Why are job postings so bad?
Like, really. Why?

Here's four I found today, plus an interview with a trainwreck from last week.
(And these aren't even the worst I've found lately!)

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Ridiculous job posting #1:
* 5 years React and React Native experience -- the initial release of React Native was in May 2013, apparently. ~5.7 years ago.
* Masters degree in computer science.
* Write clean, maintainable code with tests.
* Be social and outgoing.

So: you must have either worked at Facebook or adopted and committed to both React and React Native basically immediately after release. You must also be in academia (with a masters!), and write clean and maintainable code, which... basically doesn't happen in academia. And on top of (and really: despite) all of this, you must also be a social butterfly! Good luck ~

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Ridiculous job posting #2:
* "We use Ruby on Rails"
* A few sentences later... "we love functional programming and write only functional code!"

Cue Inigo Montoya.

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Ridiculous job posting #3:
* 100% remote! Work from anywhere, any time zone!
* and following that: You must have at least 4 work hours overlap with your coworkers per day.
* two company-wide meetups per quarter! In fancy places like Peru and Tibet! ... TWO PER QUARTER!?

Let me paraphrase: "We like the entire team being remote, together."

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Ridiculous job posting #4:
* Actual title: "Developer (noun): Superhero poised to change the world (apply within)"
* Actual excerpt: "We know that headhunters are already beating down your door. All we want is the opportunity to earn our right to keep you every single day."
* Actual excerpt: "But alas. A dark and evil power is upon us. And this… ...is where you enter the story. You will be the Superman who is called upon to hammer the villains back into the abyss from whence they came."

I already applied to this company some time before (...surprisingly...) and found that the founder/boss is both an ex cowboy dev and... more than a bit of a loon. If that last part isn't obvious already? Sheesh. He should go write bad fantasy metal lyrics instead.

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Ridiculous interview:
* Service offered for free to customers
* PHP fanboy angrily asking only PHP questions despite the stack (Node+Vue) not even freaking including PHP! To be fair, he didn't know anything but PHP... so why (and how) is he working there?
* Actual admission: No testing suite, CI, or QA in place
* Actual admission: Testing sometimes happens in production due to tight deadlines
* Actual admission: Company serves ads and sells personally-identifiable customer information (with affiliate royalties!) to cover expenses
* Actual admission: Not looking for other monetization strategies; simply trying to scale their current break-even approach.

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I find more of these every time I look. It's insane.
Why can't people be sane and at least semi-intelligent?

At one of my former jobs, I had a four-day-week. I remember once being called on my free Friday by an agitated colleague of mine arguing that I crashed the entire application on the staging environment and I shall fix it that very day.

I refused. It was my free day after all and I had made plans. Yet I told him: OK, I take a look at it in Sunday and see what all the fuzz is all about. Because I honestly could fathom what big issue I could have caused.

On that Sunday, I realized that the feature I implemented worked as expected. And it took me two minutes to realize the problem: It was a minor thing, as it so often is: If the user was not logged in, instead of a user object, null got passed somewhere and boom -- 500 error screen. Some older feature broke due to some of my changes and I never noticed it as while I was developing I was always in a logged in state and I never bothered to test that feature as I assumed it working. Only my boss was not logged in when testing on the stage environment, and so he ran into it.

So what really pushed my buttons was:

It was not a bug. It was a regression.

Why is that distinction important?

My boss tried to guilt me into admitting that I did not deliver quality software. Yet he was the one explicitly forbidding me to write tests for that software. Well, this is what you get then! You pay in the long run by strange bugs, hotfixes, and annoyed developers. I salute you! :/

Yet I did not fix the bug right away. I could have. It would have just taken me just another two minutes again. Yet for once, instead of doing it quickly, I did it right: I, albeit unfamiliar with writing tests, searched for a way to write a test for that case. It came not easy for me as I was not accustomed to writing tests, and the solution I came up with a functional test not that ideal, as it required certain content to be in the database. But in the end, it worked good enough: I had a failing test. And then I made it pass again. That made the whole ordeal worthwhile to me. (Also the realization that that very Sunday, alone in that office, was one of the most productive since a long while really made me reflect my job choice.)

At the following Monday I just entered the office for the stand-up to declare that I fixed the regression and that I won't take responsibility for that crash on the staging environment. If you don't let me write test, don't expect me to test the entire application again and again. I don't want to ensure that the existing software doesn't break. That's what tests are for. Don't try to blame me for not having tests on critical infrastructure. And that's all I did on Monday. I have a policy to not do long hours, and when I do due to an "emergency", I will get my free time back another day. And so I went home that Monday right after the stand-up.

Do I even need to spell it out that I made a requirement for my next job to have a culture that requires testing? I did, and never looked back and I grew a lot as a developer.

