Maintaining software built by interns who have all quit by now and made zero documentation

Got my hands on an interesting API.
Look around on the site.
No documentation. Like, nothing. Not even examples.
Tried calling it.
Response code: 200 OK
Body: Unknown Error.

Well, fuck you too.

Yesterday I had to modify a python script that was written by the previous dev,
There was no documentation to understand the code, I had to read 10 files almost 900 line each, after a looooooooooong 7 hours, at the top of one of the scripts, the author name was same as mine
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

I'll make the documentation after just some lines of code

Every fkn 3 to 4 days, some random dev shows up in my office really really fkn confused and frustrated about something he doesn't understand - because I have a dark secret.

Sometime, in cold lonely nights, when no one is watching, I write my documentation before the actual code.

Somehow, sometimes documentation without code attached to it makes it to production.

Today someone yelled at me for wasting his time because he wasted 3 hours trying to find the code the documentation belongs to - and demented I stop the practice from now on.

Agh.

"Don't waste your time on writing comments or documentation, as long as the code works!" - My (Ex-) Coworker

This genius made his very own super-flexible-and-versatile-never-seen-before-mvc-framework, with no documentation about the code, instead of just donwloading and implementing a popular one.

He left the company.

I maintain it.

Fell my pain.

Lazy motherfuckers (╭ರ_•́) (凸ಠ益ಠ)凸

Where do I buy this?

The company I work for...
Has:

1. No CI/CD
2. SVN instead of GIT
3. Outsourcing to India (oof)
4. No Automated Testing
5. Uses Bugnet (ancient, outdated)
6. No clearly defined code standards
7. No real documentation on the code
8. Rubbish code
9. No desire to reduce technical debt
10. Poorly maintained DB
11. Poor outdated equipment
12. A useless PM
13. Still priotizes IE support (??)

On a scale of 1 to 10 how fucked is this company and anything they develop?

I have decided to never write commits.

I will never write documentation.

I will write my code in the most confusing way possible.

I will include useless code.

I will always git commit with the message "asdfghjkl" or "HAHA LOLZ I DONT NOW WAT I WOROTEEE"

I will work at Apple.

I am xenophobic.

I will leave the company right before we push to production.

I will make so many friends.

This is soo me reading previous dev code without documentation

Effect of documentation!!!

When your colleague, who wrote the API is on vacation, the documentation is non-existent and you are tired from reading all-day long his spaghetti code, so you are just waiting for him to show up.

When someone says document your code

Sometimes looking back at your code for documentation reasons and you really ask yourself "wow, did I make this? this is fucking genius"

Me: So, I've been looking through the code and there's barely any comments and documentation. What's up with that?

Him: Yeah, it's really complex and low level, so it's difficult to actually describe what it does.

Me: But that's exactly why you should document it! 🤦🤦🤦

Him: ...

Apparently Stackoverflow was down recently. I think I missed it, because I was busy reading homemade documentation and having multiple existential crisis over the performance of my code.
Mondays

“Our code is our documentation - it’s produced in such a way as to be explanatory, logical and clear, and annotated if/where needed”

Really?? That's the reply you give me when I asking API documentation for handover ?

Other Dev left just as we hit beta and refactored all his code without documentation... Not even fucking comments...

Code Documentation 😍😎

User Guide Documentation 😭💔

This one project at my study.

We always had to do quite some documentation, even some in a way that works the opposite of how my brain works.

That's all fine if you can agree on doing it differently.

Had this teacher who valued documentation above anything else. The project was 10 weeks, after 9 weeks my documentation got approved (yes, not a single line of code yet) and I could finally program for the remaining 5 days.

Still had quite some bugs at say number five, the day of presentation.

I imagined that'd be okay since I only had 4 full days instead of the 5-8 weeks everyone else had.

Every bug was noted and the application was "unstable" and "not nearly good enough".

At that moment I thought like "if this is the dev life, I'm out of here".

How I feel working with code that's been worked on by at least three different teams at three different companies over the past couple of years and not a single person has left any comments or documentation.

When you ask for documentation and they hand you a Word document with screenshots of the changed code

Had a friend who was forced to document his own code. He gave up after an hour of trying to figure out what methods 'somethingsomething()' and 'somethingsomething2()' did...

So I spent 4-5 weeks explaining how shit the current code base was, implemented gulp tasks to lint js, CSS etc, written shed loads of coding standards and best practices to follow. At this point everyone was onboard with the changes and thought brilliant were going to start getting some good code coming out of this team.

I go on holiday for a week, come back and fucker has ignored the documentation disabled the linters in the gulp tasks and the code is back to square one SHIT!!

Plus everyone still committing to master!!!!

Why do I bother!!

FUCKING TELEGRAM FUCK YOU STAY IN YOUR FUCKING API DOCUMENTATION AND STOP FUCKING TESTING YOUR SHIT ON A PRODUCTION SYSTEM WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT FUCK OFF WHY AM I EVEN DEVELOPING SHIT FOR YOUR PLATFORM ANYMORE WHEN FOLLOWING YOUR DOCUMENTATION LEADS TO FUCKING ERRORS AND WE HAVE TO DECOMPILE AND REVERSE ENGINEER YOUR FUCKING "OPEN SOURCE" APPS BECAUSE YOU DONT EVEN BOTHER TO FUCKING UPDATE THE SOURCE CODE ONCE A YEAR WHAT THE FUCK

Thank you for your attention

Poorly written code + no documentation = complete redo of the program 😞

You would think for a company as big as Google they would be able to write good fucking documentation but nope!

Fuck me it's more spaghetti than my code!

