IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Bandwagon said:

I don't know enough to even know how to ask this question correctly, but here goes -

I use Postman to construct and test the query parameters in REST API post or get calls. Some of them just take a URL to the api, then a bunch of parameters. Others, I have to enter a bunch of non-readable shit into the "body".

What is the difference between these? Is there a name for the distinction, or a name for one vs the others? I'm trying to understand the differences and importance between the two, but don't even know what to search for.

(Please tag me if you reply....this thread isn't in my usual rotation)

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They are query params and request body. Query params can be used by all service calls (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE & also PATCH I believe) or just by the frontend code. They are usually used for call types that do not allow request bodies and are used to pass data into those calls in addition to whatever data is already included in the url path. It is usually very basic information that they are used to pass through because urls have a max size limitation. Right now I'm working on an application where we are using query params to pass pagination information through for GET calls so ?pageNumber=0&sortDir=ASC type of thing. It's outside of the scope of your question but frontend can also use them when they are attached to route paths. Many sites use ?debug=true to display additional debugging data in a frontend element.

Request body is a lot more robust and can handle much more information. POST and PUT ( and PATCH but it's a weird type and also DELETE but it has very edge case uses for a body) pass data through a request body which is your non-readable shit. They are usually used to create or edit data so it's expected that there could be quite a bit of actual data to be passed through in a request payload. You can use request body and query params for the same call but I'm not sure what the benefits of that are outside of separation of concerns and knowing that the request body is only made up of data that will be going into the database and query params are data used to identify where in the database that data will go.

Neat

I got a 10% merit raise yesterday for my contributions. This is the third time I've received one of these since I joined this company in 2019. Previously they were 4% though. I only got 1 promotion last year, however and have been in my current role since then. I am trying to understand how to advance exactly.

Yes, I will happily take more money but I have some concerns here. For all intents and purposes, I am an independent contributor. I was the first hire on this team and am now the lead developer, although I mostly work alone outside of with analysts to understand various problems I am solving. I got big-time CEO exposure for resolving some stuff for a major audit we were going through which was really cool.

My director has informed me that they are hiring an entire team to do what I have been doing alone on the side for the past year and a half or so. A director, manager, and 3 business intelligence people to build out the business intelligence team. I designed the entire data warehouse that the business currently uses, as well as a critical data management application and the billing system itself entirely alone. Which has forced me to be involved in almost every single data project we have. In addition to my normal work here.

How should I be looking at this? I am kind of angling to get a promotion to Senior dev or something... I don't really care about roles in this case but I am slightly irked that I got only 10% more when I know a director will assuredly be making more than I do and they'll be highly reliant on me for that new team for at least another year. Did I fuck this up somehow?

Going to talk with my director next week in my 1:1 about this. I can't shake the feeling that this is a big opportunity in career growth for me and I need to pounce on it. Despite my general unwillingness to be in management. This could be huge for me.

It sounds like you should definitely be trying to angle for a title upgrade with the responsibilities you currently have and the skillsets and products that you have brought to the table. The test that I have been lead to understand works for determining what your seniority level is in this circumstance is that if you perform at least 2 of: Helps train new employees, architects new product or refactors for old product and explaining and discussing products with any part of the chief structure, then you fulfill the requirements for a senior level and it sounds like you are already doing two of those and in the process of moving into training some new people to do part of the extra work that you have been performing.

I wouldn't worry that you've fucked anything up since the only thing that's happened so far is that you've agreed to a cost of living/merit raise. If you're doing a good job and your employer recognizes that then you're due that pay bump and a promotion bump should always be separate from that so it sounds like you're fine to go into your 1 on 1 to negotiate a promotion. Good luck man, it sounds like you're holding a lot of cards and it doesn't seem like an unreasonable request at all to be discussing a title promotion for the work you have done. If you have earned a title you should definitely try to grab it. It puts you in the express line when you're applying for new jobs and gets you bigger initial pay bumps when or if you switch companies.

Ao- said:

Can't tell, is the secret leaking actually there?

Also given it was trained on GPL content, wouldn't that taint code it helps with?

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I do not know if I would say "taint" but yeah, all the "AI" solutions are just reflections of the data they are trained on. Its a neat thing, there is no way it can help with anything too complicated. Humans are way too stupid to come up with anything smarter than us.

Anyone here doing mobile development using swift or kotlin?

Or how about anyone using kotlin in general? Curious to see if it's worthwhile to go ahead and start tinkering with it as an alternative to Java with Spring and Android development.

Flutter is the rage right now.

ShakyJake said:

I think Google themselves have switched to Kotlin? I watched a short intro video on Kotlin and I believe that was one of the points the author made.

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They have for android. Last I heard some android SDKs moving forward will be kotlin first.

dotnet 5 is so good. Even if AWS treats it like a second class lambda citizen