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After 25 years at CodeProject I'm making a change. I've spent nearly a quarter of a century helping developers share knowledge, learn, and overcome the hugely rewarding challenges of software development. It's been amazing but my focus needs to shift closer to home with a focus on family, wellness and balance. While I'm certainly sad to be moving on, I'm proud of what David Cunningham, myself and the rest of the team achieved.
Over the past few years my interests and personal goals have changed and evolved so it's time to embrace change, keep sharp and turn these interests into a new career.
Coding always, but this time it's personal.
cheers,
Chris
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Good luck Chris, I'm sure you'll succeed at whatever you choose to do. I came across this site ~ 17 years ago whilst looking for a solution to an MFC question. You helped me achieve my goal and I've pretty much been here daily ever since. It's by far the best site for code related content and knocks SO into a cocked hat. I wish you well in whatever you do and stay healthy my friend.
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Best of luck on your new endeavors! You've helped create a wonderful site here, sad to see you go.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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(posting this here too) --
CodeProject changed my life in major ways. Very few things, besides the birth of a child, have done that in my life. So thank you and the team for incarnating CodeProject and my best wishes to your family and finding wellness and balance. I hope everything is OK. And best wishes in your interests and new career!
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I can recommend beer making to go along with your other future endeavors. This will cure your thirst, increase your popularity with your friends, and make you a chemist (turning beer into urine)!
Thank you for all your teachings, carry on.
Lou
>64
It’s weird being the same age as old people. Live every day like it is your last; one day, it will be.
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Best of luck to you, Chris, and thanks for the greatest development community in existence. I've been here since the beginning, and although I no longer do much development, I plan to stick around for as long as it lasts. That, of course, depends on what new directions it may go, and with the Lounge devolving into a Wordle platform, I might not last too much longer. It's been a fun run, and I wish you the best, my oldest, unmet friend!
Will Rogers never met me.
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@chris-maunder Wow, this is the end of an era. Thanks Chris for everything I could learn from your website, I've been around here till the very beginning or almost, I remember lots and lots of interesting people, every funny discussion I had in the Lounge, every laugh I had in the Soapbox looking at how people could get mad over the internet. Hours of my lifetime have gone into CodeProject and into helping others, and I do not regret any of it, it was a fun ride. I was a trainee when I first opened Codeproject looking for help, which I found. I do not code now, but will stay around because of the community. I wish you all the best for the future - I hope we will hear from the new projects soon, and if not, take care and thanks again !
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Thank you Chris for everything. Although I am not as active as I used to be, CP will always be dear to me, it has helped me in unimaginable ways.
Good luck with whatever you are up to ![Rose | [Rose]](https://codeproject.freetls.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/rose.gif)
Cheers,
Vikram.
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25 years?
Holy cow.
It's about time for a change I would say.
I had no idea.
Best of luck in whatever comes your way!
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I feel like I'm back in 1992 at the moment, reading code written by a scientist and yelling at the screen as I try and understand the difference between their "process", "process1" and "process1_1" and the intent of the parameters a, b and c. Flashbacks to FORTRAN days where every variable was a, aa, aaa, aab and so on. For the next 10,000 lines.
Python is such a simple language except for the big ugly warts where it isn't. A language's syntax isn't generally the challenge, it's the libraries and it's know which way to hold the handle so you don't cut yourself. To this end we're working on providing some solid, simple Python reference material that will cut to the chase and make it a little easier to learn Python. More on that soon.
For better or worse Python is the language of choice for data scientists, for those teaching code, and for many doing AI and numerical work. I need to learn Python better, and I would say every software developer should have a working knowledge of Python. You will bump up against it one day. Maybe to actually write code, maybe simply to understand what's happening within a Jupyter notebook.
One of the benefits of Python is that it's self contained. You can deploy an app that contains the Python interpreter, the libraries, your code, everything, and you won't have conflicts with other versions of Python. I say "other versions" because there's a solid chance you have one or more versions of Python on your machine already. Here's me:
This is especially important because the change from Python 2 to Python 3 included some breaking changes and 3X is not backwards compatible.
But to the point of this whole post: Python is important for a zillion reasons and so we will be ramping up our focus on Python at CodeProject. We're after your articles, your knowledge, and obviously your Python code samples and shareable modules. From the gnarliest data diving to the simplest explanation for new developers - it's all needed. We'll be doing our part with our own content shortly.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Chris,
I would like to have "hart to hart " talk with you.
I am being constantly harassed and really do not want to talk to those individuals.
I am basically forced to curtail my TECHNICAL posts.
There in no way to get these of my back...
It looks as ANY Tom, Dick and Harry can flame or ban me at their whim.
I have asked numerous time to stop, but they just do not care.
Cheers Vaclav
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Email me at chris@codeproject.com
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Have you ever looked at a new technology and thought "that looks like a lot of work" and just kinds of...left it.
When I first started CodeProject I knew nothing about database development. I wrote, exclusively, UI components. Self contained, easy to install, easy to learn, UI components. Databases were server-based systems. Sure, they often sat on the same machine as your app, but they were...separate. Distant. Not to be trusted and probably a nightmare to manage and setup and maintain. I was totally intimidated but I had a website with thousands of articles and I really, really had to work out this whole database thing.
And so I did, in about a day, and then spent the rest of the weekend alternatively marveling at how simple it all was and kicking myself for not taking the time sooner.
This pattern has repeated itself with MVC, or Vue.js, or Bootstrap, or regular expressions. Core development technologies that I now take for granted and are really, really simple (when you get them).