I have familiarized myself with both the wonderful world of unit and acceptance testing. And deploying suddenly becomes cheap and easy. Sure, there sometimes are problems. But almost always they are related to infrastructure and not the underlying code base. (And yeah, sometimes you have randomly failing tests, but that's for another rant.)

PM: Guys, we have to upgrade Java 8

Me: hey check out all these cool functional programming stuff (lambdas)in Java 8.

PM: Sorry you can't do that. Our automated testing software isn't up to date to test Java 8. So you have to code it "vanilla"

Me: Erm, upgrade it?

PM: we didn't budget it for that.

Me: *thinks to me miself* brilliant

!!office drama

I haven't been around much in recent weeks. Due to family illness, christmas shopping, dealing with estranged parents, and brooding over the foregoing, I haven't had a lot of time or energy left to myself.

tl;dr: The CTO ("API Guy") is ostensibly getting fired, and I might be taking over his job. I don't know if I should accept, try to stave this off, or simply flee.

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Anyone who has been following my recent rants knows that API Guy is my boss, and he often writes terrible code. It's solid and unbreakable, but reading it is a *nightmare.* One of our applications is half the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and it's difficult to tell what code is live and what amounts to ancient, still-active landmines. This is one application; we have several, most of which I've never even looked at.

Ostensibly the code is so terrible because the company grew extremely quickly, and API Guy needed to cram in lots of unexpected / planned-against features. From what I can see, that seems about right, but I haven't checked timeframes [because that's a lot of work!].

Here's a brief rundown of the situation.
- API Guy co-founded the company with the CEO.
- CEO and API Guy have been friends for a long time.
- CEO belives the company will fail with API Guy as head of tech.
- They could just be testing me; I have zero way of knowing. API Guy seems totally oblivious, and CEO seems sincere, so this feels pretty doubtful.
- CEO likes pushing people around. CEO believes he can push me around. API Guy doesn't budge. (I probably won't, either, except to change task priorities.)
- API Guy's code is huge and awful, but functional.
- API Guy is trying to clean up the mess; CEO doesn't understand (maybe doesn't care).
- Literally nobody else knows how the code works.
- Apart from API Guy and myself, the entire company is extroverted sales people.
- None of these sales people particularly like me.
- Sales people sell and sell and sell without asking development if they can pull enough magic features out of their hat to meet the arbitrary saleslines. (because the answer is usually no)
- If I accept, I would be the sole developer (at first) and responsible for someone else's mountain of nightmarish code, and still responsible for layering on new features at the same pace as he. Pay raise likely, but not guaranteed.
- My getting the position is contingent upon the CEO and the investors, meaning it's by no means guaranteed.
- If I don't accept, likely API Guy will be replaced with someone else of unknown ability, who doesn't know the code, and whom I must answer to regardless. Potentially OK, potentially a monumental disaster.

Honestly, it feels like I'm going to be screwed no matter what course I choose.

Perhaps accepting is slightly better?

The best would be to assume the position of CTO and keep API Guy around -- but that would feel like an insult to him. I doubt he'd be okay with it. But maybe. Who knows? I doubt the CEO would seriously consider that anyway.

I feel like a lamb between a dim, angry rhino, and an oblivious one.

Let the student use their own laptops. Even buy them one instead of having computers on site that no one uses for coding but only for some multiple choice tests and to browse Facebook.

Teach them 10 finger typing. (Don't be too strict and allow for personal preferences.)

Teach them text navigation and editing shortcuts. They should be able to scroll per page, jump to the beginning or end of the line or jump word by word. (I am not talking vi bindings or emacs magic.) And no, key repeat is an antifeature.

Teach them VCS before their first group assignment. Let's be honest, VCS means git nowadays. Yet teach them git != GitHub.

Teach git through the command line. They are allowed to use a gui once they aren't afraid to resolve a merge conflict or to rebase their feature branch against master. Just committing and pushing is not enough.

Teach them test-driven development ASAP. You can even give them assignments with a codebase of failing tests and their job is to make them pass in the beginning. Later require them to write tests themselves.

Don't teach the language, teach concepts. (No, if else and for loops aren't concepts you god-damn amateur! That's just syntax!)

When teaching object oriented programming, I'd smack you if do inane examples with vehicles, cars, bikes and a Mercedes Benz. Or animal, cat and dog for that matter. (I came from a self-taught imperative background. Those examples obfuscate more than they help.) Also, inheritance is overrated in oop teachings.

Functional programming concepts should be taught earlier as its concepts of avoiding side effects and pure functions can benefit even oop code bases. (Also great way to introduce testing, as pure functions take certain inputs and produce one output.)

