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Search - "code improvement"
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Developer (master's degree, -bleeping- smart guy, no kidding) was bragging on how he made a piece of code 3x faster (with the usual pinch that the original dev was incompetent) and spent nearly 6 weeks working on it (wrote his own parallel-foreach library because Microsoft's parallel library was "too slow").
I was the original dev and he didn't know I had my own performance counters where I broke down each stack (database access, network I/O, and the code logic).
Average time was around 5ms (yes milliseconds) and worst case was around 10 seconds. His '3x improvement' was based on the worst test case, which improved by about a second. Showed our boss my graph (laughed out loud, said 'WTF', other curse words) and the dev hasn't spoken to me in weeks (I say 'hi' in the hall and he keeps walking)
Take that master's degree and high IQ and shove it.17 -
I work at a small company that uses very outdated coding approaches for their solutions.
About a year ago I went through our main application to improve performance and found quite a few areas that I could tackle such as using a dictionary data structure in place of (many) foreach loops that required to pull out a single object.
That specific change yielded a lot of improvement (you can only imagine) and the other developers wanted to learn the ways of dictionaries (because it was so revolutionary and new to them). I showed them many examples so that they could better understand this data structure.
Fast forward to a few months later, saw one of my coworker's code and noticed that they were using a dictionary... And iterating through each kvp similar to a foreach..... Wtf?!
P.S. that person's salary is much higher than mine :(
First time rant. Thanks for listening!10 -
Look at this! I finally succeeded in running C code on my shitty TI-83 calculator with a Z80 CPU. This is a huge improvement as I made whole games for that thing with assembly before! 😁😍20
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Bittersweet moment today, the interns last day was today, the improvements they made over the last 4 months, putting up with my “Gordon Ramsey” style attitude... definitely goes down in the books as one of best groups of freshman interns. They all truly thanked me for what they learned I sat them down and did a code review with them... but fooled them and showed them code they wrote 4 months ago.. they totally forgot about.. and couldn’t believe it was their own code.. that’s the level professionalism and improvement they made writing embedded software in 4 months.. they can’t wait to for next summer, neither can I.
Even had some of the electrical interns asking our department manager if they could switch to more software focused during their next rotation. Just so they can be under me.
I may be hard and a dick at time... but they learn! And it says a lot when you have college students impacted enough and see other students benefit so much that the “outsiders” wanna switch majors or focuses.!2 -
My code review nightmare part 3
Performed a review on/against a workplace 'nemesis'. I didn't follow the department standards document (cause I could care less about spacing, sorted usings, etc) and identified over 80 bugs, logic errors, n+1 patterns, memory leaks (yes, even in .net devs can cause em'), and general bad behavior (ex.'eating' exceptions that should be handled or at least logged)
Because 'Jeff' was considered a golden child (that's another long TL;DR), his boss and others took a major offense and demanded I justify my review, item by item.
About 2 hours into the meeting, our department mgr realized embarrassing Jeff any further wasn't doing anyone any good and decided to take matters into his own hands. Thinking 'well, its about time he did his job', I go back to my desk. About an hour later..
Mgr: "I need you in the conference room, RIGHT NOW!"
<oh crap>
Mgr: "I spoke to Jeff and I think I know what the problem is. Did you ever train him on any of the problems you identified in the review?"
Me: "Um, no. Why would I?"
Mgr: "Ha!..I was right. So lets agree the problems are partially your fault, OK?"
Me: "Finding the bugs in his code is somehow my fault?"
Mgr: "Yes! For example, the n+1 problem in using the WCF service, you never trained him on how to use the service. You wrote the service, correct?"
Me: "Yes, but it's not my job to teach him how to write C#. I documented the process and have examples in the document to avoid n+1. All he had to do was copy/paste."
Mgr: "But you never sat with Jeff and talked to him like a human being? You sit over there in your silo and are oblivious to the problems you cause. This ends today!"
Me: "What the...I have no idea what you are talking about. What in the world did Jeff tell you?"
Mgr: "He told me enough and I'm putting an end to it. I want a compressive training class developed on how to use your service. I'll give you a month to get your act together and properly train these developers."
3 days later, I submit the power-point presentation and accompanying docs. It was only one WCF with a handful of methods. Mgr approved the training, etc..etc. execute the 'training', and Jeff submits a code review a couple of weeks later. From over 80 issues to around 50. The poop hits the fan again.
Mgr: "What's your problem? When are you going to take your responsibility seriously?"
Me: "Its pretty clear I don't have the problem. All the review items were also verified by other devs. Its not me trying to be an asshole."
Mgr: "Enough with the excuses. If you think you can do a better job *you* make the code changes and submit them for Jeff for review. No More Excuses!"
Couple of days later, I make the changes, submit them for review, and Jeff really couldn't say too much other than "I don't see this as an improvement"
TL;DR, I had been tracking the errors generated by the site due to the bugs prior to my changes. After deployment, # of errors went from thousands per hour to maybe hundreds per day (that's another story) and the site saw significant performance increases, fewer customer complaints, etc..etc.
At a company event, the department VP hands out special recognition awards:
VP: "This award is especially well earned. Not only does this individual exemplify the company's focus on teamwork, he also went above and beyond the call of duty to serve our customers. Jeff, come on up and get this well deserved award."19 -
So we had a dev on our team who was on a performance improvement plan, wasn't going to pass it, but decided to quit before it was over saving us 2 weeks.
I was ecstatic when he left (caused us hell). I knew updating his code wouldn't be great, but he was only here 6 months
"how bad could it be" - practiseSafeHex - moron, idiot, suicidal.
A little run down would be:
- Despite the fact that we use Angular 2+, one of his apps is Angular 1 ... Nobody on the team has ever used Angular 1.
- According to his package.json he seems to require both mongoDb and Cloudant (couchDb).
- Opened up a config file (in plaintext) to find all the API keys and tokens.
- Had to rename all the projects (micro services) because they are all following a different style of camelcase and it was upsetting my soul.
- All the projects have a "src" folder for ... you know ... the source code, except sometimes we've decided to not use it for you know, reasons.
- Indentation is a mess.
- He has ... its like ... ok I don't even know wtf that is suppose to be.
- Curly braces follow a different pattern depending on the file you open. Sometimes even what function you look at.
- The only comments, are ones that are not needed. For example 30+ lines of business logic and model manipulation ... no comment. But thank god we have a comment over `Fs.readFile(...)` saying /* Read the config file */. Praise Jesus for that one, would have taken me all week to figure that out.
Managers have been asking me how long the "clean up" will take. They've been pushing me towards doing as little as possible and just starting the new features on top of this ... this "code".
The answer will be ... no ... its getting deleted, any machine its ever been on is getting burned, and any mention of it will be grounds for death.6 -
I just came across some code I wrote a year ago that I don't entirely hate.
I'm legitimately a bit worried.2 -
Working really hard, finishing tasks, upgrading servers. Cancel some useless meetings to finish up features, working till 2am to get a database migration working. Half of the platform is transformed, both customers and team are very happy about their accomplishments.
Boss: "OK, I think we're on the right path with these changes, but productivity and morale is honestly disappointing. Are you guys sleeping enough? You all look very tired and unmotivated!"
Attend all meetings, call boss at 7am to discuss random purchases like a whiteboard, run around the office holding a (broken, lol) MacBook, looking very busy & slightly worried. I shout random things at people across the office like "Nice work Gary!" and "Damn, you are on a roll Angela!". I initiate smalltalk with department heads, only to immediately disrupt the conversation by checking my phone saying "Oh I really have to take this one" (empty battery, lol). No one writes a single line of code for four weeks, and nothing new has been deployed by the whole team.
Boss: "I think it's commendable how productive the team has become this month. You guys are all so active and involved. A real improvement!"6 -
Been reviewing ALOT of client code and supplier’s lately. I just want to sit in the corner and cry.
Somewhere along the line the education system has failed a generation of software engineers.
I am an embedded c programmer, so I’m pretty low level but I have worked up and down and across the abstractions in the industry. The high level guys I think don’t make these same mistakes due to the stuff they learn in CS courses regarding OOD.. in reference how to properly architect software in a modular way.
