Used d3 on two different react projects. Charts weren’t the main feature but quite big still.
When the dust settled I got a feeling React+SVG had made d3 obsolete - there’s some value in d3 zoom and interaction code, but their intricate system of data sources and auto updating views felt out of time. Maybe it was cutting edge stuff during jquery years, but modern FE frameworks do it better nowadays. Without the need to learn yet another api.
Again, I’m not an expert on d3, just someone who spent ~12-18months maintaining couple visualizations (among other things)
FTFY
What if general demise of startups (due to funding drought, covid, market saturation, bad timing aka world wasn’t ready for our idea, or leave your favorite excuse in comments) also impacted open startups? And what if they weren’t successful because open but because market was easier?
I spent quite some time in FreeCAD, then switched to makerjs. For the last two covid years "code cad" designs for laser cutter have consumed most of my free time.
I am also building my own online editor with focus on UX and live reloading [1].
Few key learnings I had about code vs visual (tldr it's complicated):
- It works great for flat laser cut assemblies, but once you start doing t-nut and finger joints you really need to see your pieces rotated and aligned in 3D. and that's a lot of extra code
- Writing a geometry library from scratch is really hard. I tried multiple newer JS libraries (that aren't ports of OpenCASCADE / CGAL) and all of them had numerous bugs in boolean operations, offsets, etc. There's just too many corner cases, compounding errors, APIs that haven't been thought thru and became a tech debt, etc.
- Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places or building a wrong thing, but there aren't that many users interested in "writing code for a 3d printer". Very few people dropping complex code cad projects on github. It feels like everyone who does is also building their own CAD platform ;)
There are actually at least two styles that do exactly that. They are called OpenSCAD and JSCAD. The code above would be simple subtract(cube([h,w,t]), translate([h/2,w/2,t], cylinder({radius, height})))
I don't know why the article makes it sound like cadquery is superior in every way possible. Sure BREP is a lot more powerful than CSG, but with extra power comes extra learning curve. If all you ever design is 3d prints for reprap (and I'd guesstimate 95% of hackaday audience falls into that category) cadquery may be an overkill
Usually they ask you to fill an online form and attach any evidence.
After that it always felt like a call center employee decided whether to start the refund or not.
If you write something smart, well researched, polite, and long, chances are that poor person will just skim through it and click “accept”.
Then on the other side the company has 30-45 days to object via their bank.
With big companies they probably think it’s not worth their time.
With small companies the bank notices about a new dispute probably go to an inbox nobody monitors.
Yes, but don't forget that "Ambani family have close ties to the ruling government"
and also Jio is "the only firm that won a pan-India 4G license, leveraging the superiority and cost-efficiency of 4G".
I'm super curious what technical reasons mandate that there can be only one 4G license in a country with 1.4 billion people. And how that affects competition in a country that has Corruption Perception Index equal to that of Morocco, Ghana, China or Benin.
What if China says “we’re sending you a plane with the four individuals you are after. We insist on their innocence and want to see a fair and public trial”
Then DOJ would have to reveal their sources, wouldn’t they?
Good read, but AFAICT researches still don’t fully understand how birds fly, yet planes fly at higher altitudes and at faster speeds.
Computer vision is probably not going to mimic human eye that closely
So you also agree that there's no standoff between AWS and K8s, unlike an article titled "'AWS vs. K8s' Is the New 'Win vs Linux'" would suggest?
It also talks about building a personal data center quite a few times (at least that's how I read it).
K8s is likely to replace EC2, ECS, and all other unusable amazon bloat to become the default AWS API. But it's not going to damage AWS, it's going to enhance it and become part of it.
Software Engineer's fallacy: if all you have is software/programming skills you start to look for an open source linux based solution to holding wooden boards in place, one that doesn't vendor lock you into the iron ore.
With Windows vs Linux the premise was you install absolutely free software on a computer you already own and you end up with a superior computing and programming environment.
With k8s - you switched to it, now what? You have to buy server hardware, rent or build a room, run wires for electricity and broadband, build cooling, physical security, etc etc etc.
You will stop paying hourly rate to Amazon, but all the upfront and recurring costs will chew into that saving and you'll question whether it was worth the drill.
Foremost, it will all take days and weeks, but with AWS it takes intolerable 20 minutes to spin up the k8s control plane (did I remember the term right?)
Even if you do all of that and blog about your great success, what's your plan for when it goes viral and visitors flow in to leave accolades on your visionary move?
With AWS, you could just spin up more servers to deal with extra traffic. With your own datacenter, you'd have to order new servers, perhaps from Amazon's same day delivery...
Awesome list. One point I’d add that changed how I think about UI and UX is being aware when UI reflects internal code structure instead of just doing what a user would want to see.
The latter is harder, so engineers tend to avoid it, often subconsciously.
And also google “best google webfont pairings” pick one, apply it to your bootstrap site with only 10 lines of CSS and voila the page suddenly feels fresh and cool
IMO you need to start loving UI/UX to get anywhere. It’s actually interesting and with modern frameworks is not too hard for a decent programmer to pick up. Getting out of your comfort zone and learning new paradigms, solving new class of coding challenges etc will also make you a better backend engineer. Think of it as a good investment.
Second step - twitter bootstrap and admin templates for it are the little known secret of fast and cheap and good looking UI.
Good templates are under $50, recently some nice ones started popping up on github under open source licenses.
One aspect that is hard for me and probably requires another half of the brain is making it “pretty” (or graphic design).
Good news is there are tons of UI freebies, UI kits, free app templates shared on behance and dribble. Basically it’s pretty app designs created by people who don’t have skills to convert them into code. So they give that stuff away for free.
Taking one of those goodies and using for your side project will make your project stand out without dropping a cent on professional designers.
I always recommend freebies designs for MVP even when it’s more than a side project.
Again, I’m not an expert on d3, just someone who spent ~12-18months maintaining couple visualizations (among other things)