And this is how I currently think about AI. It's intimidating to me. There's a lot of stuff to wrap your head around. Models and data preparation and training and all that maths. Way too hard, way too messy, and I'm sure I can work around it with some really clever switch statements.
Except, obviously, there's a lot of deja vu going on here so I started scratching a little. I figured with a degree majoring in Mathematics I could probably at least pronounce some of the complicated words that are used. Maybe even recognise a symbol or two. And so I started reading and what I found, and am finding, is that AI and Machine Learning and all the bits that go into it do not require you to have a degree in advanced mathematics. They don't require you to be a rocket scientist. They do require you to understand what it is, exactly, you're trying to do and to be aware of the limitations (and sometimes the work required) but there's nothing fundamentally hard about simply using it.
As I looked around, and read, and forked GitHub repos and installed a billion packages that is making my computer hate me, and I realised the huge issue with AI right now is it's messy. Really messy. Sure, there are lots of cloud-based solutions and toolkits and SDKs that free you up from a lot of heavy lifting but I long for the time of UI component style reuse of code. I want to download something to my computer, add maybe 5 lines of code, and have AI working. No pain, no config, no fighting with compilers or libraries or PATH environment variables or any of that.
I want the Easy.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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At CodeProject we typically work hard to keep older devices working. It's not so long ago that I removed some hacks that were there to ensure CodeProject worked well on the Blackberry browser, and only yesterday I made some fixes to ensure the site runs on the original iPad 1. Dedication to antiquity!
Obviously there's a point where working around old issues will take time, resources and sanity away from moving forward and so, given Microsoft's own announcement[^] that IE is a "compatibility solution", we're dropping active support for IE.
While we will still work to ensure the most egregious issues don't cause IE to completely fail to render CodeProject, smaller issues such as certain functionality missing, or small glitches with layouts will most likely remain addressed.
We all, collectively, need to move on and ensure we use tools that make the internet safer.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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We're trying something new at CodeProject.
We noticed something interesting while digging through some data: the higher the reputation of a person, the less likely they are to ask a question. A high rep member is often someone who is technically competent, finds solutions where others can't, and is able to nut things out themselves in the face of substandard docs.
They still, however, have questions. We all do, and in doing a little soul-searching we realised that sometimes there's a hesitation in asking a question because you're scared to tarnish that reputation. We are all newbies at various stages, and the more we put ourselves in the position of being a newbie the more we learn.
If our biggest fear in asking a question is having people think we're dumb because we asked a dumb question, and if the purpose of Quick Answers is to provide a system to get questions answered, then why do we even need to show the name of the person posting the question? It doesn't add any value to the question itself. In fact it provides bias to the question, positive or negative, and that bias is unwarranted.
So we're not showing your name when you ask a question in Quick Answers. Ask away. The only time your question will have a problem is if it's not actually a question, if you've asked in a way that is unintelligible, or if you've dumped a homework assignment. Take the time to form an actual question and someone, somewhere will be able to answer it.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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As a, supposedly, high-rep user, I don't care whether or not people think a question I'm asking is dumb. I suspect that most of the competent high-rep users feel the same. To be honest, it looks like you've taken isolated data and extrapolated an assumption out of it. Why not just ask us if we're put off because we think a question could be perceived as dumb or whether it's more likely that we have honed our searching skills?
This space for rent
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From knowing you a bit I already assume that you, and many others, wouldn't care. You also have high searching and investigative skills. There's no doubt about that. My thoughts come from private conversations with developers and yes, there's definitely a low data set.
I'm not sure how many people are going to put up their hand and say "yep - I don't want my name shown front-and-centre because I think I'll look dumb".
There was another motivation to this which was to see the effect of removing the person from the question and letting the question be treated on its own merits. I have worried for a long time that a name or a reputation level immediately biases those answering (or flagging) questions.
I'm ready to be wrong about this but thought it was worth an experiment. If it's out-and-out a bad idea then I'll flip the switch back on.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote: There was another motivation to this which was to see the effect of removing the person from the question and letting the question be treated on its own merits. I have worried for a long time that a name or a reputation level immediately biases those answering (or flagging) questions.
I actually assumed that was the real reason, and while I find it commendable and have absolutely nothing against it, I believe you need to find a way to take care of the drawbacks first. The handling of spam and abuse being the major ones as far as I'm concerned.
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Jörgen Andersson wrote: I believe you need to find a way to take care of the drawbacks first.
Absolutely.
What I've done is that once you report a message you will see a shield icon. Hover over that icon and you will see a popup that provides a link to the member's account.
It's an extension of the experiment: flag messages on the merit of the message.
Then again if this is a total waste of time I will turn it off. It's better to try and fail...
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote: Hover over that icon
I'm often enough sitting with an ipad, especially when I'm not working and actually have time to help out with spam...
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Hi,
Off Topic:
Do the menus work for you on iPad? I have to go to the 'All Boards' page and navigate that huge list to get to the desired forum on Safari. I use to be able to hold down on the menu and it would open... but it stopped working a few weeks back.
Best Wishes,
-David Delaune
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The left side menus work.
But the horizontal menus below the orange bar only works with the defalt selection, since hover doesn't work.
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Jörgen Andersson wrote: But the horizontal menus below the orange bar only works with the defalt selection, since hover doesn't work.
How is it now?
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Works fine now.
Sorry for not responding until now, but I experienced another bug (which I will report separately), so I had to wait until I had the computer and the iPad side by side so I could find the message, test and respond to it.
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