Focus on one language in the beginning, it need not be Java, but don't confuse students with Java, Python and Ruby in their first year. (Bonus point if the language supports both oop and functional programming.)

And for the love of gawd: let them have a strictly typed language. Why would you teach with JavaScript!?

Use industry standards. Notepad, atom and eclipse might be open source and free; yet JetBrains community editions still best them.

For grades, don't your dare demand for them to write code on paper. (Pseudocode is fine.)

Don't let your students play compiler in their heads. It's not their job to know exactly what exception will be thrown by your contrived example. That's the compilers job to complain about. Rather teach them how to find solutions to these errors.

Teach them advanced google searches.

Teach them how to write a issue for a library on GitHub and similar sites.

Teach them how to ask a good stackoverflow question :>

I just told my biggest client that they have to start changing things or they will need to find a different company to work with.

I'm hired to program what they want. They are suppossed to do all the concepting, functional designs, QA, testing.

So they tell me to program feature x, not realising that this interact with feature y. And then complain about the change in feature y. Make me do a lot of extra work and then complain that my estimates are way off.

So I told them they also need to hire my company for the software design and QA and prefferable testing because I'm done getting blamed.

(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".

Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.

Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.

Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.

Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.

Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.

Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.

Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.

Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.

Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.

Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.

Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.

Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.

Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.

Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.

Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".

Fuck your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?

Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.

Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.

"I'm almost done, I'll just need to add tests!"

Booom! You did it, that was a nuke going off in my head.

No, you shouldn't just need to add tests. The tests should have been written from the get go! You most likely won't cover all the cases. You won't know if adding the tests will break your feature, as you had none, as you refactor your untested mess in order to make your code testable.

When reading your mess of a test case and the painful mocking process you went through, I silently cry out into the void: "Why oh why!? All of this suffering could have been avoided!"

Since most of the time, your mocking pain boils down to not understanding what your "unit" in your "unit test" should be.

So let it be said:

- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, then just write a function / class whose *only* purpose is: parse the XML file, return a value object. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, it MUST NOT: download a zip, extract that zip, merge all those files to one big file, parse that big file, talk to some other random APIs as a side-effect, and then return a value object.

Because then you suddenly have to mock away a http service and deal with zip files in your test cases.

The http util of your programming language will most likely work. Your unzip library will most likely work. So just assume it working. There are valid use cases where you want to make sure you acutally send a request and get a response, yet I am talking unit test here only.

In the scope of a class, keep the public methods to a reasonable minimum. As for each public method you shall at least create one test case. If you ever have the feeling "I want to test that private method" replace that statement in your head with: "I should extract that functionality to a new class where that method public. I then can create a unit test case a for that." That new service then becomes a dependency in your current service. Problem solved.

Also, mocking away dependencies should a simple process. If your mocking process fills half the screen, your test setup is overly complicated and your class is doing too much.

That's why I currently dig functional programming so much. When you build pure functions without side effects, unit tests are easy to write. Yet you can apply pure functions to OOP as well (to a degree). Embrace immutability.

Sidenote:

It's really not helpful that a lot of developers don't understand the difference between unit, functional acceptance, integration testing. Then they wonder why they can't test something easily, write overly complex test cases, until someone points out to them: No, in the scope of unit tests, we don't need to test our persistance layer. We just assume that it works. We should only test our businsess logic. You know: "Assuming that I get that response from the database, I expect that to happen." You don't need a test db, make a real query against that, in order to test that. (That still is a valid thing to do. Yet not in the scope of unit tests.)

~2 years ago:

Me: Managed to figure out how to port that library. Just need designs and then we can build feature X. I've tested it in ugly developer-y screens. It works fully

Boss: Thats awesome, saw the video, looks great. This is a really important feature, thanks for looking into this

~1.5 years ago:

Me: Ok i've started working on the designs, just FYI we don't have designs for feature X

Boss: Ok, must have slipped, noted

~1 year ago:

Me: I've seen more posts about users wanting apps with features X in it. Still don't have designs, we working on that?

Boss: I'll check with design

~3 Months ago:

Boss: Ok were going to have to get serious about pulling features out and reducing MVP so we can get this out there. I think feature A, D, Y and X have to be dropped for v1. Theres too much left to do on them

Me: sure

~1 week ago:

Boss: We need to start getting ready for xxxxx. Can you do me a favour and start writing up some developer docs etc, kind of like this one we did for this other project

This morning opening my emails from last night:

Boss: I've reviewed the doc, looks good, only minor things need tweaking. Let me ask you something though, you said feature X was pulled out and its "pending design work". Its not only pending design work is it? Is it that far along?