On my first day at work realising that I would be working on a code base with 1.5 million+ lines of code and the only documentation is half a paragraph some guy wrote the day before he left 😑

I saw one guy in Office writing unit test cases and documentation for his code .
Such a psychopath!!!

That moment when you search for Microsoft documentation and realize there is none, so you go search for source code and realize there isn't any of that either. 😑

I am sure this has happened to all of us in some extent with some variations.

Colleague not writing comments on code.
Ask him something like "How am I suppose understand that piece of garbage you have written when there is no comments or documentation?"
This keeps happening for a long time. Some time after, I write a kernel module using idiomatic C and ASM blocks for optimizations (for some RTOS) and purposely not write neither documentation nor comments.
When he asked for an explanation, I answered to everything he questioned as general as I could for "that trivial piece of code".
After that he always documents his code!
Win! 🏆

Now don't get me wrong, I love the multicultural aspect of open source coding.

But for the love of everything that that is sane, please do not write the basic readme and code in English, and then write the entire documentation for the code in another language.

(Yay first rant)

Feel like almost all the questions I receive as the automation lead can be replied with this.

Client: So we want you to redesign the frontend for this app

Me: Ok, sounds easy enough, send me the source code and API documentation

Client: yeaaaaaah, here's the thing, we don't have the frontend source code anymore, we originally wrote it in React and then we lost the source code, we only have the bundles now

Me: ok fine, I can handle it, can I have the API doc?

Client: yeaaaaaah, here's the thing, we didn't write API docs, but we have the source code if you want

Me: fml

Add no comments or documentations whatsoever during my initial years of coding (when actually I used to write code worse than a constipated elephant's shit).. In my mind I would be like "This is quite clear-cut.. A first grader will be able to understand this code.."

But then I had to debug my own code barely some 1-2 months later and I figured out the importance of good comments and documentation..

Yes! you made a difference.[image]
P.S.
started working at a startup as an intern(android app developer), Most of my work is like debugging the code, new feature implementations.
And the codebase is full of this kind of shit(even worse) plus literally zero documentation(not even for API's), not even a single line of comment in complete project(40K-50K), not any unit test/ UI test.
The funniest thing is when I ask for documentation he(boss | *) said: I am documentation.

The superhuman feeling of going back to your code after a week and it all makes perfect sense, the variable names are intuitive, the doc strings are comprehensive, and the general codebase structure is sensible.

Being naive enough to assume I would have time to come back and "fix that later" - oh and also that I would still know exactly what "that" was and how my own code worked with zero documentation.

So a company I'm working at has this internal product. I just got employed and was put into that team.

"First task: refactor some of the code"

Alright, I start refactoring. Oh I may need to write a small class for this one. And then rewrite this a bit. And then rewrite that a bit. And then rewrite everything.

"Why are you rewriting most of my code?"

oh i would not have needed to do so if your code was not COMING OUT OF YOUR ASS and if all the teams had FREAKING PROPER API DOCUMENTATION

Well I just learned the value of reading comments on code

Been working on issue for 3-4 days 30 seconds after reading documentation and adjusting accordingly everything is working perfectly

I feel so stupid :(

Me : I should start building user authentication system.
inner self : there are enough free and secure ones out there, just go read the documentation.
Me : fuck I'm not reading 10000 pages of documentation written in alien language.
inner self : well then you better start building
Me : **writes code
Inner self : you better add the data validation and security while coding
Me : I just want it to work !
Me after a few days trying not to suicide : the site is hacked, the code is bugged, hello darkness my friend

New job...
No introduction to project
No database overview
No documentation
No commented code

Shit, hope this isn't normal in the industry I have aimed the rest of my life at

"If you document it, it's not a Bug - it's a Feature."

I have this teacher who focuses so much on documentation that I hardly get to code sometimes. The worst experience with that teacher was with a project I think about two years ago. Every time I came up with (modified) documentation (we have to document EVERYTHING before allowed to start programming) she would turn me away with some bs argumentation and also point out non existing English grammar errors (my English is way better than hers). After nine weeks of documenting (so, no single line of code yet and projects take ten weeks) she gave me the green light. Then at 'delivery' she had the fucking balls to to tell me that MY CODE WASN'T THAT STABLE AND GOOD YET.

I WAS LITERALLY HAVING A LIVE RAGE ATTACK OVER THERE.

Today a new person joined the team.

Started bitching about the entire team for not having documentation for our already written code and software.

Asks the manager for a new task that he can take up so that he can write documentation for all our already coded works.

Manager says Go On.

Troubles me with 400 questions every 3 minutes in the name of Knowledge Transfer for writing his documentation.

Sends a proud mail to the team for writing this new documentation that no one else had time to do.
He is a newbie and had no other task to do anyway.

I seriously don't know if I should feel proud of him, for writing new documentation,
Or if he's doing this to defame me.

The team is filled with snakes.

PM, on kickoff meeting: good code speaks for itself, need no documentation

PM, on UAT day: how does this features work, where is the documentation for it?

Dev: Just do me a favor and go fuck yourself.

Story of WTF happened to my job

During my employment in (name censored) was stressful, They claimed I didn't complete my task on time which they constantly remove me from git and documentation(which have to follow their style of returning data), I kept emailing, slack, WhatsApp calls them, mostly and predictably got ghosted and blocked.

So How the fuck am I supposed to push my code or code without the documentation (I can actually, prevent refactoring every time, following the documentation is the good way to go.)

On the sprint review, they will complain about me not committing and pushing the code. (I did commit locally, but can't push, they removed me from the fucking repo) and not done.

Tried reasoning, telling the obvious reasons with them, doesn't work. They come out the second reason of me "NOT COMMUNICATING". Sometimes I can get to git merge from dev to my branch and get tonnes of fucked up code. I reviewed the code, and I can't tolerate it.

