In my experience, SO is just not useful anymore for asking questions.
All the easy questions that could be solved by just RTFM have been answered, many times.
And the more nuanced questions are fraught with bias (see: "The Definitive C++ Book Guide and List").
As for "boiling down" and "re-framing" questions, they won't get answered. Usually ever.
You'll get a few comments from people trying to help, with suggestions you've already tried, pitying your high-effort question with no answers. Then, you'll go search through the annals of your language, either to find that one guy twenty years ago published a piece of your puzzle in his blog, or that there's nothing at all in any sort of literature on how to solve your specific problem.
You'll then end up doing your own testing and research, spending an inordinate amount of time testing and verifying, until you come up with a brand spanking new type of abstraction that solves your problem perfectly. You'll write up your dissertation, post it on your question, and set it as "answered."
Then you'll curse under your breath at how f useless SO is, besides being an over-glorified forum / "selected excerpts from the manual."
I've stopped using SO, because I've realized all of your software problems can be solved with two things:
1). RTFM
2). Explore the software/language
Anything else, IMO, breeds bad habits. I say this as someone who used to rely solely on internet tutorials and other people's examples before I had to do work where my code had to be perfect or else I'd be out of a job/sued/[something violent].
I had to quickly learn how to do things myself and find the answers to my problems by straight scientific method and I know I've become a better software engineer because of it.
Having experience in both, I can say with conviction, that anyone who uses SO as anything more than a pair of training wheels that should be discarded after your first 6-12 months is liable to become a "bad" programmer (see: Ruby developer community).
Mouse commands are preferred for simple, mindless tasks.
I'd rather rearrange my entire file hierarchy with a file browser like XFE than do all of that shit in a terminal.
Even Ranger/Midnight Commander make it less of a pain in the ass, but it's still a pain in the ass. Combos and typing require a lot more brain bandwidth than the simple, mindless or rather spineful, motions of a hand flick and click.
My thinkpad doesn't have a lot of leeway for newer CPUs.
2.8Ghz was what it came with and I paid $60 for this Spartan of a passion project. 512MB is unusable on a machine with a modern use case. You're looking at some tiny linux distro and a no-js opensource web browser.
Dual core, because it came with it. And also because I don't trust any programmer to make thread-safe programs. Firefox/Pulse/etc. regularly destroy my core usage. That second core is so I can go to another TTY and kill the malefactor. Otherwise, I would need to power cycle.
I would be using 2GB of RAM, but this W500 came with a 4GB stick of DDR2. It was released in 2008 too.
Funny thing, my Centrino 2 vPro has a 6MB CPU cache while my workstation-class $700 Lenovo 8-core laptop only had 4MB and now sits in a closet as my homeserver.
I hate to be that guy, but there was something seriously wrong with your process. If you have any of your apps saved from around that time, it would be a learning experience for all of us if you shared them. Redacted, of course.
To add to your story, let me tell you mine:
High school grad, going to a CC, really bad grades and only experience in freelancing and projects. Projects weren't amazing, but they were put together well.
I averaged 600 apps per day. That was after I put a lot of effort into my resume, making sure the wording was perfect and the layout pristine.
One weekend I got really desperate and did 500 apps in one day and waited it out for a month. I got something like 30 positive responses for a phone interview/code challenge. I also had recruiters for contracting and temp work blowing up my phone for their shitty positions.
I refused them all, because I thought I could do better. And I did.
Come around 22,000 apps in one month. If it had developer/software/programmer in the title, you bet your ass I applied to it. I wasn't qualified for any of them and I didn't list my education.
I got around 900 followups and had the pick of the litter. I fabricated nothing on my resume. I got followups for positions in countries whose languages I didn't even speak. "We'd love for you to come join the team if you're willing to relocate and learn how to speak X language" [Translated].
I'm sure some of you might have even seen my resume. 30 apps per day? How does it even take that long? You can do apps in less than a minute. Cover letters are for schmucks.
I have to agree with the other poster on this. I only full compile once in the beginning and once at the end. Every other time, I just recompile the changed part and rebuild it with the unchanged object files.
But if you're talking about packages from source, then I agree. It's the one thing that sometimes makes me question whether or not I should upgrade. But, after a full night of compiling Qt5 from source, that lingering doubt usually vanishes.
> I had 16 GB of ram in 2010 and it was not even a top computer at the time
> It has 16G of ram and a very recent 3.10GHz Intel CPU. What are you doing on your laptops? This is a deeecent laptop
What exactly are all of you people doing with your laptops? I'm running an old W500 Thinkpad at 2.8Ghz dual-core, 4GB DDR2, and a 500GB HDD. The only times this machine has struggled was when I was using a memory-leaking software (Firefox, etc.) or one that tried to load a whole large file into memory instead of chunks.
If I need to work with heavy graphics I can stick an eGPU into the PCI express or an FPGA if I'm doing specialized calculations.
But besides that, I don't understand why anyone needs all this gear.
All the easy questions that could be solved by just RTFM have been answered, many times.
And the more nuanced questions are fraught with bias (see: "The Definitive C++ Book Guide and List").
As for "boiling down" and "re-framing" questions, they won't get answered. Usually ever.
You'll get a few comments from people trying to help, with suggestions you've already tried, pitying your high-effort question with no answers. Then, you'll go search through the annals of your language, either to find that one guy twenty years ago published a piece of your puzzle in his blog, or that there's nothing at all in any sort of literature on how to solve your specific problem.
You'll then end up doing your own testing and research, spending an inordinate amount of time testing and verifying, until you come up with a brand spanking new type of abstraction that solves your problem perfectly. You'll write up your dissertation, post it on your question, and set it as "answered."
Then you'll curse under your breath at how f useless SO is, besides being an over-glorified forum / "selected excerpts from the manual."
I've stopped using SO, because I've realized all of your software problems can be solved with two things:
1). RTFM
2). Explore the software/language
Anything else, IMO, breeds bad habits. I say this as someone who used to rely solely on internet tutorials and other people's examples before I had to do work where my code had to be perfect or else I'd be out of a job/sued/[something violent].
I had to quickly learn how to do things myself and find the answers to my problems by straight scientific method and I know I've become a better software engineer because of it.
Having experience in both, I can say with conviction, that anyone who uses SO as anything more than a pair of training wheels that should be discarded after your first 6-12 months is liable to become a "bad" programmer (see: Ruby developer community).