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I want Gordon Ramsey to start a IT program in the same fashion as Hotel Hell and Kitchen Nightmares
He'll sit at a desk with a laptop, examining code as if he's eating food, venting frustrations and screaming insults out loud
Then he'll have a talk with the team and see how they work on a day
After that he'll go into the freezer (server room) and scream at mold and cockroaches
Then comes the intervention where we discover that the PM is still grieving about the death of his original programming language and the team loves him but thinks he should move on
The next day the development studio is modernised and has a candy bar, tennis table and everyone is forced to use linux on their new macbooks
Then we experience a good day where everything is great and velocity is through the roof
Then Gordon leaves and everything is shit again17 -
Yesterday was Friday the 13th, so here is a list of my worst dev nightmares without order of significance:
1) Dealing with multithreaded code, especially on Android
2) Javascript callback hell
3) Dependency hell, especially in Python
4) Segfaults
5) Memory Leaks
6) git conflicts
7) Crazy regexes and string manipulations
8) css. Fuck css.
9) not knowing jack shit about something but expected by others to
produce a result with it.
10) 3+ hours of debugging with no success
Post yours27 -
I had a coworker used to write PHP pages in this way:
<?php
echo "<html>";
echo "<head>";
// 2000+ lines of un-indented nightmares
I tried suggesting him to keep the HTML outside php tags as much as possible and I stressed out that adding some indentation to the code would have improved readability. I also sent him an example of my code created using an IDE with auto-indent functionality.
His creepy answer was: «Readability is subjective. Anyway I'll try to get used to the sinusoidal trend of your code.»11 -
A while back, I ranted about emojis in code.
My nightmares are becoming reality.
Behold, production code:
34 -
Can't fall asleep because of unfinished code...
Wake up at 03:00 AM because of nightmares about bad code...
Too tired to finish code or rewrite bad code :'(7 -
This codebase reminds me of a large, rotting, barely-alive dromedary. Parts of it function quite well, but large swaths of it are necrotic, foul-smelling, and even rotted away. Were it healthy, it would still exude a terrible stench, and its temperament would easily match: If you managed to get near enough, it would spit and try to bite you.
Swaths of code are commented out -- entire classes simply don't exist anymore, and the ghosts of several-year-old methods still linger. Despite this, large and deprecated (yet uncommented) sections of the application depend on those undefined classes/methods. Navigating the codebase is akin to walking through a minefield: if you reference the wrong method on the wrong object... fatal exception. And being very new to this project, I have no idea what's live and what isn't.
The naming scheme doesn't help, either: it's impossible to know what's still functional without asking because nothing's marked. Instead, I've been working backwards from multiple points to try to find code paths between objects/events. I'm rarely successful.
Not only can I not tell what's live code and what's interactive death, the code itself is messy and awful. Don't get me wrong: it's solid. There's virtually no way to break it. But trying to understand it ... I feel like I'm looking at a huge, sprawling MC Escher landscape through a microscope. (No exaggeration: a magnifying glass would show a larger view that included paradoxes / dubious structures, and these are not readily apparent to me.)
It's also rife with bad practices. Terrible naming choices consisting of arbitrarily-placed acronyms, bad word choices, and simply inconsistent naming (hash vs hsh vs hs vs h). The indentation is a mix of spaces and tabs. There's magic numbers galore, and variable re-use -- not just local scope, but public methods on objects as well. I've also seen countless assignments within conditionals, and these are apparently intentional! The reasoning: to ensure the code only runs with non-falsey values. While that would indeed work, an early return/next is much clearer, and reduces indentation. It's just. reading through this makes me cringe or literally throw my hands up in frustration and exasperation.
Honestly though, I know why the code is so terrible, and I understand:
The architect/sole dev was new to coding -- I have 5-7 times his current experience -- and the project scope expanded significantly and extremely quickly, and also broke all of its foundation rules. Non-developers also dictated architecture, creating further mess. It's the stuff of nightmares. Looking at what he was able to accomplish, though, I'm impressed. Horrified at the details, but impressed with the whole.
This project is the epitome of "I wrote it quickly and just made it work."
Fortunately, he and I both agree that a rewrite is in order. but at 76k lines (without styling or configuration), it's quite the undertaking.