Lately, I overheard them mocking and cheering me about to get fired over a zoom meeting (I was in there, they forgot to remove me). Their conversation is about me being a coloniser, a jerk, betraying Chinese ancestors for being not Chinese enough.

I was like: "Why the fuck does their conversation sound like they are tucked in the Qin dynasty?"

Frequently I got labelled as unprofessional.

How is cussing about my ancestors, personal and life a professional behaviour?

When the source code of a library that you depend upon is easier to read than its official shitty documentation...

Update log: performance improve, API rewritten, fixed all bugs reported, new features implemented, general cleanup of code, documentation and comments update
Feedback: love the new background colour!
😞

Rant::aboutMyself(my_code){
Wrote 500+ lines of code without proper documentation. Got 200 little bugs. Got frustrated. Gave up on code. Started documenting it. Step by step. Resolved many silly mistake while documenting the code. Completed documentation. Run the program . Bugs reduced to 10. I'm sooo happy. I LOVE DOCUMENTATION 😍
}

I created a REST API for a customer that one of their customers should use. I sent some documentation and code samples to the "developer". He didn't understand why he should send css to the API. He obviously couldn't tell json from css...

Blessed be the person whose comments/documentation is embedded with tiny pieces of code.

Cons of not having proper documentation.

Wasted whole day reading code because I have to implement a feature. Turns out to that the feature is already implemented, just needed to be plugged.

My FAVORITE bugs are those in someone ELSE's code that MY code depends on. Like an API that won't respond correctly when I FOLLOW THE DOCUMENTATION EXACTLY. 😐

Me: 'alriiight let's run this code here'

Logs: 'lol the function you did is deprecated. how about you don't do that, and do the right thing instead'

What was the right thing?
I don't know. It's not on their documentation in their site.

Thanks, js devs :) you guys are the absolute best

Code quality check punishes writing massive documentation strings due to "too many lines of code"

FML

Code is not self documenting..

reading 10k+ lines of business logic does not take the place of well defined documentation.

Mic drop.

No matter how much documentation you write, and how well you comment the code, the truth is always the code itself.

Re-writing IBM Asembler code to C. No documentation whatsoever. Code was our only reference.

WTF is the point a
of auto-generated documentation. Some dude litterally thought it was a good idea to read the code and write the exact same shit differently. WTF IS THE POINT!?

Documentation takes work, sorry, stop being lazy.

No documentation. Thousands of lines of code. Still learn enough about the solution to make a required change in a day. Now the company feels like I should be the one to lead training for the module, and I still don't know what the other half of the code does. T-minus two hours...

Ask a developer to code entire night

Developer:
😏🤓No Problem. I was born to play with fire 😤😎

Ask a developer to complete the associated documentation in next couple of hours

Developer:
😳🤬🤯 Better call the devil to take me to hell 😱🤒🥵

Scrum coach: "In scrum, we give more importance to working code over documentation".
Me:😂

Both apps I'm working on have legacy code:

iOS app has 100's and 1000's of lines of code with no documentation, no proper naming conventions and cut and pasted code off the net.

Android app has skeleton code from a Spanish taxi app + remnants of a funeral webcasting app, there's also the same no documentation, bad naming conventions and cut and paste code off the net.

The server is also as bad, it had methods that we're never used, I for one don't fully understand the server but from what I can see it's a mess.

I had a hard time understanding both apps and gladly majority of the modifications I made we're not including existing stuff, so I guess I just basically pilled my code onto of the already existing software.

I would have gladly started from scratch given the chance.

Read source code and unit tests. Don’t bother documentation cause it’s outdated. Dig into the core, look where data goes in and where it gets out. Everything else is just a wrapper.

Email chains, screenshots shared in google docs, two comments per 1k lines of code, and sticky notes are sufficient documentation, right? RIGHT?

Programmers nowadays have to...
… write 100%-covering unit tests;
… set up continuous integration, linters, hinters, style checkers, …;
… follow style guides for every language;
… meet impossible deadlines;
… meet impossible management/customer/end user expectations;
… read through terrible code others made;
… read through terrible documentation others made;
… make terrible documentation themselves;
… fight with the IDE;
… fight with the build tools;
… deal with unreproducible crash reports coming in from everywhere;
… debug code written at 2am (by themselves AND others);
…
…
…
… KNOW HOW TO PROGRAM.

1. Understand APIs without reading documentation.

2. Write correct code from first try.

3. Know to program in every language.

4. Create the perfect fully functional AI system.

5. Center objects vertically with one line CSS at target object.

Holy fuck is learning new frameworks frustrating.

I'm trying to setup a simple fucking flutter app and all their tutorials are basic shit with no auth/complex routing.

Any feature of flutter that's not in a tutorial has absolute shit documentation with 0 examples on how to use it.

Material app has like 20 properties and if you click on something like on generate there is shit for knowing what the fuck it's expecting.

Stackoverflow has a ton a code but that's just it, code. I have absolutely no idea how they generate the code they have from the documentation on the site. They must have been following flutter from the start.

Ahhhhh! 😠

- I am leaving the company, so you will work on my project.
- (looks at code) But there is no single doc string or any documentation apart from the installation guide.
- Yes, but the project is really easy to understand.

... I will just sit here trying to understand your code instead of doing actual work.

I have a lab at uni where my lab group have to refactor some code from an open source project. We got assigned some Apache project and jfc that code is a mess. Little to no documentation, hard to navigate, tests that you have no idea what it's testing, and so on. On top of that the teacher expects us to spend more time than we have on it. I'll be glad when this course is over :))

I spent the last weeks rewriting a huge project which I had to hurriedly write a year ago. No comments, no documentation, spaghetti code. Part me was an asshole! But now I am done, all is new, everything is well commented, structured in classes with well defined tasks. Yay.

