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Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

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2.2k posts
 
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Meta How can we grow this community?

Codidact's communities have a lot of great content that is helping people on the Internet. Our communities are small, though, and sustainable communities depend on having lots of active, engaged p...

16 answers  ·  posted 2y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 1mo ago by Kevin Krumwiede‭

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Meta Welcome to Software Development!

Welcome to the Codidact site for Software Development! We're glad you're here and we're excited to see what you will build. This community is starting "from scratch", without importing Q&A fr...

0 answers  ·  posted 3y ago by Monica Cellio‭

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Q&A Should a salt be stored in the same database as the hash?

The purpose of a cryptographic salt is to make the same input (password) hash to different values in different instances, yet retain the hash function's deterministic properties. Salting accomplish...

posted 3y ago by Canina‭  ·  edited 3y ago by Canina‭

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Q&A What is HEAD in Git?

In Git documentation, there are lots of references to the term "HEAD". But what exactly is it? Some places refer to it as "a pointer to the current branch". So it's a branch? What is it used for?

1 answer  ·  posted 2y ago by hkotsubo‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by hkotsubo‭

Question git terminology
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Meta How can we grow this community?

Increase exposure One way of increasing our exposure is to use Codidact as a source when answering on other forums. As long as we are treating Codidact as any other source, there is absolutely not...

posted 2y ago by klutt‭  ·  edited 2y ago by klutt‭

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Q&A What is HEAD in Git?

First, we need to understand what a Git repository actually is. For that, refer to this article: it explains that a Git repository is actually a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph). I'm not going into the...

posted 2y ago by hkotsubo‭  ·  edited 1y ago by hkotsubo‭

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Q&A How does Zalgo Text work, and how can I prevent my application from accepting it?

First, let's see how Zalgo Text works. Unicode Combining Characters Unicode defines the concept of combining characters. Basically, some characters can be combined with others, to "make/create"...

posted 3y ago by hkotsubo‭  ·  edited 4mo ago by hkotsubo‭

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Q&A What must a C compiler do when it finds an error?

The C standard does not speak of "errors" and "warnings", those are not formal terms. The compiler is only required to produce a diagnostic message, as specified in C11 5.1.1.3: Diagnostics A c...

posted 3y ago by Lundin‭  ·  edited 2y ago by hkotsubo‭

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Meta Getting rid of "company tags" early on

So it appears that we've gotten our first "company tag", Apple. We know from SO that company name tags were always problematic since: Questions are about products, not companies. Given that the pr...

1 answer  ·  posted 3y ago by Lundin‭  ·  last activity 3y ago by Alexei‭

Question discussion tags
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Q&A What is the purpose of `if __name__ == '__main__'`?

It makes difference if the script is being imported. Let's suppose I have a file my_file.py: # my_file.py def some_function(): print('do some stuff') print('calling function:') some_fun...

posted 2y ago by hkotsubo‭  ·  edited 2y ago by hkotsubo‭

Answer
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Q&A Should a salt be stored in the same database as the hash?

To protect against dictionary and rainbow table attacks it is well known that passwords should be salted before hashing. The salt (unique to each password) gets stored with the hash, often in the s...

5 answers  ·  posted 3y ago by jla‭  ·  last activity 1mo ago by bencurthoys‭

Question security hash salt
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Q&A What must a C compiler do when it finds an error?

What exactly must a C compiler do when it finds a compile-time error? The most obvious kind of errors are language syntax errors, but the C standard also speaks of constraints, which are rules tha...

1 answer  ·  posted 3y ago by Lundin‭  ·  edited 2y ago by ghost-in-the-zsh‭

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Q&A Does the location of an import statement affect performance in Python?

When writing Python-based apps (e.g. Django, Flask, etc.), it's often the case that import statements can be found all over the place, often more than once for the same module. For example, you can...

1 answer  ·  posted 3y ago by ghost-in-the-zsh‭  ·  last activity 3y ago by ghost-in-the-zsh‭

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Q&A Why are list comprehensions written differently if you use `else`?

It's not a matter of order; Python simply does not directly allow else clauses as part of list comprehensions (docs). When we use [num if num != 11 else 22 for num in hand] We are actually usin...

posted 2y ago by Moshi‭

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Q&A What is the purpose of `if __name__ == '__main__'`?

I often see the construct if __name__ == '__main__' in Python code. For example, the queens.py demo in the Python repository ends with these two lines: if __name__ == "__main__": main() Ho...

1 answer  ·  posted 2y ago by J-hen‭  ·  last activity 2y ago by hkotsubo‭

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Meta Should we allow answers generated by ChatGPT?

We got our first (mostly) ChatGPT answer in our community. Also, a question includes an adapted ChatGPT code that does not seem to do the job. StackOverflow has already banned ChatGPT answers and ...

9 answers  ·  posted 1y ago by Alexei‭  ·  last activity 10mo ago by Monica Cellio‭

Question discussion answers
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Meta How can we grow this community?

By having decent source code formatting that isn't completely inferior to other sites like Stack Overflow. We might want to post/view snippets longer than 13 lines without suffering some scroll whe...

posted 2y ago by Lundin‭

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Q&A How to do private encapsulation in C?

The concept you are looking for is referred to as opaque type or opaque pointers. This is the proper method to achieve private encapsulation in C and can also be used for inheritance/polymorphism (...

posted 2y ago by Lundin‭  ·  edited 1y ago by Lundin‭

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Q&A What's the correct way to merge a branch and its dependent branch back to master?

I think a branch is a set of commits Well, technically no, it's not. But first things first. DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) Personally, Git became much more easier to understand after I've r...

posted 2y ago by hkotsubo‭  ·  edited 2y ago by hkotsubo‭

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Meta Should we allow answers generated by ChatGPT?

I want to let you know that today we (Codidact team) posted our default Gen-AI policy. As far as this community is concerned I think it's consistent with what you're already doing and nothing surp...

posted 10mo ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  edited 10mo ago by Monica Cellio‭

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Meta Growing software.codidact

We can't go and shamelessly promote Codidact in SO comments etc just for the sake of it - that's regarded as spamming and might get you banned, plus it will give Codidact a nasty rep. Similarly, SE...

posted 3y ago by Lundin‭  ·  edited 3y ago by Lundin‭

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Q&A How should we share some content between two otherwise-independent git repositories?

We have two teams, dev and doc, and I'd like them to have shared access (via git) to a common subset of content. Specifically, I would like the examples that are used in the doc and that are scrip...

4 answers  ·  posted 3y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 3y ago by Monica Cellio‭

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Q&A Is omitting braces for single statements bad practice?

While [the Apple "goto fail bug"] is pretty interesting, it's anecdotal evidence. I understand that it's still possible to produce bugs like this. One could also reasonably argue that it could ha...

posted 3y ago by Canina‭  ·  edited 3y ago by Canina‭

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Q&A For scripting what are the pros and cons of command line arguments versus capturing input at the start?

Pros of CLI arguments/flags include: Easier to leverage the tool in another script or via other automation so that user interaction is not required If certain arguments are optional and/or have...

posted 3y ago by qohelet‭  ·  edited 3y ago by qohelet‭

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Meta Questions easily answered by studying a beginner-level book

What if a question is beginner level? I would say: Someone should answer it. Some of the beginner level questions on stackoverflow have received answers that explain things in wonderful ways. Be...

posted 2y ago by Dirk Herrmann‭  ·  edited 9mo ago by Alexei‭

Answer