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Admin
Cool guy, that Andy! Designed sort of an in-memory database solution!
Admin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMWSh6kZxGc
ignore any images of child abusers.
Admin
Sort of “designed”, yes?
Admin
And nobody thought to, you know, call Al out to the grader for the lack of competence in his design and utter lack of contribution to the project? Letting him get through the course (and pick up his diploma) only made everyone elses diplomas that much worse.
Admin
Welcome to how it works. If they had they'd probably get marks taken off for not being team players or trying to get Al a bad grade or similar.
Admin
So, at the end of the story, their buddy Al was complaining that someone ripped up his breadboarded electronics project at work. This guy really sounds like a seasoned DBA to me...every single one of those guys I have ever worked with that was worfadam spent a lot of time prototyping electronics! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sounds to me that Al's BS caught up with him, both at work and at school. The dude seems destined to be a senior manager.
Admin
That was a different class at school. The story never tells us anything about his competence, or lack thereof, at work. Which is a pity; I'm sure there is no shortage of entertaining :wtf:s there, too, if his "industry experience" was not just made-up BS in the first place.
Admin
To be fair, it sounds like his code functions mostly correctly (though very inefficiently) and that already puts him quite a bit above the worst students I've taught.
Admin
I draw your attention to this paragraph in the article:
Although some of that may be Remy's creative contribution to the story.
Admin
Admin
"... at least I kept the input and output wires. Look, the interface is still the same!"
Admin
I did too. I could have sworn it said today's date was "Martha Sawyer." ;P
Admin
So I missed the (random?) reordering of columns. I'd already decided it was all crazy for not putting the sorting where it belongs anyway. :)
Admin
One wonders if Andy even bothered to tell Al about the new invention called "where clauses".
Admin
Admin
Pff. Everyone knows WHERE clauses are for chumps! Real men implement their own <!-- shitty --> query language.
Admin
I'm thinking that Al didn't even know. He probably just learned to do a query by trial and error.
Admin
Not so much "designed" as "congealed", to quote the late AdamsDouglasAdams.
Admin
Okay, yesterday we had the guy who used a hammer to drive nails, tacks, anything that looked like a nail, anything that could be stacked in the shape of a nail, and everything else as a general principle. Even if it was impossible to use a hammer, the hammer was used.
Today, we have a guy with a ten-pound stainless steel sledge hammer, who is using it to pound in quarter-inch tacks...and only quarter-inch tacks. A lot of quarter-inch tacks.
Admin
There.
What?
There, clauses. There, castle.
Why are you talking that way?
I thought you wanted to.
Admin
Castle? Don't you mean North Pole?
Admin
Sounds like good preparation for "the real world".
Admin
I always thought good preparation for that was turning off your TV before the show begins.
Admin
Everyone hates it when they requrie those. At least our uni gave us the ability to redistribute marks.
Admin
Gaining experience with a group project (especially the challenges and difficulties involved) may be more valuable than "just another coding project".
Admin
FTFY
Admin
I've always wondered if the experience could be enhanced, and what the implications would be if the whole class was treated like company employees (in some cases, preferably better than company employees).
Maybe get some source-control involved, that way there's fallback options if the group project doesn't pan out. It's possible to see people's check-ins. Of course, that's very software-engineering-centric.
If education is supposed to mean better jobs, the education should parallel the industry.
Admin
Some process in place like @Shoreline outlined above would be the only way to do it - if the instructor approached it that way, then they would see this BS and grade accordingly. Otherwise, it's Al's word against Andy's.
Or worse, imaging being the only competent one in a group of 5 who does anything, the group grade is an 'A', you complain about the others not pulling their weight. Then the other four say you were the slacker and you ended up with an 'F' instead. Yes, you could prove your competence otherwise through a retest, assuming they gave you the chance, but why risk going through all that?
Yes, you could count that towards preparation for "the real world" as @Dragnslcr says, but again - why risk having to endure the pain?