I have no idea how this code that I wrote last year work and there's obviously no documentation but thankfully I gave my classes very useful names such as "YuDoDis", "Texter467", "TheHolyButton", "GARBAGE", etc. Fucking hate myself sometimes.

After many years... I truly believe that non IT people belive that this is how programmers work:

- Goodmorning computer. How are you? Can you make me a program? I want the program to include an userfriendly userinterface, database, optimized code, documentation and dont forget that i dont want any bugs! Thanks computer. I'll get back to you when my coffee is ready.

when I got hired my boss wrote a cms in php that's 50,000 + lines of php code, without a single line of documentation. Yeah can you tell how my first few weeks went?

When in internship you have to read 150000 lines of code to make changes and the code does not have any comments, no indentation, no documentation, no wiki. You'll be like fuck this shit. I'm outta here.

I want to get in the habit of proper documentation of my code, But i'm not sure how it's formatted, how it should look or how I should even begin writing documentation? Do I open a document and just take snap shots of my code and explain how it works? I'm a little confused. Do I take pictures of my UI and explain how to use it? Is it like writing a book?

The problem being a dev at a big company (around 1000 devs) with huge codebase (I mean huge, tens of thousands of modules, if not millions) is that, as many hands touch the code of a project and deadlines are always short, not everyone care about changing the documentation afterwards.

This translates to double the work everytime you need to fix a bug or something as you have to quickly reverse engineer the modules to understand it - the documentation often reflects an old version and it messes things up much more than it helps you out.

!$rant

"Always make sure to have good documentation in your code."

And I still struggle with this advice xD

For people that do minimal documentation on a package and just say “refer to source code”…fuck you

Dear fellow project member,

I agree that most code should explain itself, but if you need to use a certain method which requires you to pass several different values of the same type and you just pass values as you like and then get, as you like to call it, 'unexpected behavior', then that is YOUR F***ING PROBLEM.

I DO know your thoughts about documenting code and I DO know you think documenting code only delays the progress, but if you for once could please CHECK THE DOCUMENTATION I WROTE, there would be no need to message me EVERY FIVE BLOODY MINUTES to complain about something that actually works when used right, just because you are too lazy to read the docs!

If you would do that next time, at least the time i spend writing documentation for our project would not be COMPLETELY WASTED! 😤

Kind Regards

Android is gonna be the death of me. Any fucking idea you have is impossible to implement, because libraries with clear documentation are deprecated. If a library is not deprecated, however, it has documentation written by a fucking caveman who thinks it's extremely self explanatory on how to use something that is extremely application specific. Spent hours looking at Google example code that crashes almost immediately after execution, what a joke.

People adding documentation to their code.

When the documentation 3x longer then the actual code (and does not make any sense)

Just want to write code... no emails, no documentation, no meetings.

Is it so hard to comment your code?

I work on collab projects here and there and both the comments and documentation are both awful, nearly always, there are some exceptions.

This is a plea to all those who teach anyone to program. "This performs a loop" is not a helpful comment, nor is "This sets variable x to 1" where the line below is "let x = 1".

The last piece of code brings me on to my next point meaningful variable names. If x is a variable that stores the age of a machine call it ageOfMachine or age_of_machine. Not aom, not x but what it actually is, modern IDEs and text editors will fill this out for you.

Finally documentation, a good friend of mine sent me this quote a while back, I can't find the image but "Documentation is like sex, when it's good, it's great. But when it's bad it's better than nothing." Your documentation should be good, a good pattern to follow is the Node.js documentation, it tells the function, what it does and what parameters it takes.

Anyway rant over; and I'm sure that this applies to people outside of this community only.

Learning through documentation.

I learned one thing.... That how I can copy paste any thing in my code and comment it as "magic happens here do not touch."

Yeah thats my code learned from documentation (image below )

Client: "documentation, oh you mean those grey texts the previous code guy wrote on the code files"

Me: I kinda need more than "grey texts on the code files" if you want me to actually fix the system and implement the new specs.

Client: oh you mean the Microsoft asp books

Me: It's a Laravel system sir, it's php not asp.net

Client: what are those?

Me:.................

Oh, I did it again!
Everytime I think I will write proper standard code with full documentation, but well, guess who didn't write documentation... And now forgot how his own code works.

No documentation....yeah....just figuring it out! 🤔😲

Commenting your code is a myth my friend.

Going through legacy or other developers code which don't have documentation or even comments. Plus the author of the code is not working in same organisation anymore to consult. We have to understand the code like deciphering any ancient language. 😥

Every time I read some code of the rust standard libraries or code of other popular rust crates, I feel ashamed of the code I produce ... their level of documentation is just outstanding, mine is ... hardly existing?

Guess a rant about myself :D

I can’t remember shit

My code editor helps me a ton!!

I have most documentation offline.

Ask me to do shit in a job interview without Google or any reference material then the joke is on 🤡

New job: Asked my manager if i can add documentation for the code/project.
Manager: it's completely useless to use hours on documentation. If you don't understand any thing just ask around. It saves time. Just use descriptive variables and method names.
Me: :|

I love to code but I hate to configure.😡😡

OK I hate to configure when it takes several hours and when there is no real documentation.

I talk to clients. I prepare the requirements. I design the database structure. I design prototype frontend. I do documentation. I code. I debug. I update change log.

I die.

You know what's fucking horrible?

Implementing new features to an Android app in production that another dev wrote...

...which has no architecture, no documentation, no modularity, no testability, everything runs on the UI thread, filled with spaghetti code and it somehow works smoothely so I have to not fuck it up.