I think it may be that too often the embedded software is written by EEs and not CEs, and due to their curriculum they lack good software architecture design.
Too often I will see huge functions with large blocks of copy pasted code with only difference being a variable name. All stuff that can be turned into tables and iterated thru so the function can be less than 20 lines long in the end which is like a 200% improvement when the function started out as 2000 lines because they decided to hard code everything and not let the code and processor do what it’s good at.
Arguments of performance are moot at this point, I’m well aware of constraints and this is not one of them that is affected.
The problem I have is the trying to take their code in and understand what’s its trying todo, and todo that you must scan up and down HUGE sections of the code, even 10k+ of line in one file because their design was not to even use multiple files!
Does their code function yes .. does it work? Yes.. the problem is readability, maintainability. Completely non existent.
I see it soo often I almost begin to second guess my self and think .. am I the crazy one here? No. And it’s not their fault, it’s the education system. They weren’t taught it so they think this is just what programmers do.. hugely mundane copy paste of words and change a little things here and there and done. NO actual software engineers architecture systems and write code in a way so they do it in the most laziest, way possible. Not how these folks do it.. it’s like all they know are if statements and switch statements and everything else is unneeded.. fuck structures and shit just hard code it all... explicitly write everything let’s not be smart about anything.
I know I’ve said it before but with covid and winning so much more buisness did to competition going under I never got around to doing my YouTube channel and web series of how I believe software should be taught across the board.. it’s more than just syntax it’s a way of thinking.. a specific way of architecting any software embedded or high level.
Anyway rant off had to get that off my chest, literally want to sit in the corner and cry this weekend at the horrible code I’m reviewing and it just constantly keeps happening. Over and over and over. The more people I bring on or acquire projects it’s like fuck me wtf is this shit!!! Take some pride in the code you write!16 -
A nice word to all developers who say stuff like "I know I write bad code, but what does it matter.":
Please try to think in a logical way about what this part you are about to write has to do. It is much more difficult to rewrite code, the longer you wait after you started to code.
Bad code can have big impacts on different levels.
For example financially: Bad coding style or program structure can lead to thousands or much more in losses because of nasty bugs, bad performance, expandability or maintainability.
Think about quality over quantity.
A little example: I had to work together with other coders to meet a fucking tight deadline. The last day we coded like crazy and these dudes started to apply styling changes (CSS) directly as inline styles to the HTML code, instead of taking a few minutes more to find where in the CSS files they had to make the changes.
At the end of the deadline we had more stylingbugs than before. It took us another whopping 3 hours to fix what they had done.
So next time you code: Thinking before coding is mostly faster than just straightahead coding and fixing at the end. 😉2 -
I spent an hour arguing with the CTO, pushing for having all our new products' data in the database (wow) with an API I could hit to fetch said data (wow) prior to displaying it on our order page.
He never actually agreed with me, but he finally acquiesced and wrote the migrations, API, and entered my (rather contrived) placeholder data. (I've been waiting on the boss for details and copy for three days.)
Anyway, it's now live on QA. but. I don't know where QA is for this app, and it's been long enough that i'm kind of afraid to ask.
Does that sound strange?
well.
We have seven (nine?) live applications (three of which share a database), and none of their repos match their URLs, nor even their Heroku app names. (In some of these Heroku names, "db" is short for the app's namesake, while in the rest it's short for "database").
So, I honestly have no idea where "dbappdev" points to, and I don't have access to the DNS records to check. -.-
What's more: I opened "dbappdev" on Heroku and tested out his new API -- lo and behold! it returns nada. Not a single byte. (Given his history I expected a 500, so this is an improvement, I think. Still totally useless, however.)
And furthermore: he didn't push the code to github, so I cannot test (or fix) it locally.
just. UGH.
every day with this guy, i swear.16 -
How devrant changes me #1:
I'm a little bit more active on devrant since about a week. Improvement so far:
1. I spent only 20% of the time on Facebook i usually do
2. I really enjoy the nice community
3. I even more enjoy that i notice there are more "dudes like me" :D i mean.. I'm tired of telling my "normal" friends how happy i am because i wrote some awesome code and just get a "eeeh.. Nice." back because they dont understand and often dont even try to understand whats so special for me.
4. Even if my english is still kinda bad, i notice that i get better with every rant i post. I mean.. That post cost me about 3 min. I swear 7 days ago it would have cost me minimum 7 minutes to get this lines down :)
Thanks devrant :)5 -
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.2
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Found out a senior dev threw me under the bus for a mistake I made while coding and it affected my raise. Not only was I never initially informed of the mistake, I was never told what went wrong and why it needed fixing. We also don't implement code reviews or anything of the sort. Seems like a great avenue for improvement and growth, right? 😑5
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So a few days ago I shared about the conflict with my colleague on learning React. Today I was let go. Obviously I asked why they would do that and they said they feel the problem isn't even my React knowledge but the fact I don't grasp the fundamentals of OO programming.
Thing is in these 3 months there has not been a single code review. They are either going of what my lying colleague told them (they claimed he was excluded from giving feedback), or the consultants who were hired to help us. And yes, I got feedback I should improve but at the same time the assurance so long as I show improvement it'd be fine. And I was told they could see improvement. So I'm not sure what changed but suddenly there is no budget to keep me on. In any case it feels like shitty corporate bullshit.
But I can't say they are wrong. I struggle to explain simple concepts I know in words. I've worked a series of bad jobs where nobody cared how you did stuff as long as it got done. I feel I'm so behind now and so affected by bad knowledge it's even harder to fix than to learn the first time. So I'm wondering how to fix this.
I'm really gutted too because I loved this company. I was finally getting a fair wage instead of being underpaid. The people were excellent. I felt I could finally relax and feel safe at work. And now I feel betrayed. Which for someone with self esteem issues is very hard. Can't trust in myself and can't trust in others.
I'm gonna try and pick myself up in the morning, but today I feel totally shit. This wasn't how I'd expected things to go. I thought my manager had intended to talk conflicts over but instead I get the boot. And the advice to stop overselling myself. Real useful that. Like it is on me that they hired me despite my subpar interview because my CV looked good. It's a shitty excuse. In any case they're now stuck with a dev that walks out of work, throws false accusations about colleagues, and another person warned me about to not engage because nothing good ever came from it. He's gonna keep over engineering everything and make up for all the time he wastes outside of work creating a dysfunctional environment for everyone. But yeah, easier to fire the new person who does her best despite the odds. And who cautioned against over engineering because we kept missing deadlines. And who believes in refactoring when it is needed because that's how agile works. Yeah better keep someone who has no sense of work life balance and makes others miserable then claiming he's being driven out by your ignorance. And of course the consultants who throw your own people under the bus. Can't get rid of those now.7 -
Last week our department drama queen was showing off Visual Studio’s ability to create a visual code map.
He focused on one “ball of mud”, vilifying the number of references, naming, etc and bragging he’s been cleaning up the code. Typical “Oooohhh…this code is such a mess…good thing I’m fixing it all..” nonsense. Drama queen forgot I wrote that ‘ball of mud’
Me: “So, what exactly are you changing?”
DK: “Everything. It’s a mess”
Me: “OK, are any of the references changing? What exactly is the improvement?”
DK: “There are methods that accept Lists. They should take IEnumerables.”
Me: “How is that an improvement?”
<in a somewhat condescending tone>
DK: “Uh…testability. Took me almost two weeks to make all the changes. It was a lot of work, but now the code is at least readable now.”
Me: “Did you write any tests?”
DK: “Um…no…I have no idea what uses these projects.”
Me: “Yes you do, you showed me map.”
DK: “Yes, but I don’t know how they are being used. All the map shows are the dependencies.”
Me: “Do you know where the changes are being deployed?”
DK: “I suppose the support team knows. Not really our problem.”
Me: “You’re kinda right. It’s not anyone’s problem.”
DK: “Wha…huh…what do you mean?”
Me: “That code has been depreciated ever since the business process changed over 4 years ago.”