------
Amusing: after running the codebase through `wc`, it apparently sums to half the word count of "War and Peace"15 -
2 years into polytechnic I got my 1st big project as a subcontractor doing Symbian. No need to tell the company I presume.
Anyways, I was brought into the project just couple weeks before holiday season started. My Symbian programming experience was just the basics from school. 1st day I was crapping my pants out of anxiety. I pretty much didn't understand anything what my project manager or teammates were telling, so I just wrote EVERYTHING down on paper and recorded all the meetings to my laptop.
My job was to implement a very big end to end SDK feature. Basically from API through Symbian OS through HAL to other OS and into its subsystem. Nice job for a beginner :/
As the holidays were starting we had just drafted out the specification (I don't know how, because I didn't understand much of what was going on) and I got a clear mission from team lead. Make a working prototype of the feature during the time everybody else was on vacation.
"No problemos, I can do it" I BS'd myself and the team lead.
First 2 weeks I just read documentation, my notes and internal coding tutorials over and over again. I produced maybe couple of lines of usable code. I stayed at the office as late as I dared without seeming to obvious that I had no clue what I was doing. After the two weeks of staying late and seeing nightmares every night I had a sudden heureka moment. Code that I was reading started to make sense. Okay, still 2 weeks more until my teammates come back.
Next 2 weeks were furious coding and I got better every day. I even had time to refactor some of my earlier code so that quality was consistent.
Soooo, holidays are over and my team leader and collagues are very interested with my progress. "You did very well. Much better than expected. Prototype is working with main use case implemeted. You must have quite high competence to do this so well..."
"Well...I did have to refactor some stuff, so not 10/10"
I didn't say a word of my super late nights, anxiety and total n00biness.
Pretty much finished "like a boss". After that I was on the managers wanted list and they called me to ask if I had the time work on their projects.
Fake it, crap your pants, eat your crap and turn into diamonds and then you make it.
PS. After Symbian normal C++ and almost any other language has been a breeze to learn.2 -
The riskiest dev choice...
How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.
I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)
A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.
The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)
Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.
I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.
And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...
After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....
Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.
Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.
But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.
But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!
Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊1 -
I tried LSD yesterday!
Backstory: I have a weird combo of bipolar type 1 and autism. During the day, my brain works inconsistently. Here how my day usually goes:
09:00. I wake up. Uninterested, cold, masculine. No thoughts in the background. No OCD.
12:00. Brain warms up. Thought process begins. Thoughts are short in their length
14:00. Thoughts start to get longer. Stress starts to accumulate. Background thoughts start, now typically 2–3 at a time.
16:00. Twitching begins. Thought chains are now 5–6 concepts long, one following the other. Perception level rises quickly. I start to feel more feminine. It is in this state that I start to spot imperfections and mistakes looking at code or text without reading it. I see it like a painting, and mistakes appear as “visually wrong” parts. This does not depend on formatting.
17:00. OCD becomes more severe. I HAVE to touch all the surfaces around me, evenly, as if my hands were text highlighters, and I had to paint everything evenly, without overlaps or spots that are brighter or darker than the others. Some surface textures become irritating, and feel quite unpleasant to the touch. If I go for a run now, like 3 km or so, I feel somewhat relieved.
18:00. Things are getting serious. Creativity levels through the roof. I speak in long, never-ending, profound sentences. Background and foreground thoughts almost become one. I appear visually drunk and happy, despite never drinking alcohol. Femininity rises even further. Sometimes, when I speak to a small group of people, especially if I go with friends to meet new people, and we go to some bar, new people ask to record my voice or to write down whatever I’m saying. To be honest, this reason alone is a huge boost to how I see yourself.
19:00. OCD is crazy now. Surfaces have soul.
21:00 <— Gotta take my meds and go to sleep here to prevent what comes at 22:00
22:00. All thoughts, both foreground and background, fully became one. Now my brain officially disobeys me and thinks on its own, and I can ride it like a surfer at best. Twitching becomes concerning. I develop a 1000-yard stare. I am officially a female. Physical strength is somewhat enhanced. Pain tolerance lowered significantly.
23:00. Derealization begins. The world around me appears two-dimensional and flat, like a picture. It is hard to get home on foot, even in close (less than one km) proximity. Brain is fully numb. All that thought monstrosity that was building up is just noise now. Zero “flops” available to think about something I want to think about, like how much money I have on me or what time it is.
