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What have you learned this week?

Savas Vedova on June 18, 2019

This is a nice question we started to ask in our web guilds every week. So, what have you learned this week? This could be tech related, or somethi...

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Thomas H Jones II • Jun 21 '19 • Edited

That when someone asks you to do network benchmarking and you come back with a bunch of iperf-based results, they'll likely ask "wtf is iperf and what does it actually tell me" followed by telling you "I need you to find another way to get me those metrics". Which led to finding that I could use lftp's pget functionality to simulate the same kind of multi-streaming activities that iperf gets you ...but only allows it in one direction. Also, if you're fairly thorough, you can uncover asymmetrical routes in a network (because, "huh: when I transfer this 1GiB test file from Colorado to Ohio, I can do it at 200MiB/s but when I transfer it from Ohio back to Colorado, I can only do it at about 7MiB/s").

I discovered yet more reasons to hate RHEL 6 (e.g., that its iperf3 version is old and broken – such that it won't honor a multi-stream request in client-mode) and wish it a speedier demise than what is already scheduled ...knowing full well that some of my customers' projects will be deploying new, RHEL 6 based solutions right up to (and likely past) the date that Red Hat officially terminates its planned EOL support.

That one of my customer's many Active Directory domains forces case-sensitivity when querying for Computer objects ...and that there seems to be damn near to nothing you can do within the client-side search-utility to force a case-insensitive search. Best you can do is either a compound search ...or use post-query processing to case-insensitively find the object you were querying for.

It's been a fun, learning-filled week. :p

Savas Vedova • Jun 22 '19

Well, apparently you learned a lot this week! :)) Thanks a lot for sharing

Nadine M. Thêry • Jun 18 '19

It would be nice to have this question asked every Friday, for instance. Last week I learnt the basics of jQuery. This week so far, I learned how to properly upload images Dev.to. hehe

Savas Vedova • Jun 18 '19

That's pretty cool! Do you like jQuery so far?

Nadine M. Thêry • Jun 18 '19

SinceI started with vanilla JS it definitely makes some things easier. I haven't used it that much, but it looks like it is ok for small projects.

Sam Atkinson • Jun 18 '19

This week I've been reading up on a11y a lot. I've learnt that auto focus is (generally) bad as it can be very confusing to a screen reader user when your focus is yanked away. Also, over 97% of screen reader users have javascript enabled.

In non a11y news thanks to the post on here I now know you can style your console.log output. Mind blown

Jeffrey Hulten • Jun 19 '19

The part that bugs me is the use of a11y itself. It spells ally, which is cool, but screen readers cannot interpret it. So we created a shorthand for accessibility that isn't accessible.

Savas Vedova • Jun 18 '19

That's very nice! React testing library is pretty cool to implement a11y. They force you to write accessible code.

Jonathan Kuhl • Jun 19 '19

Got a portion of the way through the Rust guide at rust-lang.org/learn.

Currently at the section on ownership, which sounds like a different take than working directly with things like malloc or depending on a garbage collector.

Abdur Rehman Khalid • Jun 22 '19

Nothing Special Because You Know that Mine Final Examinations are near so don't want to loose my focus from the exams, but YES! there is something I learned that Models by Mark Manson very amazing book and hmmm every guy should read it. It made me learn many new things.

Nagy Wesley • Jun 18 '19

Well since I'm working on a side project using React & NodeJS I've learned:

res.send doesn't return, coming from the PHP world I thought that res.send should be placed at the end of the function... however, this isn't a necessity with NodeJS.
the proper usage of React Hooks.

Savas Vedova • Jun 18 '19

I love React Hooks! They're pretty cool.

Btw, I created a tool to host React and NodeJS apps. It's actually designed to help frontend developers. I'd love if you could check, give feedback and eventually use it :) You can check it out here. Cheers!

Giuseppe Vetri • Jun 19 '19

I learned about Dart and personal finances 🎯

Savas Vedova • Jun 19 '19

Good one! I have little knowledge about both :D

Savas Vedova • Jun 19 '19

Oh and another thing I've learnt - and did that the hard way - was to never return an Int64 value in a JSON response. Javascript can handle numbers between -(2⁵³ - 1) and 2⁵³ - 1, so in the frontend they will be truncated. Cast to string instead.

Ross Henderson • Jun 19 '19

If you're in a field for a music festival for the week, and the forecast is rain, invest in a good tent.

There's a pearl of transferable wisdom here I think: P

Thomas H Jones II • Jun 21 '19

Similarly (but in May), I learned that the 7-day weather forecasts are a lot more accurate than the 3-day forecasts were when I was a kid (in the 70s). When we caught our flight to Vegas, the 7-day forecast was saying "windy and in the 50s (F) at night" ...yet I chose to attend a 3-day dusk-to-dawn rave in the same clothes I'd have worn had the forecast been for overnight lows in the 80s.