DK: “Nooo…are you sure? The references were everywhere.”
Me: “Not according to your map. Looks like just one solution. It can be deleted, let me do that real quick”
<I delete the solution+code from source control>
Me: “Man, sorry you wasted all that time.”
I could tell he was kinda’ pissed and I wasn’t really sorry. :)2 -
The one that made me quit was when I was told I had to drive to the data centre and do a backup every day over the bank holiday weekend with no extra pay or time off. For no reason. And yes I know I'm an idiot for doing it but whatever.
The one that made me walk out, a month and a half later, was when I came in on Monday morning to discover that my boss had entirely rewritten the code I had spent literal months on in one weekend. Naturally he'd broken it and said it was an improvement.2 -
Oh man. I have been waiting for this one. Gather round lil' chil'rens it's story time.
So. I was looking for a new project because my old one was wrapping up and that's what my company does. So I was offered some simulation type stuff. I was like "sure why not, I want to make a computer pretend it isn't a computer no more." Side note I should not be a psychiatrist.
So, prior to coming on to this job I felt stifled by my old job's process. This job was a smaller team so I thought the process would be a little smoother. But it turned out they had NO process. Like they had a bug tracking system and they held the meeting to add things to the system, but that was just fucking lip service to a process.
First of all, they used the local disk on the test box as their version control. and had no real scheme as to how they organized it. We had a CM tool but gods forbid they ever fucking use it. I would be handed problem reports and interface change requests, write a bug to track it, go into the code and about 75% of the time or more it had already been worked. However, there was no record of it being worked and I would have to fucking hunt that shit down in a terribly shitty baseline (standardize your gods damned indentation for fuck's sake) and half the time only found out it was done because when I finally located the piece of code that needed changing, the work was already done.
Then, on top of all that, they ask me what time I want to come in. I said 10am, they said okay. One day I roll in at 10 and my boss is mad. Because I missed a meeting. That was at 9. That I wasn't told about. He says I can keep coming in at 10am though (I asked and volunteered to help get him up to speed on the things I was working he said it wasn't necessary) so I did, but every time I missed a 9am meeting he would get pissed. I'm like PICK ONE!!! They move the meeting to 9:30am (which is not 10am).
This shit starts affecting my health negatively. Stress is apt to do that. It triggered an anxiety relapse that pushed me back in to therapy for the first time in 7 years. On top of that the air quality in the office is so bad that I am getting back to back sinus infections and I get put on heavy antibiotics that tear up my stomach along with the stress and new meds tearing up my stomach. So one day as I am laid out in pain, I call out sick. Two days in a row. (Such a heinous crime right.) Well I missed a test event, that I wasn't even the primary or secondary on.
So fast forward to the most pissed off I have ever been. I get called in to a meeting with my boss's boss. As it turns out, my coworkers are not satisfied by the work that I'm doing (funny because I thought I was doing pretty good given that my only direction was fix the interface change reports and problem reports. And there was no priority assigned to any of them).
And rather than tell me any of this, they go behind my back to the boss and boss's boss. They tell me I need to communicate (which I did) and ask for help when I need it (I never did). That I missed an important event (that I played no part in and gods forbid I be sick) and that it seemed like I didn't want to be there (I didn't but who WANTS to work a corporate job).
They put me on a performance improvement plan and I jumped to another project. I am much happier now. Old coworkers won't even say hi, not even those I was friendly with, but fuck them anyway.5 -
Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Here is another.
Early into our eCommerce venture, we experienced the normal growing pains.
Part of the learning process was realizing in web development, you should only access data resources on an as-needed basis.
One business object on it's creation would populate db lookups, initialize business rule engines (calling the db), etc.
Initially, this design was fine, no one noticed anything until business started to grow and started to cause problems in other systems (classic scaling problems)
VP wanted a review of the code and recommendations before throwing hardware at the problem (which they already started to do).
Over a month, I started making some aggressive changes by streamlining SQL, moving initialization, and refactoring like a mad man.
Over all page loads were not really affected, but the back-end resources were almost back to pre-eCommerce levels.
The main web developer at the time was not amused and fought my changes as much as she could.
Couple months later the CEO was speaking to everyone about his experience at a trade show when another CEO was complementing him on the changes to our web site.
The site was must faster, pages loaded without any glitches, checkout actually worked the first time, etc.
CEO wanted to thank everyone involved etc..and so on.
About a week later the VP handed out 'Thank You' certificates for the entire web team (only 4 at the time, I was on another team). I was noticeably excluded (not that I cared about a stupid piece of paper, but they also got a pizza lunch...I was much more pissed about that). My boss went to find out what was going on.
MyBoss: "Well, turned out 'Sally' did make all the web site performance improvements."
Me: "Where have you been the past 3 months? 'Sally' is the one who fought all my improvements. All my improvements are still in the production code."
MyBoss: "I'm just the messenger. What would you like me to do? I can buy you a pizza if you want. The team already reviewed the code and they are the ones who gave her the credit."
Me: "That's crap. My comments are all over that code base. I put my initials, date, what I did, why, and what was improved. I put the actual performance improvement numbers in the code!"
MyBoss: "Yea? Weird. That is what 'Tom' said why 'Sally' was put in for a promotion. For her due diligence for documenting the improvements."
Me:"What!? No. Look...lets look at the code"
Open up the file...there it was...*her* initials...the date, what changed, performance improvement numbers, etc.
WTF!
I opened version control and saw that she made one change, the day *after* the CEO thanked everyone and replaced my initials with hers.
She knew the other devs would only look at the current code to see who made the improvements (not bother to look at the code-differences)
MyBoss: "Wow...that's dirty. Best to move on and forget about it. Let them have their little party. Let us grown ups keeping doing the important things."8 -
git commit message that I hate:
1. "Adjustment"
2. "Improvement"
3. "Fix Bug"
4. "I commit it but there are bug in this code"
5. "Client request"
YOU KNOW BE MORE SPECIFIC ON YOUR COMMIT MESSAGE!!!9 -
Started a new job a month ago. I’m the only real frontend developer here. I come from a company with 10+. Now i’m working with a old ux guy. Mr. UX teached me the usage of a styleguide. This styleguide is a fucking mess. The legacy code is a fucking mess. They way of working, up for improvement.
I have a dream...4 -
TL;DR:
JuniorDev ignores every advice, writes bad code and complains about other people not working because he does not see their result because he looks at the wrong places.
Okay, so I am really fed up right now.
We have this Junior Dev, who is now with us for circa 8 months, so ca. a year less than me. Our first job for both of us.
He is mostly doing stuff nobody in the team cares about because he is doing his own projects.
But now there's a project where we need to work with him. He got a small part and did implement that. Then parts of the main project got changed and he included stuff which was not there anymore. It was like this for weeks until someone needed to tell him to fix it.
His code is a huge mess (confirmed by senior dev and all the other people working at the project).
Another colleague and me mostly did (mostly) pair programming the past 1-2 weeks because we were fixing and improving (adding functionality) libraries which we are going to use in the project. Furthermore we discussed the overall structure and each of us built some proof-of-concept applications to check if some techniques would work like we planned it.
So in short: We did a lot of preparation to have the project cleaner and faster done in the next few weeks/months and to have our code base updated for the future. Plus there were a few things about technical problems which we need to solve which was already done in that time.
Side note: All of this was done not in the repository of the main project but of side projects, test projects and libraries.
Now it seems that this idiot complained at another coworker (in our team but another project) that we were sitting there for 2 weeks, just talking and that we made no progress in the project as we did not really commit much to the repository.
Side note: My colleague and me are talking in another language when working together and nobody else joins, as we have the same mother tongue, but we switch to the team language as soon as somebody joins, so that other colleague did not even know what we were talking about the whole day.
So, we are nearly the same level experience wise (the other colleague I work with has just one year more professional experience than me) and his work is confirmed to be a mess, ugly and totally bad structured, also not documented. Whereas our code is, at least most of it, there is always space for improvement, clean, readable and re-useable (confirmed by senior and other team members as well).