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What I actually replied:

Yes ... i've sent you videos of it functional in the past, and discussed this ... more than once. Just design ... and some testing of the new designs obviously

==========
What that meant:

Yes. May god have mercy on your soul if you reply anything even remotely close to "oh I had no idea, lets revisit adding this to v1". I will not be held accountable for my actions

Question time:

Has anyone used PHP unit with Selenium before?

I have a.. well words can’t explain it nice enough but, beyond a joke, not even funny, spaghetti code base I’ve come to inherit recently, which god help me, doesn’t follow any design patterns at all, it’s just a stamp this here, staple this down over here and throw paint at the wall and hope it sticks.

It’s a mixture of procedural and functional with the rare class kind of mess.

So attempting to refactor by any means is not a real possibility without some kind of behavioural testing in place first otherwise I know I’m going to end up breaking something somewhere and not even know it.

Also if anyone has had the privilege of such code bases, tips to dealing with the mess are appreciated.

Oh and no, I can’t rm -rf or start again.😭

Lol I suck. Learnt coding without a degree in it, enough to be functional. Got an internship at a good place. Made code that worked but didn’t know enough on documenting and testing and can’t give enough time anymore on it to make it reproducible.Actually joined a CS program this fall!

Corporate pushed a change to our PC's which similataneously installed chrome and pushed their security policies on us. Extensions are no longer available. I can't sign in with my chrome account anymore. I can't automate ui testing with selenium. I can't control any chrome settings, they're controlled by group policies now.

I guess it's time to switch to Firefox. At least until they block that. At least the UI testing still is functional on that...

The "unit" in unit test does not mean your ENTIRE APPLICATION. Ever heard of scope!?

I am amazed how often people write overblown test setups, mock hundreds of unrelated services, just to test one tiny bit of logic.

That bit of logic could have been a pure function.

For that pure function you could write a dead simple unit test. Given that input, I expect that output. Nothing more, nothing less. (It helps even more if the pure functions only accepts primitives, like string and numbers, or very simple immutable value objects).

No I don't care that the service is used by another service, as your mocked interaction also doesn't test the service as a whole but you just assume the happy case most of the time anyway. You want to test the entire application? Let's not use unit tests for that but let's use a different kind of test for that (integration test, functional tests, e2e-tests).

If you write code in a way that easily allows for unit testing, your need to mock goes away.

Unit testing is cool and all, but FFS...

If you want unit test - cool. But its not drop-in replacement for functional testing!

I believe each release should be manually tested.

Coming to the end of a project and set up Wunderlist to do a snag list whilst testing, decided to involve my client, which worked out great initially but now they started adding features to it. Now in a situation of explaining that feature additions at this stage require a proper functional spec and costing as they may mean a rewrite of existing code and could derail the project. Are all clients dim or just mine?

Automated functional testing using selenium and javascript bindings

aka

FUCK FUCK FUCK Driven Development

I continue to internally read and study about Smalltalk in an effort to see where we might have FUCKED UP and went backwards in terms of software engineering since I do not believe that complex source code based languages are the solution.

So I have Pharo. Nothin to complex really, everything is an object, yet, you do have room for building DSL's inside of it over a simple object model with no issue, the system browser can be opened across multiple screens (morph windows inside of a smalltalk system) for which you can edit you code in composable blocks with no issues. Blocks being a particular part of the language (think Ruby in more modern features) give ample room for functional programming. Thus far we have FP and OO (the original mind you) styles out in the open for development.

Your main code can be executed and instantly ALTER the live environment of a program as it is running, if what you are trying to do is stupid it won't affect the live instance, live programming is ahead of its time, and impressive, considering how old Smalltalk is. GUI applications can be given headless (this is also old in terms of how this shit was first distributed) So I can go ahead and package the virtual machine with the entire application into a folder, and distribute it agains't an organization "but why!!!! that package is 80+ mbs!") yeah cuz it carries the entire virtual machine, but go ahead and give it to the Mac user, or the Linux user, it will run, natively once it is clicked.

Server side applications run in similar fashion to php, in terms of lifecycles of request and how session storage is handled, this to me is interesting, no additional runtimes, drop it on a server, configure it properly and off you go, but this is common on other languages so really not that much of a point.

BUT if over a network a user is using your application and you change it and send that change over the network then the the change is damn near instant and fault tolerant due to the nature of the language.

