Hey high five, also a local newspaper guy! I bumbled into it maybe 7 years ago. It doesn’t pay well (it’s pretty rural) but it totally aligns with my principles. It’s rough in the newspaper industry these days but it’s also an interesting challenge. Your competition is basically Facebook and Google.

I totally agree though. Certain small businesses are happy to have a skilled programmer. My boss gives me a lot of leeway to follow my principals when it comes to user privacy and stuff.

I to this day still have to Google tons of stuff, even very simple things; sometimes it’s just hard to remember that function’s name or whatever, it’s no big deal.

Programming didn’t click for me until I actually built something. Just a little command line game. Eventually after a certain point I realized: oh my god I can do anything! (with enough time)

You’ll get there, but try working on something bigger with zero stakes where you can feel out how code you write in one place ripples out to other places.

Man, Unicode is one of those things that is both brilliant and absolutely absurd. There is so much complexity to language and making one system to rule them all ends up involving so many compromises. Unicode has metadata for each character and algorithms dealing with normalization and capitalization and sorting. With human language being as varied as it is, these algorithms can have really wacky results. Another good article on it is https://eev.ee/blog/2015/09/12/dark-corners-of-unicode/

And if you want to RENDER text, oh boy. Look at this: https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/

Classic talk; one of my favorites. I’ve watched it multiple times and it always goes way over my head. Always makes me think of LISP.

This is such a weird fix! Good work finding it!

What about a non-breaking space?

Edit: I just realized you addressed that in the post.

WHAT?

I’m on Ubuntu, but from what I remember to get it working in my local environment I just:

• Installed the module.
• Added the following to the php.ini file:

    [xdebug]
    zend_extension=xdebug
    xdebug.mode = debug
    xdebug.start_with_request = yes

• Restarted the apache server.
• Installed the PHP Debug extension for Visual Studio Code.

And now I just hit F5 and select “Listen for Xdebug” and I’m ready to go.

Ooh rust just became more appealing to me.