FrancisChung

On Day 7 if the punchline was "Wordpress" instead of MongoDB, I would have lost it.

Day 5 onwards had me laughing out loud

Well, one is an IDE and the other is a code editor .... it's like comparing apples & oranges ...

For once, a joke about programming that actually made me laugh.

This is awesome. Thanks! I do have a Win10 partition, but don't intend to use it for Web Development unless using ASP.NET stack. AMPSS sounds interesting especially for beginners if it has a PW Install package. Thanks for looking into it so far.

50% off for the next 38 hours. I'm on my 3rd year now with JetBrains but it's the first time I've seen them gone on sale. Best value for buck IMHO in the market for dev tools, especially if you use a variety of languages and environments. https://www.jetbrains.com/store/?fromMenu#edition=personal

@pwired, thanks for trying out Ampps and reporting back. At this stage, the small performance hit might be worth it if it saves me hours messing with configuration. I also had a look at XAMPP but that looks like it's tightly integrated with Bitnami now. (Any opinions on Bitnami?) I had to install Docker (for ubuntu) for a different project, so I might see if I can replace Ampps with Docker instead.

@dragan , @pwired Am I right in thinking that Laragon is Windows only?

I was wondering if anyone has used AMPPS before? Seems like a decent MAMP replacement for Ubuntu, but I'm wondering if anyone can give their take or experiences on it.

You can do it on 13 inch but it's a struggle constantly switching screens. So I got one of these and it's a brilliant addition for any Devs out there. https://www.packedpixels.com/ I took the opportunity to find out more about CPU / RAM Usage of Docker Containers and it looks like it can vary a lot. I was thinking more in terms how VMs are run with Docker, but that is not the case and it seems much smarter. It looks like with the new version of Docker, you can actually constraint it's CPU / Memory usage using flags/switches during startup if you find it's using too many resources. Filezilla / Chrome : They can be CPU/memory hogs and possibly your #1 user of CPU / RAM depending on # of tabs. I'm actually running Waterfox instead of Firefox for the extra performance without all the bloatware. And Chrome, I highly recommend OneTab and/or The Great Suspender extensions if you're a tab hoarder like I am. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbolifaimnlloiipkdnihall?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en It's probably the best way to buy an Apple. 15% discount is not to be sniffed at. The last 2 laptops I owned were refurbs from Apple. The 1st one the graphics card died after 6 years but that model was notorious for gfx card issues and lucky it was cheap enough to replace. My last one I've had a few issues with in the last 6 months, but I was very lucky to find a very good deal at the refurb site at the time. And finally, I recommend backing up your laptop from day one. The excellent Time Machine backup software has saved the day plenty of times. You don't have to buy a Time Capsule for it. I think just any portable HDD will do. I can still remember unboxing my first Macbook like it was yesterday .... enjoy the experience and your new machine!

Office in Mac used to be poor too. But it's improved a hell of a lot in the last couple of iterations to a point where I can't tell the difference now between the MacOS & Windows version. If you only occasionally need Windows then go down the Parallels route, but beware you have to upgrade Parallels every 2 versions. I don't have much experience with Docker (installed it once and ran a container few times). I had some initial trouble with Ubuntu but I learnt it's just a matter of installing the drivers manually. It's been very stable so far touch wood. Sounds like Spotify is the culprit here on first glance, but it could be anything really ... I still don't know my way around Ubuntu to diagnose such issues. (No doubt some log somewhere will have a cryptic error message)

If you can't find/afford a bigger SSD model, these are not a bad choice for extra (portable) storage. I own one myself and it's very handy. https://www.amazon.com/Transcend-JetDrive-Storage-Expansion-TS256GJDL360/dp/B00WGARJGU

I think the fact that you have only 2 cores to run all those apps in 8GB will be a struggle. I own a MBP 13inch 2015 model with 16GB and sometimes it struggles with PHPStorm, Chrome, Parallels, MAMP. Yeap. Screen started peeling off in my Retina and luckily it was replaced for free. The keyboard died on mine about a 3/4 months ago. Unfortunately, it was not covered and it costs too much to repair so resigned to using a portable logitech keyboard. (Apparently the main board needs replacing!!!) If you have the budget, go for a 512GB model. IMO 128/256 is going to be too small and you'll be lugging around portable HDDs. If you don't, get the 15inch model as the 13 inch is going to struggle if you intend to run all those at the same time. As an aside, I probably will not buy another Macbook Pro until Apple up its game. Seems like the build quality is not there anymore, and why pay a hefty premium for a machine that seems to break down frequently and costly to repair. I've been using Ubuntu for a month and the ONLY thing I miss from OSX is MAMP. All the other tools I use are easily available on Ubuntu.