And this idiot who could implement his (far smaller part) so fast because he does not care about structure or any style convention, pattern or anything complains about us not doing our work.
I just hope, that after this project, I don't have to work with him again soon.
He is also one of those people who think that they know everything because he studied computer science (as everybody in the team, by the way). So he listens to nothing anybody explains to him, not even the senior. You have to explain everything multiple times (which is fine in general) and at some points he just says that he understood, although you can clearly see that he didn't really understand but just wants to go on coding his stuff.
So you explain him stuff and also explain why something does not work or is not a good thing, he just says "yes, okay", changes something completely different and moves on like he used to.
How do you cope with something like this?6 -
So it's been a while since I've posted as my first few months at the new job have been amazing. But now I'm running into issues with a team member that I need to get off my chest.
So my new job is front end development in React. I'm brand new to it but I was promised time to learn on the job. On my first day the team member I'm now having a conflict with offered me help. He's the most experienced so I gladly took it.
But now several months in I've noticed his teaching style doesn't work for me. He'll go into long theoretical explanations whenever I ask a question and I get overwhelmed with info. And he gets frustrated with my inability to process all that, because he feels I waste his time. So frustrated that at one time he just walked out of work and drove home, which was really upsetting to everyone.
My direct manager and my mentor in the company (our software architect), as well as our scrum master (a consultant) are all aware of the conflict. I've been assigned another colleague to help me out. Things were going ok but he got sick so I had to turn back to the team member with the conflict for assistance. Of course frustrations arose again.
Now yesterday during our sprint planning meeting we had to say what we liked and didn't like about the past sprint. And I brought up I feel I need time for learning and that I don't know where to put that, since we don't have a task for it. I said I also felt past approaches weren't working out and that I'd like to take up the offer to go on training. I was trying to word it very neutral to not upset my colleagues, as they tried their best. But the colleague who I had previous conflicts with took it personal and accused me of not listening and that is why my code is awful. While all I've been doing is rely on his code to learn. Long story short it got very heated and direct manager and scrum master who were present had to shut it down.
I'm thinking of talking to my manager and mentor today. It really hurts when you're accused of maliciousness when all you did was try. I know my code isn't perfect. But I get no help in improving it beyond long winded explanations about theory. If I ask for practical help he says he won't write my code for me. Which isn't what I expect. When I say I followed his example he says I shouldn't copy. But two sentences later he says if I don't know what I am doing I should listen to him. It's really very confused and demotivating as a beginner, but he makes it about how I waste his time and ruin his job for him. I understand he tries his best and that it has to be hard when someone seemingly is as dumb as a bag of bricks. But my manager and mentor told me they support me as long as I continue to show improvement. So I asked for alternatives (training, time to study, or whatever I haven't thought of) and now I feel like the bad person. I'm already someone with crippling low self esteem, and I'm thrown into the deep end. It kinda sucks when someone then tells you from the sideline you can't swim and how swimming works. How about tossing me one of those floaty things and then maybe accept I need to hold on to that for a bit and my technique will need work until I can make it on my own? :(2 -
I was out sick the day an urgent ETL job I was building would be due, so it got reassigned. When I return, I find most of my code commented out and replaced.
The first step was rewritten, with a comment that reads "Made changes to run faster." What used to be a single execution lasting 30 seconds was now a 4 step process taking 5 minutes, and yielding identical results.
Being a one-time execution (not a recurring job), I'm left wondering why they thought execution speed was even an issue, let alone what about their redesign they felt was an improvement...2 -
[Half question / half rant]
Would you rather work with a laid-back, humorous colleague who produces shit code and won’t understand advice for improvement?
Or would you rather work with someone who’s more serious, even slightly boring, but who takes quality seriously and is open to advice?
Yes I’ve worked with both types. Hands down I prefer working with the latter. With the first dude I’ll have good conversations and a good laugh at his puns and jokes. But at the end of the day I’m pulling my hair trying to make sense of his code and spending a shitload of time reviewing his PRs just to make sure he’s not fucking things up even more.4 -
The whois service for the legacy top-level domain for Germany (.de) is one of the most fucked up things on the internet.
For years now they've restricted the whois service to notice you about their website information service (https://denic.de/en, you run a search and get information about the domain) which already cost you an unnecessary amount of time if you simply want to lookup something.
A while back they changed it so that you need to state whether you want to look it up fotr informative purposes or business purposes, then they changed it so that you need to supply a reason in a text box.
The new (GDPR) way is that you only get the connectivity status ("connect", "free") via whois and the nameservers on the website (without supplying a reason, which actually is an improvement). Everything this either is for executive authorities or the domain owner (by entering their mail address or zip code).
Germany - the land of "We can opt out of any standard because we can and since theaws changed we can also behave like dickbutts".
Adding the GDPR now only fed the trolls even more.7 -
Is anyone else get irritated while upgrading apps and seeing changelogs as:
1. minor improvements
2. performance boost
3. information not provided by the dev
4. repeating changelogs from the past few updates.
just tell me what minor improvement u fixed?
where performance is boost?
how can I trust if tomorrow you decide to add some malicious code.
I don't know but it really irritates me. Sometimes I don't even upgrade the app until they have something in the changelog.
Maybe because I am getting old now.8 -
Working with the Android SDK after about a decade of mostly avoiding ever having to do so directly...and fucking hell, nothing has changed.
It's still obtuse as fuck, you constantly have to provide contexts to operations which can't need them (there's only one fucking keyboard to close), and whilst they have added some new stuff which helps like Material, the APIs are just as mental, the setup just as elaborate and manual - and they don't seem to have deprecated anything along the way, so fifteen years of random software design decisions cohabit awkwardly together like the Bucket family.
I don't really mind Java, it's just long-winded C - but boy has it found its niche here. Your code is more boilerplate than not until you've written more than you'll mostly ever need to for an app.
At this point I'm just laughing when I come across another Stack Overflow solution for a trivial operation that involves writing an entire class. I would try Kotlin but this isn't a new project, and I'm not pissing another ingredient into this hot mess.
Alright, Android Studio is an improvement on Eclipse, but that's not really saying much.3 -
Just learnt perfectly what the below joke means:
'I wanted to improve the world, but they wouldn't give me the source code'
I really don't understand why the world is full of obsolete processes that people fight against daily when changing things ever so slightly could take the weight of the world off their shoulders. The same thing goes for my work, I work in finance, and we use a remote app built in Windows forms (not xaml or wpf, the original forms) and it's insecure, slow, buggy, and crashes whenever you press ESC (yes, really). Even worse, I've offered to rewrite their whole network for nothing, just the improvement to people's lives. And they say no! WELL FUCK YOU FOR BEING A PLAGUE ON THE FUCKING WORLD! Why do people insist on staying behind the times when the world could be such a beautiful place?!?3 -
This is so annoying, I had 9 diff. jobs the past 2 years and this is my 10th and if this doesn't change I might reconsider my options again.
I came to work at a company that pays me like a Junior and treats me as an intern. My 20yo "boss" who acts as a project owner/lead dev doesn't want to learn anything new and sees any improvement as a waste of money. The problem is he thinks hes a great programmer but he doesn't know shit. Im mainly working on the Laravel installation because "I claimed I know Laravel". And its absolute garbage. They haven't used a single Laravel features besides routes and everything else is vanilla PHP. They write for loops that loop through $_REQUEST to remove a single character. Write 100 deep nested ifs and they abuse Elasticsearch to the point ES crashes because the program is using 1000 deep multidimensional arrays. Its only a webshop...
Everytime I try to make a suggestion like making the master branch protected, doing code reviews etc etc I get shut down because they are autistic and don't want anything to change.9 -
Just got off a 10-day pip. I didn’t do anything differently and everyone said I showed a lot of improvement. I literally write like 3 lines of code in two weeks and closed six tickets.7
-
ideal sprint fallacy.
total days 10 , total hours(excluding breaks ) 8 hrs per day= 80 hrs per dev
code freeze day = day 8, testing+ fixing days : 8,9,10. release day : day 10
so ideal dev time = 7days/56 hr
meetings= - 1hr per day => 49 hrs per dev
- 1 day for planning i.e d1 . so dev time left . 6 days 42 hrs.