Honestly, I don't know what went wrong or why we are not bringing this shit to the masses, the language was built for fucking kids, it was the first "y'all too stupid to get it, so here is simple" engine and we still said "nah fuck it, unlimited file system based programs, horrible build engines and {}; all over the place"

I am now writing a large budget managing application in Pharo Smalltalk which I want to go ahead and put to test soon at my institution. I do not have any issues thus far, other than my documentation help is literally "read the source code of the package system" which is easy as shit since it is already included inside. My scripts are small, my class hierarchies cover on themselves AND testing is part of the system. I honestly see no faults other than "well....fuck you I like opening vim and editing 300000000 files"

And honestly that is fine, my questions are: why is a paradigm that fits procedural, functional and OBVIOUSLY OO while including an all encompassing IDE NOT more famous, SELECTION is fine and other languages are a better fit, but why is such environment not more famous?

My first rant. Woohoo!

Honestly I do the whole shebang ussualy depending on what the needs are from network to servers to coding because for some reason nobody has any technical experience where I work.
I just started app development for a gamedev startup and I am in sheer awe of the amount of transpiling/compiling etc that needs to be done for an multiplatform app for iOS and android with js(x)/typescript, html, css.

I remember when I could just write some spaghetti code to make it working by following a couple of tutorials. Then refractoring and testing it for a couple of hours and be done with it. push it into production.

Now I am lost having to learn OOP, functional programming, reactjs, react native, express, webpack, mongodb, babel, and the list goes on and on...
Why not just make a new backend that does all of that in another language which supports all of that.

I have no formal education in programming/coding and the last time I learned JS it was just some if else, switches and simple dom manipulation.

I just want to get to coding a freakin' game but I have to learn JSX for the front and typescript on the backend.

I am this close to going back to ye ol' lamp stack and quitting this job. 😥

¡rant|rant

Nice to do some refactoring of the whole data access layer of our core logistics software, let me tell an story.

The project is around 80k lines of code, with a lot of integrations with an ERP system and an sql database.

The ERP system is old, shitty api for it also, only static methods through an wrapper to an c++ library

imagine an order table.

To access an order, you would first need to open the database by calling Api.Open(...file paths) (yes, it's an fucking flat file type database)

Now the database is open, now you would open the orders table with method Api.Table(int tableId) and in return you would get an integer value, the pointer.

Now for the actual order. first you need to search for it by setting the search parameter to the column ID of the order number while checking all calls for some BS error code

Api.SetInt(int pointer, int column, int query Value)
Then call the find method.

Api.Find(int pointer)

Then to top this shitcake of an api of: if it doesn't find your shit it will use the "close enough" method of search.

And now to read a singe string 😑

First you will look in the outdated and incorrect documentation given to you from the devil himself and look for the column ID to find the length of the column.

Then you create a string variable with ALL FUCKING SPACES.

Now you call the Api.GetStr(int pointer, int column, ref string emptyString, int length)

Now you have passed your poor string to the api's demon orgy by reference.

Then some more BS error code checking.

Now you have read an string value 😀

Now keep in mind to repeat these steps for all 300+ columns in the order table.

News from the creators: SQL server? yes, sql is good so everything will be better?

Now imagine the poor developers that got tasked to convert this shitcake to use a MS SQL server, that they did.

Now I can honestly say that I found the best SQL server benchmark tool. This sucker creams out just above ~105K sql statements per second on peak and ~15K per second for 1.5 second to read an order. 1.5 second to read less than 4 fucking kilobytes!

Right at that moment I released that our software would grind to an fucking halt before even thinking about starting it. And that me & myself and I would be tasked to fix it.

4 months later and two weeks until functional beta, here I am. We created our own api with the SQL server 😀

And the outcome of all this...

Fixes bugs older than a year, Forces rewriting part of code base. Forces removal of dirty fixes. allows proper unit and integration testing and even database testing with snapshot feature.

The whole ERP system could be replaced with ~10 lines of code (provided same relational structure) on the application while adding it to our own API library.

Best part is probably the performance improvements 😀. Up to 4500 times faster and 60 times less memory usage also with only managed memory.

I was hired as a wpf dev for a large scale project and I was told that the backend is perfectly complete and that I am able to work right away, then after I started working, I noticed that every request I sent was returning a 500 internal error, I thought it was a problem on my end, but later I found out that they didn't even implement the api yet, it was just a "reference" for devs, which basically means that I should work and give them a perfectly functional app without testing anything at all.

something i love about pop os is that light mode just doesn’t work. it’s straight broken at least for me. i mean sure i have like 5 conflicting desktops installed but yeah, i like the idea that the light theme just straight up doesn’t work. it gives me comfort knowing that the developers who made it and the testers who tested it weren’t subjected to the cruelty of creating and testing a [functional] light theme.

Testing a script embed plugin I am building on various random websites, and came across this.

Like, bruh; have you ever heard of a javascript map? Basic functional programming? Or even a switch statement?

