I'm surprised that old printers like that go for $80-120 USD. I'm pretty sure you can buy a new inkjet for $50.
If I wanted to do something similar, what is the cheapest type of printers I should be looking at? Dot matrix does seem awesome for the vibes, but I could be happy with something else as well. Any recommendations? I do like the idea of buying something old.
I agree. I will mock 3rd party APIs sometimes so I can test that my system correctly handles failures. For example, what if I get a 500 response from the API? With my mock I can easily make that happen. If I was using the actual API, I would have no way of forcing a 500 to happen.
> Margaret Hamilton worked out how to write bug-free software during the Apollo 11 project. The IT industry collectively went, "meh."
I have tried to look into this before, and I never can find much information about it. Last I checked, her homepage was basically trying to sell some proprietary system to customers who have bought into her marketing about "bug-free software". But actually trying to figure out how it works, or how to do it oneself, has remained elusive. Saying "The IT industry collectively went, 'meh.'" is kind of misleading. It's not exactly clear _what_ she worked out, but I'm skeptical of the claim that she "worked out how to write bug-free software". And if she did, she isn't exactly shouting from the rooftops about how to do it.
I had lexical highlighting in javascript for a while, but IIRC I stopped using it because the plugin didn't play well with JSX.
To be honest it wasn't that big of a deal. Definitely not a game changer. Although I like that people are at least considering these things. Most people I showed the lexical highlighter to couldn't imagine not having syntax highlighting (which is silly, you get used to it quickly).
romhacking. I want to make patches to old console games from the late 80s and early 90s. I've never really worked with binary data before, so I have had to learn some new things.
+1 for Software Tools by Kernighan and Plauger. It was eye-opening for me because it really made me understand the unix philosophy of composing programs out of smaller programs.
If I wanted to do something similar, what is the cheapest type of printers I should be looking at? Dot matrix does seem awesome for the vibes, but I could be happy with something else as well. Any recommendations? I do like the idea of buying something old.