-----------
all good planning. now here comes the messups
1. last release took some time. so planning could not happen on d1. all devs are waiting. . devtime = 5 days 35 hrs.
2. during planning:
mgr: hey devx what's the status on task 1?
d: i integrated mock apis. if server has made the apis, i will test them .
mgr : server says the apis are done. whats your guestimate for the task completion?
d : max 1-2 hrs?
m : cool. i assign you 4 hrs for this. now what about task 2?
d : task told to me is done and working . however sub mgr mentioned that a new screen will be added. so that will take time
m : no we probably won't be taking the screen. what's your giestimate?
d : a few more testing on existing features. maybe 1-2 hrs ?
m: cool
another 4 hrs for u. what about task 3?
d : <same story>
m : cool. another 4 hrs for u. so a total of 12 hrs out of 35 hrs? you must be relaxed this sprint.
d : yeah i guess.
m cool.
-------
timelines.
d1: wasted i previous sprint
d2 : sprint planning
d3 : 3+ hrs of meetings, apis for task 1 weren't available sub manager randomly decided that yes we can add another screen but didn't discussed. updates on all 3 tasks : no change in status
d4 : same story. dev apis starts failing so testing comes to halt.
d5 : apis for task1 available . task 3 got additional improvement points from mgr out of random. some prod issue happens which takes 4+ hrs. update on tasks : some more work done on task 3, task 1 and 2 remains same.
d6 : task1 apis are different from mocks. additionally 2 apis start breaking and its come to know thatgrs did not explain the task properly. finally after another 3+ hrs of discussion , we come to some conclusions and resolutions
d7 : prod issue again comes. 4+ hrs goes into it . task 2 and 3 are discussed for new screen additiona that can easily take 2+ days to be created . we agree tot ake 1 and drop 2nd task's changes i finish task 2 new screens in 6 hrs , hoping that finally everything will be fine.
d8 : prod issue again comes, and changes are requested in task 2 and 3
day 9 build finally goes to tester
day 10 first few bugs come with approval for some tasks
day 11(day 1 of new sprint) final build with fixes is shared. new bugs (unrelated to tasks. basically new features disguised as bugs) are raised . we reject and release the build.
day 2 sprint planning
mgr : hey dev x, u had only 12 hrs of work in your plate. why did the build got delayed?
🥲🫡5 -
I decided to upgrade my intellij ultimate from 2019.3 to 2020.2 and I saw there is update button.
I clicked on it.
As I expected it didn’t work and it was 30 minutes waiting looking at progress bar going back and forth couple of times before I decided just to download latest version and drag and drop it to applications folder ( took me 5 minutes) - I use mac so it replaces all crap ( I think ).
I cleared the old cache that growed to 2 gigabytes leaving some configuration files.
Next as always crash on startup cause of incompatible plugins with long java stacktrace - at least I could click the close button or popup closed itself I can’t remember ( one version I remember this button couldn’t be clicked cause it was off the screen and you need to do some cheating to launch ide )
The font has changed and I see that it at least work a little faster - that is nice. Indexing is finally fixed after all those years - probably thanks to visual studio code intellisense pushing those lazy bastards to deal with this.
But the preloader on first logo disappears so I think they decided to remove it cause it’s so fast - no it loads the same time or maybe little longer when I launch it on my old macbook.
After that as always I looked at plugins to see if there’s something interesting, so to find ability to scroll over whole plugins I needed to click couple of times. I think they assume I remember all the nice plugins in their marketplace and I only type search.
Maybe I should be type of user who reads best 2020 plugins for your best ide crap articles filled with advertising or even waste more time to watch all of this great videos about ide ( are there any kind of this stuff ? )
After a few operations I unfortunately clicked apply instead of restart ide and it hanged up on uninstalling some plugin I’m no longer interested in for 5 minutes so I decided to use always working ‘kill -9’ from command line.
Launched again and this time success.
Fortunately indexing finished for this workspace and I can work.
I’m intellij ultimate subscriber for 7+ years and I see those craps are not changing from like forever.
What’s the point of automate something that you can’t regression test ?
I started thinking that now when most people are facebook wall scrolling zombies companies assume that when new software comes out everyone is installing it right away and if not they’re probably not our customers cause they’re dead.
What a surprise they have when I pay for another year I can only imagine ( to be fair probably they even don’t know who I am ).
Yeah for sure I am subscribed to newsletters and I have jetbrains as a start page cause I shit myself with money and have nothing better to do then be grupie ( is there corporate grupies already a big community? )
Well I am a guy who likes to spend some time when installing anything and especially software that is responsible for my main source of income and productivity speed up.
Anyway I decided to upgrade cause editing es7 and typescript got to be pain in the ass and I see it’s working fine now. I don’t know if I like the font but at least the editor it’s working the same or maybe faster then the original that is huge improvement as developers lose most of their time between keyboard and screen communication protocol.
I don’t write it to discourage intellij as it’s great independent ide that I love and support for such a long time but they should focus on code editor and developers efficiency not on things that doesn’t make sense.
Congratulations if you reached this point of this meaningless post.
Now I started thinking that maybe it’s working faster cause I removed 2 gigs of crap from it.
Well we’ll see.1 -
Recently installed SonarQube and its been amazing to see the level of code quality (or lack thereof)
Some projects have 30 to 60 days of technical debt and I found a few files with a cyclomatic complexity over 100. I’m still learning what the “good” numbers should be.
Yesterday, couple of devs were very proud they were going to start reducing the numbers, they started with one of my solutions that had 5 minutes of technical debt. Yes, 5 minutes.
DevA: “OMG…look at this…it has a cyclomatic complexity of 11…that’s terrible. I thought we were supposed to be professional developers.”
DevB: “And take a look at this, he used the double-slash instead of a triple slash for comments. How does any of code even compile?!”
Me: “Maybe we should tweak some of those SonarQube rules so they make more sense to our code base. We’re never going to use unicode, so all those string culture warnings should go away and code comment formatting? Who cares? Be happy we have comments. I think we should also focus on the bigger fish in that pond. The CRM project is one of the biggest and has a lot of improvement opportunities.”
DevB: “There you go again, don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions..ha ha”
DevA: “Yea, no kidding …hey…did you see the logger? OMG…the whole class is over 25 lines…we gotta split that up into smaller projects so it’s more manageable.”
It’s a good thing our revenue stream isn’t dependent on people getting work done.3 -
Well, I am not sure whether this is supposed to be about worst experience as a reviewER or a reviewEE so I'ma do both. First as a reviewer.
So, on my first project in this company, I introduced automated build scripting (read: suggested, was "volunteered" to do it, then had to bust my ads to get it done). Prior to this, our process was run the thing in Visual Studio a bunch of times (don't ask) and package the resulting files. Well, new requirements made this not sustainable.
So after many many meetings in which I assured my co-workers that the script wouldn't cock up and go sideways and format our server (HOW???) and showed them how to work it AND added all the features they requested. I finally send the script out for code review. Oh the joy. Questions like: "why did you implement this?" Came from the guy who told me to implement it. "Can you change the formatting?" I checked and no. "Why isn't this to the code standard?" Because the code standard doesn't include scripting languages.
And here is the piece that takes the whole piss soaked shitsicle pie "I don't understand why we're doing this in the first place. We have a build process already, why do we need a new one?" FUCKING REALLY?!?!? YOU WERE IN THE GODS DAMNED MEETING WHERE WE DECIDED TO DO THIS!!! SET OUT THE REQUIREMENTS!!! LITERALLY EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THIS SCRIPT YOU WERE THERE AND YOU'RE ASKING WHY WE'RE DOING IT NOW!?!?! Fucking hell. I forced it through anyway because I had the higher ups all signed off on it, but seriously. Just because we're doing something new that slightly inconveniences you, doesn't mean it doesn't need to be done. Stop being afraid of change.