It's the same statement, over and over again, but with different parameters. Even old javascript had enough tools to do this with at least a basic stench of "efficiency"

This is my first rant, so here it goes:

Working with a functional SME who's "too busy" for end to end testing and, this is a direct quote, "I'm confident that the technical team can fix anything which inadvertanly gets broken by configuration/process changes". Then when the inevitable happens and he breaks something, he refers the irate users to my team. I really hate this guy.
Thanks for listening, fellow Ranters.

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

Just remembered that I still had a foobar invite link in my email inbox 😋

The challenges are odd though, first challenge was super easy (basically an idiot check), but while I was able to convert 3 cans of energy drink into a functional solution in half an hour, the verification utility is not very verbose at all. So in Python 3.7.3 in my Debian box it worked just fine, yet the testing suite in Foobar was failing the whole time. After sending an email to my friend that gave the link (several years ago now, sorry about that! 😅) asking if he knew the problem, I found out that Google is still using Python 2.7.13 for some reason. Even Debian's Python is newer, at 2.7.16. To be fair it does still default to Python 2 too. But why.. why on Earth would you use Python 2.7 in a developer oriented set of challenges from a massive company, in 2020 when Python 2 has already been dead for almost a whole year?

But hey now that it's clear that it's Python 2.7, at least the next challenges should be a bit easier. Kind of my first time developing in SnekLang regardless actually, while the language doesn't have everything I'd expect (such as integer square root, at least not in Debian or the foobar challenge's interpreter), its math expressions are a lot cleaner than bash's (either expr or bc). So far I kinda like the language. 2-headed snake though and there's so much garbage for this language online, a lot more than there is for bash. I hate that. Half the stuff flat out doesn't work because it was written by someone who requires assistance to breathe.

Meh, here's to hoping that the next challenges will be smooth sailing :) after all most of the time spent on the first one (17.5 hours) was bottling up a solution for half an hour, tearing my hair out for a few hours on why Google's bloody verification tool wouldn't accept my functioning code (I wrote it for Python 3, assuming that that's what Google would be using), and 10 hours of sleep because no Google, I'm not scrubbing toilets for 48 hours. It's fair to warn people but no, I'm not gonna work for you as a cleaning lady! 😅

Other than the issues that the environment has, it's very fun to solve the challenges though. Fuck the theoretical questions with the whiteboard, all hiring processes should be like this!

I feel like writing or telling people about the time I jumped from Windows 7 Ultimate and jumping to Windows 10. (I'm not against 10, but I'm never updating after what had happened to me)
It all starts when none of my games will play due to a possible issue with my graphics card. I look up "3D source game bug" and not many results pop up. I go on Microsoft's Qna areas and ask this question but to my surprise nothing they say would make sense. "Clean the pins of your graphics card, make sure you verify the games on Steam". I verified the games and they checked out as perfectly fine. I don't have access to my graphics card because this is a laptop, sadly not a tower.
Two months pass and my computer is already showing signs of stress, like it didn't want to live in a sense. It was three times slower than when I was on Windows 7 and it was unallocating areas of my main hard drive where I could make virtual hard drives.
Instantly I start looking up Linux distros and find Linux Mint. 17.3 was the current version at the time. I downloaded it and burned it onto a DVD-rom and rebooted my computer. I loaded into the disc and to my surprise it seemed almost like Windows 7 apart from the Linux part. I grab my external hard drive and partition it to hold the Linux distro and leave it plugged in incase Windows 10 does actually fail.
On December 19, a few months after Windows 10 had released. I start my laptop to try and continue my studies in video game development. But to my surprise, Windows 10 had finally crashed permanently. The screen flickered blue and black, and an error box saying Loginui.exe failed to start. I look at it for a solid minute as my computer had just committed suicide in a sense.
I reboot thinking it would fix the error but it didn't. I couldn't log in anymore.
I force shutdown the laptop and turn it back on putting it into safe mode.
To my surprise loginui.exe works and I sign in. I look at my desktop, the space wallpaper I always admired, the sound files, screen shots I had saved.
I go into file explorer and grab everything out of my default hard drive Windows was installed on. Nothing but 400gb got left behind and that was mainly garbage prototypes I had made and Windows itself. I formatted my external hard drive and placed everything on it. Escaping Windows 10 with around 100GB of useful data I looked at the final shutdown button I would look at.
I click it and try to boot into normal Windows 10. But it doesn't work. It flickers and the error pops up once more.
I force it to shutdown and insert the previous Linux Mint disc I made and format the default hard drive through Linux. I was done. 10 gave me a lot of shit. Java wouldn't work, my games has a functional UI but no screen popped up except a black abyss and it wouldn't even let me try to update my graphics card, apparently my AMD Radeon 5450 was up to date at the AMD Radeon 5000's.
I installed Linux Mint and thinking the games would actually play I open steam and Launch Half-Life 2 to check if Linux would be nicer to me than Windows 10 had been.
To my surprise the game ran. The scene from Highway 17 popped on screen and the UI was fully functional. But it was playing at 10-15fps rather than the usual 60-70fps. Keep look at my drivers and see my graphics card isn't in use. I do some research and it turns out I have a Hybrid Laptop.
Intel HD Graphics and an AMD Radeon 5450 and it was using the Intel and not the AMD. Months of testing and attempts of getting the games to work at high frame rates pass and the Damn thing still functions at a low terrible fps. Finally I give up. I ask my mom for a Windows 7 disc and she says we can't afford it. A few months pass and I finally get a Windows 7 installation disc through money I've saved up. Proudly I put it into my optical disc drive and install it to my main hard drive deleting Linux completely. I announced to all my friends my computer was back in working order and I install everything I needed, Steam, Skype, Blender, and Unity as well as all my games. I test Half-Life 2 and it's running exceptionally smoothly, I test Minecraft at max settings and it's working beautifully. The computer was functioning properly once again and my life as a developer started as I modeled things and blender, learned beginners C# and learned a lot of Batch. Today the computer still runs at a great speed and I warn others of what happened to me after I installed Windows 10 to my machine if they are thinking of switching from 7 or 8 on an older machine.
Truly the damage to my data cannot be undone. But the memory of the maintenance, work, tests, all are a memory of how Windows 10 ruined me and every night before the one year anniversary of Windows 10's release, I took out the battery of my laptop and unplugged it from the a.c. power, just so Windows 10 doesn't show it's DLLs, batch scripts, vbs scripts, anything on my computer. But now, after this has happened and I have recovered, I now only have a story to tell