Oh and I'm also a junior. So fuck me, right?

The worst part of being a senior software engineer for a team is that the legacy code of the company is not clear, and there's no documentation.

So....
I was just told why the company's code has no documentation...

Quote: "It enforces devs to write simpler/better code"

Oh and added bonus - the whole backend is PHP with a bunch of tweaked libraries.

>>Struck on a stupid concept with very little documentation.
>>Searched for days, finally frustrated and fucked up.
>>Started searching for libraries,found a decent one with good documentation and even a sample usecase.
>> library handles my application completely fine, me happy and motivated again :D
>>opened the library's source code, that was again very nice and simple.
>>Now learnt the concept and implementing it in my app natively . Even opened some issues in the creator's library
>>thank you github :)

I fckin love it when you start working on a new project in a new team and the 5000 lines of Angular code are acompanied by 0 documentation.

Whenever I have to ask about how certain code of someone else works, I feel bad. I feel like I should be able to figure it out on my own.
On the other hand, if people ask me to implement something within their code, that I am not familiar with, I kinda expect more info? Like if you don't have any tutorials or documentation on your tool, be prepared to answer some stupid questions about how to set it up and whatnot. How else am I gonna know how to start with? Having to read the entire source code is a massive waste of time, no?

tl;dr: if you don't provide documentation or tutorials, be ready to answer stupid questions.

Currently doing my final handover, the "senior" developer is trying hardly to find things for me to change not in the code, no, in the documentation. Bitch, this is the ~most~ only documented project in the whole company!

#5 days left.

It's disgusting how a package like compress-commons can have 1.3 million weekly downloads yet no documentation whatsoever and not even any relevant comments in the code. Honestly fuck the javascript ecosystem

Tfw you are forced to work with vendors with bloated code and horrible documentation

Taking advice from devRant and just working on some documentation for hacktoberfest. Well until I can find a project that I want to add code to

What you're about to read is an horror story based on real facts.
Our story begins one week ago, when a dev who calls himself "Arfmann" (what a loser, the f* means arfmann?) decided to take his dev skills to another level.

He always has been scared of databases. He made really bad dream about them. Like, they were screaming at him "SELECT useUs FROM database" while he was crying in some shared preferences noises.

A week ago, he decided to overcome his fear. He learned the basics of SQL. Everything was going well. Until, he decided to implement it on Flutter. A Google's technology.

At first, he decided to appeal to documentation. Went on Flutter web site. Flutter documentation. Sqflite documentation. Started reading. Started doing tests with the code written by Google's engineer.

Everything was fucked up. Dozens of errors, the documentation started to blow up and his PC went on fire, due to Android Studio.

He used a sample project made by Google's engineer. "Maybe if use directly their code it will work. Maybe I was the problem". He wasn't.

The whole documentation was wrong, every single line of code was a spaghetti code (yes, every single line was an entire spaghetti code). Everything was put in the main. If you wanted to try to keep things organized, you would end up punched and beaten up from the code itself. It would become a sentient entity that will beat you the fuck up.

Really scary.

Documentation? That's the stuff of dreams for us.

Instead we have ancient code written by people who have long left / forgotten with no idea what the cryptic mess they left behind does.

How do we feel about documentation?

Fucking lies, lies and more lies.

If you are not going to keep it accurate don’t even fucking write it down you goddamn morons!

I would rather look at the source code then be led down the garden path by your fucking lies.

Technical debt.... so much technical debt it’s driving me crazy!

It’s not only that there’s commented out lines in abundance, methods and whole classes not used anywhere anymore in a decade and code using not only deprecated standard library functions, but some that have been REMOVED in earlier versions of the language (have no idea how those have even stayed functional...), and documentation that has very little to do with the reality... but today, I submitted a pr to fix the documentation for setting up dev env - which was outdated already when I started a few years ago!

I know we are understaffed and busy, but c’mon - it doesn’t take much to leave the code in a better place than when found...

If it weren't for poor documentation I'd be retired by now.

We didn't all write your library. In fact, only you did. So, some helpful documentation would really help us all out. Can't believe the number of times I need to read source code to figure out what the hell you are doing.

Just spent 2-3 hours working on code that's been functional for months, but suddenly stopped working bc an dependency I'd updated decided to change required input/output formats without any documentation whatsoever on those new requirements.

When you decide it's not worth of your time to go through lengthy code documentation and just run that stackoverflow snippet straight on production.. 🤠

Do you agree?

Junior: What are comments

Mid-level: Hah! My code is so clean, I don't NEED comments!

Senior: comments comments comments comments comments comments comments comments comments comments comments comments comme-...

I always stalk my code if it runs perfectly. I wonder that *Did I write this code?*

I don't know why they made so many algorithms, data structures and big O questions during interview, when all they wanted me to do was to maintain some legacy, tight coupled, spaghetti code with no architecture, documentation, tests nor any kind of engineering behind :/

There is a commercially sold ERP solution that has it's DB schema in excel and Other documentations in MS Word. And its not even properly structured, no schema diagrams, last updated for a 4 year old major release 😒😫.
I have to develop a custom module for it and that requires building an ActivexDLL Project in VB fucking 6 😭😭 .

VB6
Unstructured Documentation
Legacy code
Incomplete documentation
FML

Tell me if you want ss in comments.

Be me, get a consultant job, go to a supposedly great client that has fame of getting scouted by Google. (attn: I doubted all this shit before I started)

Learn the basics by a awesome mentor and trial/error stuff at the same time to get the hang of things, after that was done, I noticed there was no documentation whatsoever, code is spaghetti and your documentation, good luck!