@bernhard, Slightly off topic but what program did you use to create the gif capture above?

There are no guarantees that Gitlab or any other providers won't do that either. If people are afraid of snooping, they shouldn't check-in code to a 3rd party provider in the first place.

I'm glad it's MS buying it and not some other company. (Imagine FB or Apple with their recent track record ..) Their track record with Developers for most part has been pretty good especially of late, and I hope their involvement means more features that developers ask for (e.g. Folders to organise repos) will actually get delivered. I wouldn't be worried about MS stuffing this up unless it's people involved in Windows 10 and/or Skype are being transferred to work on Github. There's been a bit of knee-jerk reaction with some devs jumping ship for Gitlab already but there's far too many Open Source projects on Github at the moment and I can't see any of them jumping ship to Gitlab, at least in the near future.

If you are referring to config->debug = true setting, then yes try turning it off and see what happens. It might just error silently and do nothing when you try and process the payment. Update : You could try disabling the File Compiler, but I don't know if that will help. In theory, your compiled code and uncompiled code should be executing the same logic. But certainly, do give it a try as when you're debugging errors you shouldn't dismiss any possibilities outright.

You should really redirect this to the Padloper developers as they would be able to provide better support. From what I can see it looks like an error occurred whilst handling the payment, but it wasn't handled (i.e. there was no contingency code to process this type of error) stef4341 is probably the account the website is hosted on, that would be my guess.

Does anyone here a personal portfolio site or a personal website that I can draw some inspiration from? I need to knock one up with minimal effort. I was wondering if there's any commercially available themes or solutions I can leverage? I looked at something called Gitshowcase but it didn't quite output what I needed, as it seems to have a very limited biography section.

Glad you sorted it out eventually. Perhaps now is a really good time to implement a Backup Strategy whilst the lesson of hardship & panic is still fresh in your mind ?

Is there another computer you could try the install on? That should tell you whether it's definitely the install itself or machine related and we can go from there. What sort of machine / OS is it?

I Just wanted to add that if you're using Procache (which you should be if you value performance), just be wary that you MAY have to use relative paths. I had an issue where the fonts were not being loaded using a path of /site/templates/fonts/.... It used to work flawlessly but it stopped working 1 day. Tried to get to the bottom of it with no success, but Ryan suggest a workaround to use a relative path. i.e ../fonts/....

If anyone is interested in Data Science (Machine Learning, AI, Deep Learning etc), then I highly recommend this course as your starting point. https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning/ It’s offered by the Stanford Uni’s Andrew Ng, who is considered a leading pioneer in this field. The course is regarded as the starting point for any aspiring data scientist’s learning path. It's an 11 week course with a lot of subjects to cover, but Andrew Ng does an amazing teaching job. There is a lot of maths in the course, but don't be afraid of it too much. I was dreading it before the course, but it turned out unnecessary. You just need to know what a gradient is (of a straight line) and what the sigma symbol is (Summation). They also use partial derivatives, but you don’t need to know how to derive them. Matrix Operations are used heavily, but there’s a really good primer as part of Week 1’s syllabus. The course uses Octave/Matlab instead of R/Python etc. And the course feels more like a traditional Computer Science course where they really try and give you a good basic grounding in theory. Having said that, I thought the exercises you did got closer to real world problems as the course progressed. Whilst you will be very well grounded in all the concepts of Machine Learning, you will probably have to do at least another course or projects to learn how to apply this knowledge in the real world. I've also shared some tips here for newcomers of the course, if anyone is interested:

My 2 cents on Udemy. You need to be selective/careful on Udemy. They seem to have a more lenient criteria on who can upload a course, and the quality of the courses can wildly vary as a result. I've seen some really good courses as well as some (god) awful ones. My advice is to have a look at the average ratings of the course, compare the score against other courses in the same domain, and also read the user reviews (both good/bad) and make a decision.

I thought I'd start this topic because I seem to be recommending certain courses to people repeatedly, so why not share it with the PW community. The topic can be a review or overview of any IT or non IT-related courses you're doing or have done. I'll start off with a course on teaching you how to learn. https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn I'm halfway through this course and I can already see huge improvements in the way I'm learning and also my approach to learning. I wished I've taken this course when I was a student! The course can be taken free, and all it takes is a couple of hours of your time. If you have kids that are in school, I think this should be compulsory viewing for all children in academia. If you're into self-improvement or learning, then I can't recommend this course highly enough.