Ranting...
So they called me for a phone interview, I made a good impression, the job desc. states that it's a full stack Java/J2EE Developer, after all they hired me.
Now I found myself doing validation (Implementing a VTP for functional testing) using UFT and VBS for an eclipse RCP application made in 2007, in my previous job I was a TL for a Spring/angular application with five other developers building a LIMS from scratch, I feel a bit disappointed, although the salary is pretty good and there is no stress at all.
Any comment is welcomed.

How do you switch from testing while debugging (functional) to TDD unit tests?

Usually I test while coding by just running the use case and making sure while coding, bad inputs are caught/handled.

But most times I start with a general idea of the structure and what the about should be (which essentially would be the functional test case?)

I don't think about how you can break each part or the functions I need until I need them. Then usually start simple and then refactor. And until I'm sure each time I refactor would require changing the tests?

What are your thoughts on documenting developer (local/dev) functional testing? Should we be trusted that we've tested our shit and it works? Or should we provide proof? Are we better to provide proof to protect ourselves?

How do you think about unit testing/TDD when writing apps? (I'm working this at 3am so might be a bit messy... Just a thought I woke up to).

Whenever I write an app, I don't write unit tests but as I'm developing I may create test functions for specific parts that I run to validate a specific component is working before moving onto the next.

So first, when I get a problem, break it up into components based on the requirements. It's usually sort of input, processor, output sequence.

Where the processor is essentially the core app. And so I start coding it, referring to the input thru an interface, model objects, adding fields as I go along (assume no matter what the input, I will get these before the logic is called). I may add some more interfaces as well for other data I may need but I know won't be going in the first input.

So I write all the logic, functions needed to get a basic app to run that does what I am writing the app for.

Only then do I write a test functions passing in different parameters to make sure the logic and response is what I want and making fixes as necessary. At that point I basically have the simplest version of the app.
(I guess this is sort of like mocking?)

Then build outwards implementing and testing components as I go along and may do some simple refactoring/redesign. (I guess all these tests are functional then, have to start the whole app).

And finally when I have the basic requirements fully complete I will add the "nice to haves" on top via refactoring of specific logic in specific components. Again testing by running the app maybe with simple inputs.

I guess now I'm thinking how do you write unit tests/TDD if the app keeps changing (via adhoc refactorings) as you are creating it?

1) receive functional requirements
2) create functional specification, post it on forum (no jira)
3) create memo document, post it on forum (no jira)
4) create analysis document with actual code changes without seeing the code (wait for step 8), post it on forum (no jira)
5) receive review on analysis document, fix it and post (no jira, redmine etc from now till the end of rant)
6) after analysis is approved make a checkout request
7) source code manager checkouts files from svn and posts them on forum along with the files list
8) you make actual changes to the code, post changed sources on forum
9) source code manager makes a review to check that amendment commet is present in source code and is properly tagged, and every line of code chnged is properly tagged (you are not allowed to delete anything, not even one space, you need to comment it (and put an appropriate tag))
10) after you passed review you fill in standard compilation request form
11) you code is compiled and elf is put on testing stand
12) you fill in "actual behaviour" and "expected behaviour" columns near description of changed function in template of unit test plan document (yeah we have unit testing) and post it on forum
13) if testing ok changed sources and compiled elfs along with its versions (cksum) commited to svn (not by you, there is a source code manager for that)
14) if someone developed function in same source file as you "commited" he is warned by source code manager and fills checkout request form again
15) ...

