Notices by Julia Evans (b0rk@mastodon.social)

@pettter do you have any other examples than money calculations? I'm struggling to come up with specific examples

today I'm thinking about how floating point numbers can be treacherous -- what are specific examples of when they've betrayed you?

so far I have:

* money calculations where you need to get the exact correct answer
* twitter's tweet IDs are bigger than 2^53 and can't be represented as a Javascript number, you have to use a string
* implementing numerical algorithms (like matrix multiplication) (I've never done this)

tiny holiday project: I made a little site to show/hide boosts for the people you follow on Mastodon, using the Mastodon API https://manage-boosts.jvns.ca/

I'm not really taking feature requests but I found it helpful so I'm sharing in case other folks do as well

the code is here: https://github.com/jvns/manage-boosts

I know $12 USD is a lot of money for some people, so to celebrate 1000 sales, I'm giving away 1000 copies of The Pocket Guide to Debugging (honour system: please only use the free link if you can't afford $12!)

Here’s the link, use code BUYONEGIVEONE at checkout to get a free copy https://store.wizardzines.com/products/the-pocket-guide-to-debugging-pdf

(I can't disable the billing address prompt but you can just enter a fake address like 123 Fake st, new york NY 12345, (123) 123 4567 :))

It’s here!! My new zine “The Pocket Guide to Debugging” is out now!! It has 47 pages of my favourite strategies for solving your sneakiest bugs. ? ?

Get it here for $12: https://wizardzines.com/zines/debugging-guide/

a debugging manifesto

@filippo is masto.host open for registrations again?

@tbroyer did you see an obvious other good candidate? I couldn't find one

notes on reading error messages

I'm wondering if there are more tips I should include here -- for example "remove the parts specific to your program when Googling the error" feel too obvious to me

really enjoyed reading this interactive guide to flexbox, I learned some new things about flexbox (like how it interacts with `min-width` which has confused me many times in the past)

https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/interactive-guide-to-flexbox/

debugging strategy: sprinkle assertions everywhere

if you use assertions for debugging, I'd love to hear how you use them -- I don't use them very much myself, even though it seems it might be useful