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rant? rant!
I work for a company that develops a variety of software solutions for companies of varying sizes. The company has three people in charge, and small teams that each worked on a certain project. 9 months ago I joined the company as a junior developer, and coincidentally, we also started working on our biggest project so far - an online platform for buying groceries from a variety of vendors/merchants and having them be delivered to your doorstep on the same day (hadn't been done to this scale in Estonia yet). One of the people from management joined the team working on that. The company that ordered this is coincidentally being run by one of the richest men in Estonia. The platform included both the actual website for customers to use, a logistics system for routing between the merchants, the warehouse, and the customers, as well as a bunch of mobile apps for the couriers, warehouse personnel, etc. It was built on Node.js with Hapi (for the backend stuff), Angular 2 (for all the UIs, including the apps which are run through a WebView wrapper), and PostgreSQL (for the database). The deadline for the MVP we (read: the management) gave them, but we finished it in about 7 months in a team of five.
The hours were insane, from 10 AM to 10 PM if lucky. When we weren't lucky (which was half of the time, if not more), we had to work until anywhere from 12 PM to 3 AM, sometimes even the whole night. The weekends weren't any better, for the majority of the time we had to put in even more extra hours on the weekends. Luckily, we were paid extra for them, but the salary was no way near fair (the majority of the team earned about 1000€/mo after taxes in a country where junior developers usually earn 1500€/month). Also because of the short deadline given to us, we skipped all the important parts like writing tests, doing CI, code reviews, feature branching/PR's, etc. I tried pushing the team and the management to at least write tests and make feature branches/PRs, but the management always told me that there wasn't enough time to coordinate and work on all that, that we'll do that after launching the MVP, etc. We basically just wrote features, tested them by hand, and pushed into the "test" branch which would later get tested and merged into master.
During development, one of the other juniors managed to write the worst kind of Angular code you could imagine - enormous amounts of duplication, no reusable components (every view contained the everything used in the view, so popups and other parts that should logically be reusable were in every view separately), fuck - even the HTML was broken (the most memorable for me were the "table > tr > div > td" ones, but that's barely scratching the surface). He left a few months into the project, and we had to build upon his shit, ever so slightly trying to fix the shit he produced. This could have definitely been avoided if we did code reviews.
A month after launching the MVP for internal testing, the guy working on the logistics system had burned out and left the company (he's earning more than twice the salary he got here, happy for him, he is a great coder and an even better team player). This could have been avoided if this project had been planned better, but I can't really blame them, since it was the first project they had at this scale (even though they had given longer deadlines for projects way smaller than this).
After we finished and launched the MVP, the second guy from management joined, because he saw we needed extra help. Again I tried to push us into investing the time to write tests for the system (because at this point we had created an unstable cluster fuck of a codebase), but again to no avail. The same "no time, just test it manually for now, we'll do that later when we have time" bullshit from management.
Now, a few weeks ago, the third guy from management joined. He saw what a disaster our whole project was. Him joining was simply a blessing from the skies. He started off by writing migrations using sequelize. I talked to him about writing tests and everything, and he actually listened. He told me that I'm gonna be the one writing them, and also talked to the rest of management about it. I was overjoyed. I could actually hear the bitterness in the voices of the rest of management when they told me how to write the tests, what to test, etc. But I didn't give a flying rat's ass, I was hapi.
I was told to start off by writing a smoke test for the whole client flow using Puppeteer. I got even happier, since I was finally able to again learn new things (this stopped at about 4 or 5 months into the project).
I'm using jest as the framework and started writing the tests in TypeScript. Later I found a library called jest-extended, but it didn't have type defs, so I decided to write them and, for the first time in my life, contribute to the open source community.19 -
Me: Hans, Get ze Flammenwerfer!!!
Hans: Why?
Me: The fucker rejected my PR because "calling twice the same getter is a code duplication". I swear, he always tries to find something!3 -
The nightmare continues.
Currently dealing with a code review from a “principal” dev (one step above senior), who is unironically called a “legendary dev” by some coworkers. It’s painfully obvious he didn’t read the code, and just started complaining and nitpicking.
It’s full of requests to do things that make absolutely no sense, and would make the code an unmaintainable mess.
• Ex: moving the logic and data collection from the module’s many callers into the module instead of just passing in the data.
• Ex: hiding api endpoint declarations by placing them in the module itself, and using magic instance variables to pass data to it. Basically: using global functions and variables instead of explicit declarations and calls.
• Ex: moving the logic to determine which api endpoint to use, for all callers, into the view.
More comments about methods being “too complex” (barely holds water) right next to comments saying “why are these separate? merge them together!”