Admin
That's why a commit history is useful. It's a type of audit trail, and it stops all sorts of shenanigans.
However, actual real-world projects are about a hell of a lot more than just coding. Some students totally forget this bit. Don't be those guys.
Admin
That might prove you competence, but doesn't prove you contributed to the group project. A team member could be perfectly competent but fail to contribute to the project due to laziness, of course, or illness, family troubles or a host of other reasons. Testing should not be a substitute for demonstrated contribution to the project.
That said, it often happens in the real world that individual and team results get tied together in ways that are not fair — individuals rewarded for successes to which they under-contributed, and teams penalized for failures that properly belong to a particular individual, sometimes even on an entirely separate project1 — and exposure to this in an academic environment is not entirely inappropriate. However, the instructor really should have a way of measuring individual contributions, and source-control is a great way to do that (as will as teaching the use and value of source-control).
1 That is true in spades here. More about that in a few weeks when I don't work here any more.
Admin
My university does a really good job here. The bachelor's thesis is a group project - students form groups of 4-5 and select tasks from a pool of orders submitted by external companies. So it it not only a group project but also a real industry task.
We did two team projects during the studies, and source control was an obvious choice. How do you imagine a group project without source control?If I were to score such projects, I would decrease the score for not using source control.
Admin
Option 1: emailing round zip files. Option 2: using a shared dropbox folder.
:facepalm:
Admin
[anticipation]
Admin
Bookmarked, so that maybe I'll remember to fulfill your anticipation.
Admin
Option ErrorNotFound: Box of "Papers" containing "photographs" of the "meeting notes" detailing the "project status" and "revisions".
Filed under: Sorry, Error 62928: Out of Memory; While: Iterating subcontainers
Admin
Any chance AI is porting working FoxPro code in his company to the language the project is using?
If he really worked thousands of projects and produce this kind of code, it's pretty scary.
Admin
Admin
Nobody picked up on the fact that somehow Andy wants to get the current date out of a database? Really in most languages there is a better way of getting that?
Admin
Admin
Sure there are ways of getting the current date in most common languages.
However for database applications it can be an advantage to get it from the db which could even be on a different server and thus could in theory be set to an other time (DST or small offset although that should be fixed by ntp).
By getting it from the db, all times and dates are synchronised to a single time frame and the order of timing events will be clear.
Admin
I agree. Not doing much DB stuff myself since I'm in engineering and people like flat text files and matlab over here. But on the other hand we have five different fingers.....
Admin
Are you saying that the system of group-projects is fundamentally broken and open to being unfair?
Admin
I've only got 4. And a thumb.
Are you from Norfolk?
Admin
Yes. That's exactly what he is saying (as is group exams, although to a lesser degree if they are oral).
From my personal experience, neither works as intended, as the smart and/or competent students end up doing most of the work as they do not want to take the risk of a low grade because someone else in the group is lazy or not as competent.
Admin
I have 10, two of which are thumbs.
Admin
handpaw? :stuck_out_tongue:Admin
That was never specified.
As a cyborg ninja cat whose biological part is genetically human, I am not entirely feline in form, and I am sure you will agree that it would be rather counter-productive to remove the ability to use the extremities of one's forelimbs for fine manipulation and call it an augmentation. So I have hands, albeit with retractable claws attached. Besides, I couldn't possibly have fingers on a paw. Paws have toes, hands have fingers, and I have deja vu.
Admin
Back when we did such project, colleagues didn't use version control. They used patches and tarballs. In fact, back then (it was 2-3 years. they started 2000 and finished 2002; we finished later because we mismanaged) it was the same process as Linux was using back then. Meanwhile we struggled with CVS and then switched to Arch (it was not GNU yet). Does anybody here remember TLA? It was heavily inspired by that tarballs and patches workflow to the point that it stored the data in tarballs and patches… (it was vastly superior to subversion already though :grinning:)
Admin
Admin
thumbandfingershould both be derived fromdigit- your test-case is wrong.