Side note: these people actually would regularly hold up process and product improvement because change is scary.2 -
I'm finishing up the most depressing client engagement ever. Ultimately it all traces back to their worthless Expert Beginner EA who thinks he's a genius but can't write code. I don't mean that he's not great at it. It's some of the worst I've ever seen by a person in his position.
In the time I have left here I could do so much to help them clean this stuff up so that future developers could ramp up more easily and there wouldn't be tons of duplicate code.
But I've just given up. You can't help someone who thinks their code is perfect. I don't even bother suggesting stuff any more (like don't have two methods in a class - a "real" one and one for unit testing) because he gets mad or just says that's his "pattern."
If I have a useful improvement, first he'll want me to put all new code in some new library, which is fine as an end result but you don't start with putting single-use code in a library separate from where you're using it. You work with it for a while to see what's useful, what's not, and make changes. But, you see, he just loves making more libraries and calling them "frameworks."
He tells me what he wants me to name classes, and they have nothing to do with what the classes do. When you haven't done any development yet you don't even know what classes you're going to create. You start with something but you refactor and rename. It takes a special breed of stupid to think that you start with a name.
I've even caught the dude taking classes I've committed and copying and pasting them into their own library - a library with one class.
The last time we had to figure out how to do something new I told everyone up front: Don't waste time trying to figure out how you want to solve the problem. Just ask the EA what he wants you to do. Because whatever you come up with, he's going to reject it and come up with something stupid that revolves around adding stuff to his genius framework. And whatever he says you're going to do. So just skip to that.
So that's the environment. We don't write software to meet requirements. We write it to add to the framework so that the EA can turn around and say how useful the framework is.
Except it's not. The overhead for new developers to learn how to navigate his copy-pasted code, tons of inheritance, dead methods, meaningless names, and useless wrappers around existing libraries is massive. Whatever you need to do you could do in a few hours without his framework. Or you can spend literally a month modifying his framework to do the same thing. And half the time his code collapses so that dozens of applications built on his framework go down at once.
I get frameworks. They can be useful, but only if they serve your needs, not the other way around.
I've spent months disciplining myself not to solve problems and not to use my skills.
Good luck to those of you who actually work there. I am deeply sad for the visa worker I'm handing this off to. He's a nice guy and smart. If he was stupid then he wouldn't mind dragging this anchor behind him like an ox pulling a plow. Knowing the difference just makes it harder. -
Existing code:
Logger class would block the caller, lock a mutex, call CreateFile(), write a single line to the file, unlock the mutex and return.
Improvement:
Added two logging queues and created a thread that will periodically lock one queue and write it to the disk, around 500 entries at a time, while new entries are being inserted into the other queue. Kinda like a bed pan or urine bottle. While emptying one bottle, the logs go into the other one. Added fatal exception handlers so that the log queues are dumped when the application is crashing. When the exception handler is triggered, logging method does not return so that the application STOPS working to make sure there are no "not logged" activities.7 -
For some reason I keep over engineering stuff to the point I spend 2 hours thinking the best way to do something. I'm making the backend for a project of mine and I wanted somewhat decent error handling and useful error responses. I won't go into detail here but let's say that in any other (oo) language it would be a no-brainer to do this with OOP inheritance, but Rust does OOP by composition (and there's no way to upcast traits and downcasting is hard). I ended up wasting so much time thinking of how to do something generic enough, easily extendable and that doesn't involve any boilerplate or repeated code with no success. What I didn't realize is that my API will not be public (in the sense that the API is not the service I offer), I'm the only one who needs to figure out why I got a 400 or a 403. There's no need to return a response stating exactly which field had a wrong value or exactly what resource had it's access denied to the user. I can just look at the error code, my documentation and the request I made to infer what caused the error. If that does not work I can always take a quick look at the source code of the server to see what went wrong. So In short I ended up thrashing all the refactoring I had done and stayed with my current solution for error-handling. I have found a few places that could use some improvement, but it's nothing compared to the whole revamp I was doing of the whole thing.
This is not the first time I over engineer stuff (and probably won't be the last). I think I do it in order to be future-proof. I make my code generic enough so in case any requirements change in the future I don't have to rewrite everything, but that adds no real value to my stuff since I'm always working solo, the projects aren't super big and a rewrite wouldn't take too long. In the end I just end up wasting time, sanity and keystrokes on stuff that will just slow down my development speed further down the road without generating any benefits.
Why am I like this? Oh well, I'm just glad I figured out this wasn't necessary before putting many hours of work into it. -
Never understood why people bloody love their code. It's good to be happy about it, but
beats the zest for refactoring or any other sort of improvement.
Took me an hour to explain a senior dev why his changes introduced bugs in build.
Literally landed to the point reverting his commit and demonstrating the damn build to work.
To which he replies what if the data is corrupt
Damn it's not the data, it's your bloody senses.2 -
The shit code I wrote before my cs degree is marginally better than the shit code I write now. The lack of of improvement is related to the shit job I got after my degree. Cs degree did teach me a lot of good oo concepts and design.... That I rarely use due to shit legacy code I maintain.1
-
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.2 -
As someone from the clothing/retail industry, I could never imagen a life within Tech.
I had a shop, it went very well. I had my ups and downs like most shop owners. Since the shop was on not on your typical shopping street, I had to make good relationships with my customers.
I enjoy talking to people, listen to peoples opinions, their day to day activities etc. After some years I really needed some much needed improvement to the administration and overall solutions. Checking around the internet I found some tools but expensive, or tools without those stuff I really needed.
As a can-do:er I am, I thought I would hook some tech people up and sell my idea, so they could make the product while I design it. They started build it, I watch. But they were busy all the time, no time to build something else. They taught me some code and suddenly, I was back at school learning to code.
And now, I'm a system developer. Really enjoying programming and the amazing world of technology. Even when I mostly talk to people over the web :')1 -
After a lot of work, the new factorization algorithm has a search space thats the factorial of (log(log(n))**2) from what it looks like.
But thats outerloop type stuff. Subgraph search (inner loop) doesn't appear to need to do any factor testing above about 97, so its all trivial factors for sequence analysis, but I haven't explored the parameter space for improvements.
It converts finding the factors of a semiprime into a sequence search on a modulus related to
OIS sequence A143975 a(n) = floor(n*(n+3)/3)
and returns a number m such that n=pq, m%p == 0||(p*i), but m%q != 0||(q*k)
where i and k are respective multiples of p and q.
This is similar in principal to earlier work where I discovered that if i = p/2, where n=p*q then
r = (abs(((((n)-(9**i)-9)+1))-((((9**i)-(n)-9)-2)))-n+1+1)
yielding a new number r that shared p as a factor with n, but is coprime with n for q, meaning you now had a third number that you could use, sharing only one non-trivial factor with n, that you could use to triangulate or suss out the factors of n.
The problem with that variation on modular exponentiation, as @hitko discovered,
was that if q was greater than about 3^p, the abs in the formula messes the whole thing up. He wrote an improvement but I didn't undertsand his code enough to use it at the time. The other thing was that you had to know p/2 beforehand to find r and I never did find a way to get at r without p/2
This doesn't have that problem, though I won't play stupid and pretend not to know that a search space of (log(log(n))**2)! isn't an enormous improvement over state of the art,
unless I'm misunderstanding.
I haven't posted the full details here, or sequence generation code, but when I'm more confident in what my eyes are seeing, and I've tested thoroughly to understand what I'm looking at, I'll post some code.
hitko's post I mentioned earlier is in this thread here:
https://devrant.com/rants/5632235/...2 -
Code review with some people is emotionally draining. How do you keep encouraging someone to get better without being a dick when the improvement isn't there?4
-
I had the idea that part of the problem of NN and ML research is we all use the same standard loss and nonlinear functions. In theory most NN architectures are universal aproximators. But theres a big gap between symbolic and numeric computation.
But some of our bigger leaps in improvement weren't just from new architectures, but entire new approaches to how data is transformed, and how we calculate loss, for example KL divergence.
And it occured to me all we really need is training/test/validation data and with the right approach we can let the system discover the architecture (been done before), but also the nonlinear and loss functions itself, and see what pops out the other side as a result.