Incredulously asking how many times I’m checking permissions and how ridiculous it all is. (The answer? Twice.)
Conflating my “permissions” param and method names with a supposedly forthcoming permissions system overhaul, and saying I shouldn’t use permissions because my code will all have to get rewritten. Even if that were true, and it’s likely not, the ticket still needs to use the current permissions. I can’t just ignore them because they might be rewritten someday.
Requests to revert some code cleanup because the reviewer thought the previous heavily-nested and uncommented versions (with code duplication) were easier to read. Unsurprisingly, he wrote them.
On the same ticket, my boss wants me to remove all styling and clientside validation, debouncing, and error messages from a form. Says “success” and “connection failed” messages are good enough. The form in question sends SMS and email using arbitrary user input for addresses. He also says it shouldn’t be denounced on the server, and doesn’t want me to bother checking permissions. Hello, spam!
Related: the legendary dev reviewer says he can’t think of a reason why we would want to disable the feature for consumers, so I should remove the consumer feature flag.
You can’t make this stuff up.7 -
New job surprise: I will inherit a 900k lines of php code from a contractor dev shop. It is the company erp web app.
It has no version control, tests, architecture or configuration management of any kind.
There are just 1800 bug ridden files with almost no comments in a directory with lots of code duplication.
Also just learned that the contractor was paid a lot monthly for over 2 years for this monster.
I will need a raise quickly. At least management understands that I will need a couple of months to get a semblance of order in this madness.
And to you contractor I have your address and i'll try to restraint myself from vandalizing your house but I can't make any promises.
And fellow developers send help or beers or come and join me to teach this bastard a lesson.5 -
I think I've been doing too much Android programming in the last three days.
Had a lucid dream last night where I couldn't wake up until I figured out how to set up an inter-thread latch that would allow me to process through a shit ton of data points in parallel without duplication or skipping errors in the most efficient manner (effectively no blocking). We're talking several hundred lines of code. Slept 14 hours last night, I heard my alarm but didn't wake up. When I finally got up, I did what I did in my dream and it worked better than the existing code.
Turns out my brain is great at Java evaluation now, I guess.4 -
I AM IN RAGE !!! MY MANAGER IS A FUCKIN SNAKE ASSHOLE!
FUCKER RATED ME 3/5 !
i feel like destroying my laptop and putting my papers right away. this is absolute shit hole of a company where corporste bullshit and multi level hierarchy runs the system, ass licking is the norm and still me, a lowly sde dev 1 was giving my 200% covering their bullshit to deliver outputs on time.
let me tell you some stats.
- our app has grown by 2x installs and 5x mau.
- only 3 devs worked on the app. the other 2 can vouch for my competence.
- we were handled an app with ugliest possible code full of duplication, random bugs and sudden ANRs. we improved the app to a good level of working
- my manager/tl is such a crappy person that if asked about a feature out of random, he will reply "huh?" and will need 2 mins to tell anything about it.
- there is so much dependency with other teams and they want us to talk to them personally. like hell i care why backend is giving wrong responses. but i cared, i gpt so good handling all these shit that people would directly contact me instead of himal and i would contact them. all work was getting done coz 1 stupid fellow was spending 90% of his time in coordinations
- i don't even know how to work with incompetence. my focus is : to do my task, fix anything that is broken that will relate to my task in any way and gather all the stuff needed to complete my task
i am done. i cannot change this company because its name is good and i am already feeling guilty about switching my previous jobs in 1 year but this is painful.
in my first company i happily took a 10% hike coz i was out of college and still learning.
in my 2nd company, i left due to change in policies ( they went from wfh to wfo and they were in a different state) , but even while leaving they gave a nice 30% hike
in my current company idk wjat the no. 3 equates to , but its extremely frustrating knowing a QA who was so incompetent, he nearly costed us a DDOS got the same rating as me
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PS : GIVE ME TIPS ON HOW TO BE INCOMPETENT WITHOUT GETTING CAUGHT8 -
The lack of one (no thinking about long term design and issues) leading to poorly designed systems that crumble when it needs to be scaled and has massive bus factor and code duplication.1
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Eureka! I have done it! I have written a program that will replace 80% of programmers with an AI!
The approach is to use grammar identification with language heuristics to recognize solution patterns using multilayered neural networks. The code source uses trusted pattern samples that are scored by human programmers. The code is programmed using text duplication and placement from the trusted sources.
