I did the 2014 version of this to learn Swift to port an Android app I made.

He’s an excellent teacher!

I think he worked at Apple so he shared a lot of the history behind the APIs in iOS going back to the NextStep days.

Kotlin, because it’s a language I like

IMO it's maybe the best suited language to AoC. You can write it even faster than Python, has a very terse syntax and great numerical performance for the few challenges where that matters.

I know this is pretty personal but Python's way with indention really does not play well with throwing things out. It's obviously matter of practice, but languages that have same qualities but are easier on formatting issues and aren't that set on one correct way of writing things allow much doing things much faster. But at the end, it's personal :-)

Modern straight Java works just as well.

When I was a university student in 2009 a lecturer accused me of plagiarising a c++ win32 project I submitted.

It turned out he ran it through a plagiarism detector and multiple lines of code where identical to lines in their database.

It was very silly because there’s a lot of boiler plate code in win32 projects

Is this something you think they can or should fix?

Been a while since I've looked at available APIs, but can't the browser handle conversions into its own local system TZ?

If it's going by IP geolocation, I would call that a bug.

Browsers can handle conversions just fine but they need some context. If that context is somehow tampered with, then the results might be weird.

In this case, SpaceX seems to be using UNIX timestamps(1) which is probably fed to a combination of Date and Intl to obtain a localized date string. Extrapolating the country where the user is located is not really rocket science either. But, if my context is somehow tampered with (VPN, internal clock, browser settings…), then I will get a potentially "wrong" date, for whatever definition of "wrong".

The problem is fundamentally the same on the server side because you can only rely on the information you get… which might be wrong.

So either you take the safest route, which is to display the local time of the organization or its UTC representation and let visitors figure out their local date on their own, or you take a somewhat riskier one, which is to try to display a localized date to your users and accept the potential flaws of the method.

[1] https://sxcontent9668.azureedge.us/cms-assets/future_mission...

it's way easier too. Just parse an ISO UTC date string into a javascript date object and it'll correctly display the local time, no conversion needed.

Yes, by setting the datetime attribute (in UTC) on a time element, then on the client side pulling that into a Date object and calling toLocaleString().

Absolutely. If they sent UTC over the wire and handled it client-side, it would just work (your browser tends to know its own timezone)

We do this in game development .

Watch someone play the game for the first time. Don’t interfere. See if they can figure out how to play.

Play testing is the most important part of game development. Indies who struggle to come up with concepts are really sleeping on this. If you run play tests well enough your roadmap will almost write itself. Players will do and ask for things that you would never dream of.

I think an intense culture of playtesting is why valve software puts out games so rarely. Their new strategy seems to be to keep a title semi-secret for years while a small army plays it full time. If Deadlock makes it to market, it is almost certainly going to be an acceptable game to most who are even remotely interested in the genre.

Normally I don't, but liked the humour.

Regarding your last sentence, it seems like he did buy a used EV.

As a noob, this is confusing me.

Usually web servers can be configured so if you request a directory it will look in that directory for index.html and serve it if it finds it.

This page explicitly links to name/index.html for each submission rather than just name, an ironic waste of bytes given the subject matter.

When people give me a hello back I raise them a “how are you?”

It took me a depressingly long time to figure out that when people (offline) ask me how I am, they don’t expect, or want, an answer.

The whole "How are you?" ritual is quite possibly the most nonsensical thing about the Anglo cultures. Like, I get that the point is to feign polite interest in the other person. But then by asking this question with the expectation of the same formulaic reply "I'm fine!" (and confusion if the response is something else) - even if the other speaker is emphatically not fine - it literally does the opposite, making it clear that the way they actually feel doesn't matter.

I had a coworker who took this to the extreme. When they'd come up to anyone they'd say, without any pauses in-between: "Hi. How are you? So I wanted to tell you x, y, z [...]", not leaving any time to respond, even with the formulatic "I'm fine.". Really driving home that they're just reciting, without caring one bit how you feel.

Pretty overwhelming to me personally, but I could tell other coworkers were taken aback by it too.

Fine thanks, how are you?

Hey I know you!