If a network can instrument its own code as it were, maybe it'd find new and useful nonlinear functions and losses. Networks wouldn't just specificy a conv layer here, or a maxpool there, but derive implementations of these all on their own.
More importantly with a little pruning, we could even use successful examples for bootstrapping smaller more efficient algorithms, all within the graph itself, and use genetic algorithms to mix and match nodes at training time to discover what works or doesn't, or do training, testing, and validation in batches, to anneal a network in the correct direction.
By generating variations of successful nodes and graphs, and using substitution, we can use comparison to minimize error (for some measure of error over accuracy and precision), and select the best graph variations, without strictly having to do much point mutation within any given node, minimizing deleterious effects, sort of like how gene expression leads to unexpected but fitness-improving results for an entire organism, while point-mutations typically cause disease.
It might seem like this wouldn't work out the gate, just on the basis of intuition, but I think the benefit of working through node substitutions or entire subgraph substitution, is that we can check test/validation loss before training is even complete.
If we train a network to specify a known loss, we can even have that evaluate the networks themselves, and run variations on our network loss node to find better losses during training time, and at some point let nodes refer to these same loss calculation graphs, within themselves, switching between them dynamically..via variation and substitution.
I could even invision probabilistic lists of jump addresses, or mappings of value ranges to jump addresses, or having await() style opcodes on some nodes that upon being encountered, queue-up ticks from upstream nodes whose calculations the await()ed node relies on, to do things like emergent convolution.
I've written all the classes and started on the interpreter itself, just a few things that need fleshed out now.
Heres my shitty little partial sketch of the opcodes and ideas.
https://pastebin.com/5yDTaApS
I think I'll teach it to do convolution, color recognition, maybe try mnist, or teach it step by step how to do sequence masking and prediction, dunno yet.6 -
Curiosity killed the cat.. or was it Opportunity?! 🤔
You get to learn new stuff daily.
Not one assignment is the same, and if it's similar, you can hijack the old code, improve it & turn in the better version of it.. or don't improve..totally how you feel that day..if you're not a crappy developer no improvement should still also be ok..
I love mostly adjustable schedule, so there's no biggie of I have a day or two of coders block & can't produce much of value..I can switch tasks & do some simple ones on those days..or just refactor.. all's good..
I love solving puzzles, every bug is a new puzzle I can play with..
So basically, I love being a dev, because it's like being back in school, but only with the subjects you like! -
After learning a bit about alife I was able to write
another one. It took some false starts
to understand the problem, but afterward I was able to refactor the problem into a sort of alife that measured and carefully tweaked various variables in the simulator, as the algorithm
explored the paramater space. After a few hours of letting the thing run, it successfully returned a remainder of zero on 41.4% of semiprimes tested.
This is the bad boy right here:
tracks[14]
[15, 2731, 52, 144, 41.4]
As they say, "he ain't there yet, but he got the spirit."
A 'track' here is just a collection of critical values and a fitness score that was found given a few million runs. These variables are used as input to a factoring algorithm, attempting to factor
any number you give it. These parameters tune or configure the algorithm to try slightly different things. After some trial runs, the results are stored in the last entry in the list, and the whole process is repeated with slightly different numbers, ones that have been modified
and mutated so we can explore the space of possible parameters.
Naturally this is a bit of a hodgepodge, but the critical thing is that for each configuration of numbers representing a track (and its results), I chose the lowest fitness of three runs.
Meaning hypothetically theres room for improvement with a tweak of the core algorithm, or even modifications or mutations to the
track variables. I have no clue if this scales up to very large semiprime products, so that would be one of the next steps to test.
Fitness also doesn't account for return speed. Some of these may have a lower overall fitness, but might in fact have a lower basis
(the value of 'i' that needs to be found in order for the algorithm to return rem%a == 0) for correctly factoring a semiprime.
The key thing here is that because all the entries generated here are dependent on in an outer loop that specifies [i] must never be greater than a/4 (for whatever the lowest factor generated in this run is), we can potentially push down the value of i further with some modification.
The entire exercise took 2.1735 billion iterations (3-4 hours, wasn't paying attention) to find this particular configuration of variables for the current algorithm, but as before, I suspect I can probably push the fitness value (percentage of semiprimes covered) higher, either with a few
additional parameters, or a modification of the algorithm itself (with a necessary rerun to find another track of equivalent or greater fitness).
I'm starting to bump up to the limit of my resources, I keep hitting the ceiling in my RAD-style write->test->repeat development loop.
I'm primarily using the limited number of identities I know, my gut intuition, combine with looking at the numbers themselves, to deduce relationships as I improve these and other algorithms, instead of relying strictly on memorizing identities like most mathematicians do.
I'm thinking if I want to keep that rapid write->eval loop I'm gonna have to upgrade, or go to a server environment to keep things snappy.
I did find that "jiggling" the parameters after each trial helped to explore the parameter
space better, so I wrote some methods to do just that. But what I wouldn't mind doing
is taking this a bit of a step further, and writing some code to optimize the variables
of the jiggle method itself, by automating the observation of real-time track fitness,
and discarding those changes that lead to the system tending to find tracks with lower fitness.
I'd also like to break up the entire regime into a training vs test set, but for now
the results are pretty promising.
I knew if I kept researching I'd likely find extensions like this. Of course tested on
billions of semiprimes, instead of simply millions, or tested on very large semiprimes, the
effect might disappear, though the more i've tested, and the larger the numbers I've given it,
the more the effect has become prevalent.
Hitko suggested in the earlier thread, based on a simplification, that the original algorithm
was a tautology, but something told me for a change that I got one correct. Without that initial challenge I might have chalked this up to another false start instead of pushing through and making further breakthroughs.
I'd also like to thank all those who followed along, helped, or cheered on the madness:
In no particular order ,demolishun, scor, root, iiii, karlisk, netikras, fast-nop, hazarth, chonky-quiche, Midnight-shcode, nanobot, c0d4, jilano, kescherrant, electrineer, nomad,
vintprox, sariel, lensflare, jeeper.
The original write up for the ideas behind the concept can be found at:
https://devrant.com/rants/7650612/...
If I left your name out, you better speak up, theres only so many invitations to the orgy.
Firecode already says we're past max capacity!5 -
Am I the only one missing ``` // some code ``` backticks/tags (the ones that convert wrapped text to monospace code) here? @trogus -- Since this is a dev-oriented community.. could this be an area to improve devRant?2
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Just a quick follow up. I told you guys after rebooting my server by accident, I'll color in the terminals for my ssh connections.
Normal terminal in white. With the code to do it. Just a shell script with the name ssh earlier in the path than the actual ssh. That was the only solution that didn't fuck my auto-completion. compdef was somehow useless. But it is simple.
For some reason I had to hardcode the return color to white. Alacritty was not happy with just a no-color code. But whatever. Super useful. I won't accidentally restart non-host computers now.
Planning on extending this to have different colors according to the host. Like my homelab could be green. Live servers would be red. Dev servers blue. But that's for the future.
Just wanted to share my little improvement that will make my computing saver.8 -
Yeah..finally some improvement.
my code is throwing Internal Server error exception now, two days back it was showing Unknown Exception.
Improving day by day.1 -
As I'm on a research/algorithm improvement project at work I'm working pretty much independently. As such I've set up an automated test framework and writing tests for any piece of code I touch.
Today as I was fixing a bug in production area I was demoing my tests to CTO and principal design engineer. They come from a hardware background and have pushed back against automated tests in the past but they were interested in what I was doing.
I WILL DRAG THEM KICKING AND FUCKING SCREAMING INTO THE WORLD OF AUTOMATED TESTS.1 -
When and how do you improve documentation?
I dont mean "added new/refactored code, gotta document it" but active improvement.
Which feeback channels do you have for your docs?3 -
Up all damn night making the script work.
Wrote a non-sieve prime generator.
Thing kept outputting one or two numbers that weren't prime, related to something called carmichael numbers.
Any case got it to work, god damn was it a slog though.