Royal spaghetti, you can't make heads or tails of it, dev code in production, empty try/catch blocks, empty statements, if (true)... (incl. their core classes)

Keep in mind this is a multi milion dollar company...

Someone please understand my pain...

all documentation points to an Invalid auth token being code 400 (ignore the fact that this is a code in the JSON response and not HTTP)

Me: here iz credential. Plz send datas
API: haha fock off and die mate, then credentials you got there aren’t workin’
API: code 998 invalid auth token
Me: *speechless* so that’s why it took me longer than it did to find that error, because YOUR CODE WAS MISSING ALL MY CHECKS FOR CODE 400.

Why can’t people design apis properly.

1) Let me work with devs without me having to explain fundamentals of programming

2) Stop devs from copy pasting code from StackOverflow or any other project without actually understanding what it does

3) Get devs to actually read and understand project documentation FIRST before jumping into any programming work

Me: "Need help with build config problems, please help almighty documentation page!"

Docs Page: "Nah fam, I got 4 headers about problems with no text, a blank code example, and 2 error 404 pages."

And that's why I don't like build pipelines.

Yay, I inherited a project with no documentation that is soon to be out of the prototype phase in a tech stack where I have no experience. It is already sold to customers and they expect it soon.

There are so many bugs, never been code reviewed but the main functionality semi-works :(

Yea sure, I'd like to refactor your fucking 1000 loc spagetti code "module" with no documentation at all...

Worst documentation? Unreal Engine 4's documentation on editor customization (custom panels/windows and whatnot). It might have improved in the last two years, but the last time I made a custom editor there was almost zero documentation on the matter and on their Slate UI framework. The little documentation that existed was very vague and had awful examples.

I don't remember very well, but I think it took me close to two weeks to get something very basic working. I had to read a LOT of C++ code filled with generics and macros to figure everything out, but after I did I enjoyed a lot working with that stuff.

I just don't know how I was able to do that, working with UE4 was a pain the butt every. single. day. Runtime error on the gameplay code? Too bad, the whole editor will crash and then take ~40s to reopen. It was crash after crash, ~1min of compilation time for any little change to the code, so so so so much frustration.

I do miss a those times a bit though, because even though it was hard, it felt good to feel competent, to know something complex reasonably well to the point I could help people on forums. Today I always feel I don't know enough about the languages/frameworks I use. It's kinda depressing, it takes a huge toll on my self confidence. But whatever, let's keep going, one day I'll get there :)

No documentation, even if it's for personal private projects.

I still can't wrap my head around code I made 2 years ago...

Are you planning on entering politics?

Because your documentation is dishonest, doesn't mention side effects and is not meant to be read humans workout a law degree.
Your code on the other hand makes me question whether you try to troll us or whether you are actually unable to understand what you were supposed to do.

Trying to understand other people's code like:
- 6 README, in total 7 lines (that's all there is for documentation)
- 40% of code is commentary like (original code, not altered...)
// if(a = b)
// c = d; // this is not working

People who literally ask "How to I translate this code to this programming language/framework" without even attempting to read the documentation should burn in a fire.

Please don't tell me the mobile app is a priority when the whole IT infrastructure has been handled by fuckface interns who had not a single fuck to give about documentation or commenting their shitty code that strangely reminds me of a drunken Jenga game.

Taking over development of a system from some other guy who just straight up dropped it with zero documentation. The code looks like he wrote it after watching some getting started tutorial. There is no structure. Some methods and statements are just empty. And he spelt 'connection' three different ways in the same file.

God help me...

The pain of using third-party library with unclear documentation.

"Oh just read the code"

well it would've helped IF THE CODECLIMATE RATING ISN'T 0.4. D:

Last year I wrote a sudoku program which did solve easy sudokus but messed up on harder ones. I had got bored after a bit and forgot about it until today I thought I'd rewrite it using new stuff I've learned since and make it work properly.

So I opened it up and look and I'm like 'WHAT!?' because I don't understand what I wrote. After a bit I start to get the idea and see that it was kind of smart even if long and complicated.

If anything, it shows how much my documentation skills have improved.

Now I just have to work out how to redo it in a way I understand.

Just got upset with a coworker due to not understanding the code written, logic, lack of documentation, comments. Nothing!

Other coworker: But Dave, you added that feature last December. Remember?
Me: So what are we working on today?

Alright, fellow coders. If I am required to spend 6-8 hours documenting your steaming pile of shit, MAKE SURE IT FUCKING COMPILES SO I CAN CHECK THE FUNCTIONALITY AND GET SCREENSHOTS! IT IS ALMOST NOON! I DONT WANT TO STAY LATE! Bitches.

If you're a PM, don't complain about the lack of documentation if you only gave your developers 20% less time than they needed just to write the code.

I tend to understand more from reading others code than documentation.

There's no provisioning script. Code repo's there, but no configuration files. Missing folders that break the app. No documentation on what to install, what directories to create, NO instructions. Nothing. Just an empty Ubuntu vagrantbox and a git repo. Took the entire morning and then some, just to replicate the dev environment. Fuck

The CEO just made a huge huge push-over to the developers.

He doesn't have any customers/clients and wants us to push our limits to make a Service Oriented Architecture where legacy code is needed to be revived, no documentation, and a single motherfucking mobile developer who has 3 projects already in his 1st month of stay.

Don’t write documentation for other people, write it for yourself! It may all seem obvious today, but six weeks from now you’re not going to remember what you were thinking or why you wrote the code the way you did.