I go to sleep. I see nightmares. I wake up, and the cycle repeats.
Contrary to a popular opinion, I never take any “brain-boosting” meds like antidepressants, and I think now you can see why. I consume neither alcohol nor caffeine. Neither me, nor my doctors want my brain to explode. I only take lamotrigine that helps to “lower down” mania, and quetiapine, a neuroleptic, that slows down my brain, like a neuroleptic. Both are there to slow down my brain, to kinda “throttle” my brain like a CPU to cool it down.
That said, 100ug of LSD just… brought me my usual 18:00 state, but in the morning?
All that small-dose recreational ordeal? The thing that helps people feel more energetic and creative?
People pay money… for that? To feel the way I feel every evening?10 -
Dev nightmares :
- Not finding bug fix on stackoverflow/GitHub .
- Losing code that hasn't been pushed to GitHub.
- Dealing with an unclean and inconsistent database.
- Installing Node Dependencies.
- Resolving CORS and 500s.
- Training a Linear Regression Model with 700 epochs on an entry-level Laptop.
Keep appending to this list.
#devrant #devnightmares20 -
Last few weeks have been very hectic and I will explain everything in a few days when all of my things to do are done (if you are concerned - nothing bad happened, just code nightmares. Expect a strongly worded rant soon).
Also, I’m getting vaccinated for the coronavirus on Saturday night!9 -
Best: gaining experience and learning new ways to write programs in the best way possible, even beyond working hours
Worst: the amount of ABAP code I saw these past two years gives me nightmares, and older programmers don't seem to want to improve and advance from the old ways of the language 😥1 -
You know when you are true developer when you have nightmares about non functioning code and bugs without solutions...1
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Spent seven hours reading source code at work yesterday. The little documentation I was able to find alternated between English and Spanish. And some of the things I saw... Straight out of a horror novel.
For example: NUMBER_2 * NUMBER_60 * NUMBER_60 * NUMBER_1000 to get the number of milliseconds in two hours.
Or this super contrived method which capped the registration age at 100, which now caps it at 102 anyways because they use hard coded values for the current year. Took me 15 minutes to find out what "fixYear" (this method) did.
No wonder I got home and crashed in bed till nearly midnight after that... I swear that was harder than a university Calc final...3 -
Writing code for software that was deprecated since 2015 it's a nightmare. More when the unit tests take way more time than the actual fix or feature. Just kill it with fire
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6 weeks of doing nothing except dealing with nightmares from the past in my mind I think I left all that crap behind and I am ready to jump back.
I don’t feel much anger and disappointment anymore, even some excitement for new crap to come by on my desk.
I started to write some code and practice puzzles for getting some decent job or project (again)
Puzzles are usually not a problem but I fail with HR.
When they’re asking me stupid questions I answer with stupid answers to piss them off.
But now time to get some money so I’d try to be gentle. -
worst: codeSourcery cross compile tool chain. The stuff of nightmares.
Best: textmate or notepad++. Never code in them, but really usefull for a quick edit, or log analysis.1 -
I'm the only one who doesn't understand how the fuck people dream about code/coding? I get it, you leave work and still think about a solution for a certain problem, that's normal. But dreaming/having nightmares about this shit is weird.4
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# Gave me a job and more stress and literally nightmares;
# Physically resisting myself to give solutions to everything people moan about. Even myself. But we know things flap in production;
# Cursing my life, other people's code, customer's IQ more often;
# Getting more LinkedIn, messages, profile views and requests than my social media (which I really don't give a shit about);
# Using a combination of programming punctuations in usual writing (this rant for example);
# My sleep is down the toilet;
# Never complaining any coffee as long as it works; -
When I was started my journey in coding, what ever I do, I think about coding. Sleep code, eat code, dream code, dating code. Its become my usually nightmares.
Its become worst when I got stucked in coding. Ppl see me like a geek zombie.
Coding used to ruin my life.
But when my code working like charm, feel like god. I can do anything. 😂😂😂
Sometime l just love it, but most of the time I fucking hate it. -
I've had an issue with eel.js for the last two days , the shit has been giving me nightmares all weekend backend processes keep shutting down on page navigation turns out i had not imported eel on the index page.
For fucks sake it had to be that one single line of code
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