TLDR: Uses pattern matching to copy and paste from Stack Overflow.1 -
Just figured out "code map" and "code clones" on VS 2015 (don't ask me why I didn't know these features)
Thought I should try it on my newly created application for a client (+/- 1500 lines of code C#)
Came across 1 duplication, 0 unreferenced classes or members and no circular references
I'm just awesome -
As I started learning React, I found the allure of declarative style of programming appealing. I try to avoid maintaining multiple state variables for data that can be derived from the base state itself that's stored in the redux store. It works wonders when I have to change something; as I just need to make changes to one function in the utils folder and that change is implemented across the whole app, rather than change the instances everywhere as was the case when I initially started working on this project after the previous dev left.
But I see myself redefining a lot of computed values everywhere, and if I just try to define them in the root component, I'll end up with a huge list of props being passed to a couple of components. Shifting it to the utils folder helps a bit, but then I find myself defining even the simplest of array filtering methods to the utils folder.
Is this need to define computed values everywhere a trade-off that you need to accept when you write declarative code, or is there a workaround/solution I am missing? As of now, the code-base is much better than how it used to be when they had a literal Java dev work on React with their knowledge of Java patterns being used in a framework that is the polar opposite of OOP, but I still feel like there's room for improvement in this duplication of computed values.2 -
Sometimes people want to be too smart. If you want to consume a handful different restful API, it might make sense to abstract away some common functionality in your client implementation — yet to assume they follow the same convention in how their URI is built is borderline insane.
All I wanted to do was to change one API to a newer version, and now the implementation breaks for at least two other because it was done in an Abstract class and now I have to untangle that mess.
In some cases code duplication wouldn't be that bad. Even if an otherwise unrelated API seemingly share the same contract, still assume it has its own contract. You never know how those API evolve and I proclaim they will evolve towards breaking your assumptions.1 -
Rubber ducking your ass in a way, I figure things out as I rant and have to explain my reasoning or lack thereof every other sentence.
So lettuce harvest some more: I did not finish the linker as I initially planned, because I found a dumber way to solve the problem. I'm storing programs as bytecode chunks broken up into segment trees, and this is how we get namespaces, as each segment and value is labeled -- you can very well think of it as a file structure.
Each file proper, that is, every path you pass to the compiler, has it's own segment tree that results from breaking down the code within. We call this a clan, because it's a family of data, structures and procedures. It's a bit stupid not to call it "class", but that would imply each file can have only one class, which is generally good style but still technically not the case, hence the deliberate use of another word.
Anyway, because every clan is already represented as a tree, we can easily have two or more coexist by just parenting them as-is to a common root, enabling the fetching of symbols from one clan to another. We then perform a cannonical walk of the unified tree, push instructions to an assembly queue, and flatten the segmented memory into a single pool onto which we write the assembler's output.
I didn't think this would work, but it does. So how?
The assembly queue uses a highly sophisticated crackhead abstraction of the CVYC clan, or said plainly, clairvoyant code of the "fucked if I thought this would be simple" family. Fundamentally, every element in the queue is -- recursively -- either a fixed value or a function pointer plus arguments. So every instruction takes the form (ins (arg[0],arg[N])) where the instruction and the arguments may themselves be either fixed or indirect fetches that must be solved but in the ~ F U T U R E ~
Thusly, the assembler must be made aware of the fact that it's wearing sunglasses indoors and high on cocaine, so that these pointers -- and the accompanying arguments -- can be solved. However, your hemorroids are great, and sitting may be painful for long, hard times to come, because to even try and do this kind of John Connor solving pinky promises that loop on themselves is slowly reducing my sanity.
But minor time travel paradoxes aside, this allows for all existing symbols to be fetched at the time of assembly no matter where exactly in memory they reside; even if the namespace is mutated, and so the symbol duplicated, we can still modify the original symbol at the time of duplication to re-route fetchers to it's new location. And so the madness begins.
Effectively, our code can see the future, and it is not pleased with your test results. But enough about you being a disappointment to an equally misconstructed institution -- we are vermin of science, now stand still while I smack you with this Bible.
But seriously now, what I'm trying to say is that linking is not required as a separate step as a result of all this unintelligible fuckery; all the information required to access a file is the segment tree itself, so linking is appending trees to a new root, and a tree written to disk is essentially a linkable object file.
Mission accomplished... ? Perhaps.
This very much closes the chapter on *virtual* programs, that is, anything running on the VM. We're still lacking translation to native code, and that's an entirely different topic. Luckily, the language is pretty fucking close to assembler, so the translation may actually not be all that complicated.
But that is a story for another day, kids.
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wasting time trying to write good code and minimize duplication , but it probably won't work and there are no working examples
duplicate code and do the stupid thing, which will work, with extra dumbass boilerplate code to convert between swagger2 & 3 schema
fuck you swagger code gen
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