When I started this job 4 months ago, I was given a grace period of a week to "get into the groove of the code". I asked the lead dev where on pulse (intranet) the documentation was, he laughed and then resumed what he was doing. I shrugged it off and continued scrolling through the code.
A week later, working on a story, I'm stuck at why a particular function exists. I say "it would be nice if there was documentation, where is that anyway?". Lead dev replies, "one thing you should know about this company, there is no documentation unless it's API related".
Last month's retro, 80% of our (mine and lead dev) problems were related to a lack of kt, I laughed.

If you have any project (personal or not, doesn't matter) that does not have proper code comments and documentation and you don't want to make one because of the effort (maybe even "wasted" effort), think again. When commenting on a wall of code to say what it does, you may find a better way of doing what you have to do, possibly increasing performance, or improving security.

I have been able to do better input sanitization for a method on a personal project of mine because of this.
Don't use the amount of effort for proper documentation as an excuse not to make one.

Dr. Robert Ford is that dev who made himself indispensable to the organisation by deliberately not commenting his code. He operated under the notion of those senior developers that are the physical manifestation of the documentation gatekeeping the project

Wrote a set of beautiful Swift functions. Runs Xcode, nothing. Checks code...looks good...clean build, delete app, re-install, rebuild...nothing. Checks documentation, watches three videos, re-writes code...nothing. Stares at screen for an hour...realizes I never actually called the functions. Closes laptop, checks self into pysch ward.

I dont understand the Log4j vulnerability.

Isnt the ability to execute code a feature they added so that you can add dynamic data to the logs?

If it is a feature then isnt it written in the documentation?

Is the problem that a lot of companies forgot to sanitize the input before logging it?

Love writing comments, hate writing documentation.

Ugh, I know it is needed but just don't care about it as much as the code/comments which is a more direct 'here is what this does' approach. Writing idiot proof documentation sucks. Any little change? Have to remember to update the docs. Yeah, not happy.

So, I joined a hardware company as a software developer few months back. I'm working on a c++ code base with thousands of files and no idea what the code is supposed to do.

I got one overview of what the product is supposed to do, which contains mostly electrical engineering jargon that I have no clue about.

Now my manager wants me fix a bug in this code. I have no clue what the expected behaviour is and no documentation whatsoever, and literally no one in the entire country who understands the code.

So I've been writing code for 2 months to implement the GAN for a research paper that I'm writing, and I'm slowly becoming paranoid.

IN THEORY my idea should work. BUT WHAT IF there's some bug in my code that's preventing it from actually doing so. I'm tired of having to wait for days to see some minuscule training improvements...

I swear to god, I'll blame it on the documentation. >D

Does anyone find the laravel documentation just lacking? It seems like it the twitter feed of documentation leaving out very important information that leaves me banging my head for hours. I really like laravel and much better than working with raw php but I wish there was an option in the drop down for additional a more flushed out version with more code examples. I understand experts don't want to parse through tons of text just to find the correct artisan command but c'mon.

This is what I did today in 5 hours and 45 minutes. Documentation and optimized code inside. One method was kinda tricky but I managed to optimize it from 1,88s in the first lazy version to 35ms in the end. Now that's what I call a productive day

In freelance world,

Some Computer Science degree holder (from client company) explain how good are they in Software development.

But when as soon as my team and I (after got criticized by this guy for the fact that my team and I don't have a degree in computer science) review their code, the code is a bunch of spaghetti! No proper Architecture, no documentation, and everything in one class?

Damn...

For fuck sake why would you put in documentation some functionalities you did not even develop ?! How am I supposed to guess that my error comes from your code when event the fucking DOCSTRING of the method says the use case is handled ?
It's nice to have documentation and commented code, but could you please make it FUCKING coherent with what the code actually does ? I feel like I'm playing fucking riddles here !!

Reading 1 tutorial/ part of the documentation
Trying it on my own
Realize that your code doesn't work
Googling the problem
Fixing it
Repeat

I'll never understand how you could learn to code by reading the documentation and not by actually...idk...solving problems and coding? Especially if you're a beginner.

Can't decide between the guy that used gedit to code and the guy who wouldn't read the documentation.
Wait, that was the same guy!

16 Lines of code.
Nearly 600 words of documentation.

When you come back from work after filling up jira, talking with colleagues during too long stand ups and writing documentation it's time to finally sit down and write some pure code.

Starting a new side project and I am determined to do it right.

Just finished writing the features list and now I'm writing the documentation. Not written a single line of code not, nor even created a repository.

Why why why the fuck would you assign the same variable name at the start of a function to completely different data? These aren't params, but variables being assigned different things, no comments, no documentation, crucial in the operation, but assigned wildly different values with different behaviors through the code.

Sometimes, when the documentation of libraries of software is unclear, instead of asking the author and waiting for a reply, I browse through the source code to find out what the exact behavior is. It sometimes feels like I'm the only who does that.

Being handed an old system to maintain with scant documentation, and being expected to understand exactly how it works.. FFS It looks like a bunch of monkeys on acid got into the codebase 😣 I doubt even they knew what this fucking code does, and they wrote it!

Comments belong here on devRant, not in your code!

Code cleanly folks.

“Good code is its own best documentation. As you’re about to add a comment, ask yourself, ‘How can I improve the code so that this comment isn’t needed?'”
– Steve McConnell 

A project that is used across our company with multiple clients. It's huge, over 2million lines of code and 116 separate projects. Not a single piece of documentation. Took me three weeks to track down where the authentication occurred with visual debugging and mapping tools.

I *hate* it when a senior asks me to write a functional test report. Like I thought we hired functional testers to do that sort of stuff? I'm a programmer, I only write 3 things: code, documentation, and more code. Not freaking reports about how something did not work before, and after this 1-line fix does work. Oh and don't forget to include screenshots and a description of the issue. Arghhh

I wish the retard to who wrote these programs before me had the decency to write some documentation. Even a few lines of comments.

