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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • My biggest gripe is the lack of respect/understanding for the importance of data models and clear domain boundaries.

    Most things that end up as “technical debt” can be traced to this. Sometimes, it’s unavoidable, because what the data models changes, or the requirements of the domain, etc.

    And, it’s very innocent looking differences sometimes. Like “We know that the external system state will change from A to B, so we can update that value on our side to B”. Suddenly you have an implicit dependency that you don’t express as such.

    Or, things like having enum that represents some kind of concept that isn’t mutually exclusive. Consider enum values of A and B. Turns out this really represented AZ, and BP (for some inherent dependency to concepts Z and P). Someone later on extends this to include ZQ. And now, suddenly the concept of Z, is present in both AZ and ZQ, and some consumer that switches on concept Z, needs to handle the edge case of AZ… And we call this “technical debt”.


  • I did eventually yes. Thanks for asking. I was exhausted yesterday, and upon reading my comment again, I get the downvotes. Being a second language doesn’t fully explain the wrong tone there. The article was a lot more insightful and in depth than I had mistakenly assumed.

    After reading it tho, it seemed a lot more focused on performance than I think would be warranted. But that could be due to different concerns and constraints than where I’m used to working. I’d focus more on the mechanisms that best expresses the intent, and although they do discuss this well, the Venn diagram for the appropriate use of exceptions and error codes don’t overlap as much in my world.

    And, it’s not like I’m arguing that they are wrong. It’s an opinion on a choice for a tradeoff that I only think, while allowing the possibility of being wrong, might miss the the mark. Stack unwinding is by its nature less explicit for the state it leaves behind. So it shouldn’t be a question of either error codes or exceptions, but which are most appropriate to express what, and when.

    Even for Rust, where monads are preferred and part of the language to express and handle error codes, I would say that the statement of “newer languages like Rust don’t allow the use of exceptions”, seems incorrect to me. Something like panic!("foo"); coupled with panic::catch_unwind(|| { ... } }); I believe would unwind the stack similar to that of a throw/catch.

    Anyways. Thanks for reminding me to actually read the post. It was well worth it, and very insightful.









  • Sort of. It might be a good idea to see what the mentioned Heroic Launcher does. What I do is tedious and cumbersome.

    Edit: I tried Heroic Launcher. Use that. It’s exactly what I wanted. Ignore what I’ve now placed in the spoiler.

    spoiler
    1. Download all GoG install files for a particular game, and place them in some folder.
    2. “Add a non-steam game” from within steam, for the installer executable, with the corresponding working directory (“start in”).
    3. Run the “game”, with the proton compatibility mode enabled.
    4. After installing, change the entry from 1., to point to the game executable (you’ll have to search for it), and corresponding working directory. It should be somewhere in $HOME/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/

    PS: Surround all paths with double quotes. Both the TARGET and START IN fields. The working directory is almost always the directory that the executable is in.

    When updating a game, it is sort of the same story. Download update files. Change the entry to run the update. Update. Change the entry back.

    I’m sure there are better ways to do this. So I’ll probably check the Heroic Launcher. I remember trying similar things in the past, and I wasn’t all that happy with it.