One of the most annoying things about translation is that the length of the string may change which can mess up designs and layouts. For example German strings tend to be longer than their English equivalents. Or dealing with languages which orientation is right to left (eg. Hebrew).
This is a very tricky issue. Tr8n somewhat solves it by allowing developers to specify translation key constraints for critical sections right in the code. The constraints make the translation key unique, give an indication to translators what they need to do and enforces the translators submissions. For example:
<%= tr("App", :max_length => 6) %>
If translators try to submit something longer than 6 chars, they will get a warning to adjust to the constraints.
In Russian "App" is "Приложение". So they would have to provide something shorter or an abbreviation.
I've found this to be a bit of a nightmare with Japanese and English. Japanese DVD and CD titles often have a mix of both languages, so length becomes next to meaningless when comparing Japanese strings even against themselves. The feel of the text is also completely different, which makes it hard to balance the layout for both languages.
At an airbnb techtalk they stressed how this is a really annoying problem for them. They actually have a subdomain that substitutes longer than normal english strings within their design:
That's a pretty common approach. In Rails it's also not too hard to monkey patch I18n in development to e.g. double every string it returns, or throw in random UTF characters.
The hard part I've encountered is that you have to think about text differently. Things that are identical in English but have different semantic meanings must be split. Plurals. Almost-never concatenating or .join(',')ing or .split()ing. It's pretty easy to write yourself into a corner unless you stick to doing it right all the time, which takes some time to learn.
What type of database did they use? What type of caching would be desirable? Most modern RDBSes, like Postgre, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL server, have internal LRU caching already implemented. InnoDB tries to store everything in memory.
I wonder if they meant that the default caching was turned off, or that all the queries had "no cache" clauses, or that an additional caching layer (Redis, Memcached) was not implemented?
Just for the record, contractor did not wanted to use it and argued the team have no experience with it. Someone in government decided it must be done that way (in spring or summer).
Yeah, a database with an unfamiliar paradigm in a project with late and constantly changing requirements, a major one of "no window shopping" in August, and others through the week before launch, is an obvious recipe for an extra big disaster.
Some people have theorized that Accenture's new role is to quietly replace much of the current code base with their not quite so horrible California exchange code.
The back end is swappable. I think right now you can use Mongo or MySQL. If you want to use something else you have to write your own DDL. They hope that more people will do that in the future. Or presumably, they will do it themselves, once they think it's a priority.
I assume it meant zoning that limits the number of hotels that can be built in a particular municipality. I also assume he meant to suggest that established players attempt to limit the growth of competition by being in favor of regulation (permits, zoning restrictions, business licenses) that makes it difficult to enter their market.
If more programmers did volunteer (or their employers encouraged volunteering), even for a little bit, by being exposed to the problem and having an opportunity to interact with the homeless, some new solutions might arise.
I work in the Downtown Crossing section of Boston, which has the one of the highest visible homeless populations in the Boston area. I was also consistently troubled by the number of homeless people I encountered to and from work.
It really helped to volunteer at a nearby homeless shelter (Pine Street Inn). I was comforted to see some of worst cases (including people I encountered daily) have access to meals, a clinic, a shelter, and treated with courtesy.
I was also struck by how many people seemed normal - not someone who was mentally ill or spent time on the street.
In general America fulfills a lot of need with private charity - which can occasionally be really impressive. When I worked at a large financial institution there were lots of opportunities for matched giving and volunteering opportunities. I wish tech companies would do this more.
Matched giving seems to be one of those benefits that is more common at the larger employers (e.g. Microsoft employees broke the 1 billion dollar mark last year) and doesn't appear on the smaller tech companies benefits sheets
I think he means "They should've made it more obvious that the bad gameplay experience was 'cause of piracy, not 'cause it was a terrible game."
Irrespective of whether you think pirates should be "punished", a situation where these people tell their friends "Nah, I played that game. It was shit, you just lost for no reason" isn't in the best interests of the publisher.
I think he means a developer who is actually reliant on the financial outcomes of his work, like the OP. If you work for somebody else in exchange for a salary, yeah, of course you don't care about throwing good money after bad — it's not your money. (Obviously I don't know whether this is the case, but the difference seems significant to me.)
That is exactly what I mean. If you draw a salary from an employer then you are in an entirely different situation than if you're relying on your output to directly pay your bills.
If you've never been in a situation where you have to sell that output to customers then you know less than a shit about what piracy can do to cripple a small business and should shut your fucking mouth about which market to serve. I'll take care of those that put the food on my table, thank very much, and you can give throat-fucking forced blowjobs to any random stranger if you want.
This is a false equivalency. Musicians can opt out of having their music played on the radio. If they do choose to have their music played on the radio, there is a genuine attempt made by radio stations to track how often their music is played and make a commensurate royalty payment to the artist. (source I worked on college radio).
Well, OK, but then nothing prevents anyone from copying the radio stream in one way or another and playing it over and over again for free without telling the artists. It still remains "free" in that sense.
Businesses take cash to local bank branches, which then take the cash to closest Federal Reserve branch. Most large cities have Federal Reserve branches even if they are not heads of the regions.
The Office Manager interacts with pretty much everyone in the company... they're a pretty important part of any company. I prefer to call the role "Support", rather than "Admin" or something similarly distant.