Been working through this refactoring project for about a month now. It physically hurts to keep going through this guy's old code.

*Working on code: 😋😃🥰

-

* Goes to todo list

-

* Item on the list: Documentation (1 month overdue)

-

Writes good code because "Good code is it's own documentation"

Ends up documenting someone else's code. :(

Spent seven hours reading source code at work yesterday. The little documentation I was able to find alternated between English and Spanish. And some of the things I saw... Straight out of a horror novel.

For example: NUMBER_2 * NUMBER_60 * NUMBER_60 * NUMBER_1000 to get the number of milliseconds in two hours.

Or this super contrived method which capped the registration age at 100, which now caps it at 102 anyways because they use hard coded values for the current year. Took me 15 minutes to find out what "fixYear" (this method) did.

No wonder I got home and crashed in bed till nearly midnight after that... I swear that was harder than a university Calc final...

Very useful!
It's not just about code but the whole package.
Watching great programmers fail miserably at project management, research, documentation, team leading and acting professional is just embarrassing, especially when they slate those who went out to educate themselves.

🎙️ Mic drop, I'm out!

I wanted to deploy the code of the project I'm working on on the test server to try something.

The code wasn't deployed because the automatic quality inspector detected some methods used are deprecated. So I check the documentation of the methods used. The method is a pass-by to avoid some errors launched by the automatic quality inspector.

So the quality inspector stopped my deployment because I used something that should stop the quality inspector provoking errors.

god dammit

Treat documentation as first class folks. DOCUMENTATION is important. And yes, code does does replace a good documentation. Code and documentation are not mutually exclusive.

You know your software's documentation sucks when it forces its users go snoop through the source code to find out how to set it up...

Dev: [does some weird code to make test pass]
Me: this won't work. Literally the documentation says what you did won't work once we move towards our end goal architecture.
Dev: [shows middle finger and requests merge and somehow managed to get code merged]
.... One Sprint later nothing works...
Dev: [does some weird code to make test pass]
Me: no. You need to solve underlying problem.
Dev: [shows middle finger and requests merge and somehow managed to get code merged]
.... One Sprint later nothing works...
Me: please stahp
Dev: [shows middle finger and requests merge and somehow managed to get code merged]
Me: WTF man do your fucking job
Scrum Master: stahp lowering our velocity
Me: wut? 😒

Reading documentation for 3rd party software... come across a code snippet which references a class. The class is spelt correctly in the comment but wrong in the code!

What??? Surely if you're going to get it wrong it would be the other way round :/

Is it me or most developers just write code so it compiles and passes tests?

No documentation, no standards, no "good practices", no"good design", no software principles, no performance analysis, nothing.

If not understanding code, read the documentation or debug the code. When trying to modify...
1. Follow proper indentation.
2. Don't make spelling mistakes and follow naming convention.
3. Don't try to write all the code in one line (based on line length set)
4. Simplify if else statements if possible.
5. If value of method call need to be used once, don't store it in a variable. Directly use where ever it is needed.
6. If there is duplicated code, put it in separate method and re-use it if possible.

Frameworks for Mobile Hybrid Apps.

So we are considering to migrate our native Android app to a Hybrid because the app almost entirely consists of webviews.

what do you think will be the best choice to try.
in terms of performance, documentation, community, ease of writing and maintaining code

Trial and error.

Taking an existing code base and playing with it to see what does what. Eventually learning enough to create basic programs. Eventually I wanted to make more complicated things so started reading documentation.

in class.
professor: "this course is much about learning to read documentation and searching the Internet for solutions. "
me at exam: *writing part of code I learnt from stackoverflow*
...professor failed me at the exam for not using what they taught us during the course.. 😕

Hey documentation providers! Some of us don't want to have to go to slow ass websites to look up everything about your code, system, library, api, etc. It also really sucks when trying to work on those systems without an internet connection. So, please provide offline documentation.

A special thank you to Python for providing help files with Python itself. This has been a life saver when working offline.

Also a special fuck you to Bethesda for not providing an offline version of the Creation Kit wiki. Everything else you do is nice, but please provide offline docs.

Books, tutorials, documentation and reading/understanding code; whether it's mine or not.

Finished a validation library and knowing the common excuse for not using code already written (devs come down with 'not invented here' syndrome) is "I would have used it, if there was documentation". Spent this week documenting each class/method, diagrams, scenario based code examples, sent to my boss for review ...

Boss: "Wow...this is fantastic. All our libraries should have this level of documentation. You even updated the project's Nuget package to include a link to the documentation. Devs won't have an excuse now. I'll clear your plate for the rest of the year so you can get started."

What the hell did I just do to myself? FML.

Communicated 50% more time than I actually estimate for a new feature because the management usually thinks it can be done faster than estimated.

Actually got that 150% approved so I have enough time to write some bad ass beautiful code with unit tests and documentation 😳

Seems like good things actually happen..

I have become the only thing I always hated in a developer. Building a project without a proper documentation.
As a solo developer in a company where I have to do database architecture, front-end, back-end, testing, NETWORKING (I am the most ignorant guy when it comes to networking), product design, there is no time for documentation.

But hey, I have structured the project, files and functions (with comment, parameters type and return type) properly and I understand what I've done even after 4-5 months without touching that specific project so I got that going for me which is nice... I guess.

Bugs are good in code. It shows that you're Human. You make mistakes. And you're willing to correct them.

But when they're someone else's bugs in a piece of code they didn't give a flying fuck about documentation, bugs can tick one off. The bigger the project, the better the documentation needs to be. And I'm not taking about java docs. Put proper comments in your code. Especially when it's not a personal project and you fully intend to leave the company.