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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Which do you agree with?

    Edit: There is maybe one that’s semi-ok (reversing a linked list) but it’s not a red flag if an engineer can’t do it on the spot.

    In my decade+ career, I’ve used a linked list in production code…… maybe twice? Thats not to say they aren’t useful, but I don’t make a habit of committing stuff to my memory unless I’m going to use it.

    Could I do it? Absolutely. Could I do it without searching it up? Yea. Would I search it up anyway? 100%











  • The 404 should just say the same message as “acronym not found”. It just means the first 4 letters didn’t match a file on the backend; I didn’t enumerate all the blank json for A-Z*4.

    Yeah, but it doesn’t translate to the site. That’s what I’m trying to say :) Your catch above doesn’t distinguish between 404 or anything else (5xxx) and displays An error occurred while processing your request. Please try again later for all eventualities. So, regardless whether the acronym wasn’t found or there was a genuine server error, the same error message is displayed.

    It was a really challenging project to process all the data. As with most large datasets, there are tons of pain points. Like 60% of the time spent was parsing out the song name from the janky first line of metadata. Some pain I dealt with over the project off the top of my head:

    I honestly have no idea what you had to drag it all out from, but it looks well implemented from the small amount I played around with it. I’ve never used Firebase, but it looks like you got it working so that’s a good job too.

    It’s probably just my old man brain that saw you were doing this all with files and it felt odd. That’s not to say it’s wrong, it’s just different to what I would have done.

    There’s a bunch of advantages to databases, like indexes and partial/fuzzy text matching - but I can certainly understand why you went this route if you needed to keep costs down and didn’t want to bother with any DB maintenance.

    Well done :)


  • Yeah, that error message is left over from an earlier version where I sharded by acronym length instead. At that time, there would always be a file. The problem was the files were getting to be huge at the 50 character length (20MB) and performance went to shit on poor mobile connections. So I refactored to shard by first 4, and files dropped down to a few K each and became a lot snappier.

    I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I just tried a random string, and I got the correct 404 response back, but it doesn’t look like the app handles that case and it just prints that error on any error.

                .catch(error => {
                    console.error("Error fetching or processing the JSON file:", error);
                    displayError("An error occurred while processing your request. Please try again later.", tableBody);
                });
    

    Anyway, I wasn’t trying to shit on it. Good job :)