Generates next and previous primes pretty reliably regardless of the size of the number
(haven't gone over 31 bit because I haven't had a chance to implement decimal for this).
Don't know if the sieve is the only reliable way to do it. This seems to do it without a hitch, and doesn't seem to use a lot of memory. Don't have to constantly return to a lookup table of small factors or their multiple either.
Technically it generates the primes out of the integers, and not the other way around.
Things 0.01-0.02th of a second per prime up to around the 100 million mark, and then it gets into the 0.15-1second range per generation.
At around primes of a couple billion, its averaging about 1 second per bit to calculate 1. whether the number is prime or not, 2. what the next or last immediate prime is. Although I'm sure theres some optimization or improvement here.
Seems reliable but obviously I don't have the resources to check it beyond the first 20k primes I confirmed.
From what I can see it didn't drop any primes, and it didn't include any errant non-primes.
Codes here:
https://pastebin.com/raw/57j3mHsN
Your gotos should be nextPrime(), lastPrime(), isPrime, genPrimes(up to but not including some N), and genNPrimes(), which generates x amount of primes for you.
Speed limit definitely seems to top out at 1 second per bit for a prime once the code is in the billions, but I don't know if thats the ceiling, again, because decimal needs implemented.
I think the core method, in calcY (terrible name, I know) could probably be optimized in some clever way if its given an adjacent prime, and what parameters were used. Theres probably some pattern I'm not seeing, but eh.
I'm also wondering if I can't use those fancy aberrations, 'carmichael numbers' or whatever the hell they are, to calculate some sort of offset, and by doing so, figure out a given primes index.
And all my brain says is "sleep"
But family wants me to hang out, and I have to go talk a manager at home depot into an interview, because wanting to program for a living, and actually getting someone to give you the time of day are two different things.1 -
I sometimes laugh randomly about the incident where @fullstackcircus hyped up his code a little too much, and when he got judged by other devs, resorted to "Well I guess, there is always room for improvement".
LOL.8 -
This is kind of a loaded question because it's so broad. So I'll just throw my thoughts down on the idea anyways.
Honestly with all the way that game dev has come it's so sad to see just the increase of people that are so ungrateful and dont appreciate what went into making it. Complaining about small not a big deal bugs that occur, blaming the devs for stuff that's completely not up to them but the "idea man", etc. Although good things are coming out of it. Like children wanting to get into it more which is awesome and indie developers basically holding up the industry while majority of the AAA companies get their shit together. So I see all of that increasing. Also I'm expecting to see the Rust language start to be used in AAA titles replacing C++
Web dev I believe will just get more JavaScript improvement with new libraries, frameworks. I really hope the companies that had PHP5 legacy code get back on their feet quickly. But I hope we can become more accepting of JavaScript doing more than just webdev like Electron, WebGL, etc. Because I think it's great that it can do all that stuff. Is there better options hell yeah but let's let people do crazy shit.
Software dev well I see python making a bigger uprising and I'm hoping people become more accepting of python as well.
These are all just random thoughts so please take that into consideration -
Just need to vent out a bit. There's already been a few times at work where the senior developer asks me why I take so long to do something, and I'm unable to fully explain why.
Now, I could think of several reasons. Maybe it's my lack of experience; I just start researching on Google for solutions, start putting things together, and then I guess things start to get too complicated for me to be able to explain clearly. Maybe I end up "over-engineering" to solve problems that could be solved in a simpler way.
And this leads to my second reason, and that is there's no code review going on. I've wanted to just tell him, "If you'd just take a long look at my code, you'd understand why it's taking me so long! So you can tell me if I'm doing it right or wrong, or if I'm making it too complicated!" But, of course, being the junior developer, I also think that when he's explaining how to do something, I'm just not understanding it right.
I could ask for clarifications, and believe I've done that on some things, but my third reason is that he's just not good at explaining things, or that there's some miscommunication happening. English isn't his first language. His English is ok, but I know there's a lot of room for improvement. I also notice that our other co-workers are also having a bit of a hard time but it seems they already developed some sort of adaptation to communicate with him.
So yeah, there's my rant, and I'd love to know everyone's input on this. -
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 -
1. Sum up all the behaviours/functionalities the program should have
2. break each functionality down to the data/procedures that it uses(mindmaps can help)
3. get an understanding of a naive implementation and implement it (fast)
4. collect improvement opportunities (opitimization/simplification/expansion) and get a deeper understanding of the solution
5. spend a few days on some real life issues
6. improve the naive code, if appropiate, start all over -
One year ago I graduated from university college,
Thought I had a stack overflowing with knowledge.
How wrong can one man be?
Very wrong, apparently...
Even though I only had a bachelor degree,
I landed a job at a nearby company.
Today I'm maintaining the code I wrote back then,
Seriously wondering if I could just write it all again.
The code I wrote I would consider a crime,
But it's good to see improvement over such a short time.
I still dread coming back to this code in another year,
Thinking yet again; "What the hell went wrong here?".2 -
Context:
At work, I code primarily with Java.
I'm a big believer in the mantra, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but I find myself conflicted with that when I can see how much of an improvement it would be to use a different language for some of the simple pieces in our integration.
Question:
When should one start considering other languages for your team? And if you choose other options, how do you do it in such a way where you don't end up building a chimera of an integration?3 -
Study, discussions with seniors and passion for improvement of my own code to make it better and better.
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Me: 'here we go, code working completely as intended, tested and without bugs.'
Senior after reviewing code: 'apart from the formatting errors, I'd also do this piece of coding in a different manners'
*Comments exchange in pull request*
Me: 'well this seems more like a change the whole logic request rather than a small improvement, I'll keep it like this and resolve it like suggested on a future opportunity'
Still in prod. -
I know there is this huge argument about whether to use tabs or 4 spaces and while I'm on neither side, just sitting there using tabs, in this new project I'm FORCED to use a 1 space indentation and no line breaks in Android layout XML files format.
I sat there for about 10 minutes trying to wrap my head around d this absurd specification they agreed upon with the client. The code looks SHIT and every time I copy some beautifully formatted reference code into this project it turns into a piece of unreadable garbage.
But since I'm just a part-timer and the senior developer working on this project for some years now is much more experienced than me, I'm hesitant to criticise it more than I already did.
Maybe I'll start arguing with industry standards and the improvement for new developer to read our code... -
When you are attempting to learn a new framework what is the learning process like? Do you watch youtube tutorials for 5 hours straight or do you go straight to the documentation. Just curious3
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I am not so sure about what I am going to do after high school.
I have been working part time as a backend web developer, and I think that the experience combined with my profound interest in the subject has made me quite good for my age.
I also took part in national and international coding competitions.
I am writing all this to prove that, although I am no genius, I have a decent enough curriculum to get a job as soon as I am out.
The problem is, (please save your insults for later) I want to be a Java developer. I just love the syntax, the and the code just forms in my head better than the other languages.
Up until a few years ago I wanted to go to uni and get a 5 year degree in computer science - and I would still like to do so if it is going to help me get away from web development, and I would get lear lots of cool stuff in the mean time.
My question is: should I study computer science?
If I don't get, I could go choose engineering with computer science focus in another uni, but should I? Should I just get my job to full time and wait the next year?
Will studying in uni get me a better paying job, or some sort of tangible improvement over just working right away?
I am very interested to hear your opinions, and sorry for the long post :)2 -
YOU ARE A FOOL, BY USING VISUAL STUDIO CODE!!!
Hating Microsoft is not about how bad is this or that feature because they failed in making it responsive, neither should it be blessed for its new outstanding opensource projects.
Microsoft is a marketing company, they don't have new ideas, breakthrough projects, inventions... no, they just copy the market and make/buy their own replicate of the trending services.
THAT IS SLOWING THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE AND HUMAN IMPROVEMENT ITSELF.
Microsoft is just using the cold comfort of today instead of making a change but is also destroying the bright, enthusiastic, but poor brains of the modern society.
You are fool by using Visual Code, you are a manipulated sheep, a slut which innevitable follows the propaganda of the enemy of progress.
I an not going to stand here and support my enemy, I delete Visual Code.35