit in school and never picked it back up again. Places that speak it natively all have their own conventions because, even though the native languages were replaced by colonizers, a lot of the native languages patterns remained in place. Most places that speak it are super welcoming and stoked that you’re trying to learn.

Assembly is proto-indo-european

I started using Python ~15 years ago. I didn’t go to school for CS.

Compared to using literally anything else at the time as a beginner, pip was the best thing out there that I could finally understand for getting third party code to work with my stuff, without copy paste… on Windows.

When I tried Linux, package managers and make were pretty cool for doing C/C++ work.

Despite all that, us “regular” engineers were consigned to Windows.

We either had to use VBA or a runtime that didn’t need to be installed.

https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/

Enjoy a new rabbit hole to dive down

Got a link to that?

AutoCAD is amazing once you get all your shortcuts and settings set up just the way you like it.

100% this. I used to work at a company that sold software that mechanical engineers used all day, every day in a certain field. Our app looked like the last pic but with better alignment.

People who are competent want all the things on their screen all at once all the time. They also want keyboard shortcuts.

Two days ago lol

I watched Jon Gjenset’s stream where he implemented the beginnings of a BitTorrent client in Rust and of the four hours about 25% of it was spent wrestling with quirks in serde and reqwest.

It was pretty discouraging watching a pro have to fight the ecosystem so hard.