!rant
I saw many devs here complaining about WordPress, which I used to do. But recently WordPress saved me in work.
Client needed a fully functional e-commerce site with some custom logic in 3 days, which is required only for 2days for a contest. So we developed the site in WordPress in 2days, 1day testing and data upload.

So I'm not sure if there is any solution other than WordPress or platform like that to help in these kind of situations.

!rant

Using Java is there a framework for building functional tests?

For unit testing we use JUnit but when I'm writing my code, often I need to debug against an actual db, for example, to be able check it actually will work and return the results I expected (and mocked in the unit test).

Vague requirement for feature A received from client
Business consultant refines
Example mapping done
Acceptance criteria defined
Scheduled in sprint
Development done
Unit tests passed
Pull request reviewed
Code merged and deployed to system test
Functional testing successful
Deployed to UAT
Client asked to sign off

Client: "Actually I don't want that feature."

Being pretty much the only one who has some knowledge of how to code and get my way around tech (even if minimal, I'm too lazy for my own good) in my familiar household - and by extension, my family (Family extends FamiliarHousehold - LoL I'm sorry) - (my brother is on his first grade of a programming course in high school, I'm a 2nd grade uni student aiming to become a game dev) sometimes I wish I knew nothing of it.

Don't get me wrong, I do like working on code (if in Java. C is making me wanna tear my eyes out) but sometimes ignorant family members push me through the edge.

I worked on a business thing my family started this summer and one of the "jobs" was managing everything via a website.
Fair enough, I knew nothing of it when I started but I learn fast and just like that I knew my way around it. The problem came when I had to teach the person who started the project how it worked. This doesn't sound all that bad except he is kinda in the stone age regarding informatics.
He got a computer a few years ago and he pretty much only played poker in it, and he still had one of those old nokias you could throw to a wall and get a hole into it. The computer is like 9y and runs like crap.
To make things worse he bought a new phone, a smartphone, and pestered me to teach him. I swear trying to teach him is like repeating the same thing 1000x and pray he keeps it in his head. Spoiler: he doesn't. ( sanity--; )
So to try and easy my suffering I decided to make a manual for the website (which is outdated by now because the team behind the website did a 180 and some things looks different), but it acted as if I'd done nothing. ( sanity--; )
To top this off he keeps on saying I don't wanna help him. ( sanity--; )
This kept going for the whole damn summer, and meanwhile I had to go back to uni and in the first days I still got like 4-5 calls/day, half of those might about the smallest things because he's so panicky.
Like (both examples happened while I was still there but it kinda goes along those lines sometimes):
- (During the period they changed the website the first time since we're there; they were mostly doing changes back and forth and testing because it had a new layout for a day or 2 before going back; also the site was totally functional, except for a thing or 2)
Him: "They're changing the website, why are they doing that?"
Me: "Because it's their website and they can?"
Him: "WHY DIDN'T THEY LET US KNOW"
Me: "They don't have to, they don't work for you." ( sanity--; )
Or (during the same period; the pages have a menu on the left; one of the submenus has a counter that resets every time the session ends; during that maintenance time they must've "disabled" the function because the number kept growing even after the session ended):
Him: "WHY IS THE NUMBER GROWING?"
Me: "They're working on the code, relax, it's nothing."
Him: "But why." ( sanity--; )

The only quesion he pretty much hasn't asked me yet is why "Is the website's colour this one and not that one?".

Do you think that's a good idea to work with 4 developers on a shared development server without functional or technical specs and versioning software or testing methods/environment?
Just asking for a friend, not for my future employer...

A year ago I built my first todo, not from a tutorial, but using basic libraries and nw.js, and doing basic dom manipulations.

It had drag n drop, icons, and basic saving and loading. And I was satisfied.

Since then I've been working odd jobs.

And today I've decided to stretch out a bit, and build a basic airtable clone, because I think I can.
And also because I hate anything without an offline option.

First thing I realized was I wasn't about to duplicate all the features of a spreadsheet from scratch. I'd need a base to work from.

I spent about an hour looking.
Core features needed would be trivial serialization or saving/loading.

Proper event support for when a cell, row, or column changed, or was selected. Necessary for triggering validation and serialization/saving.

Custom column types.

Embedding html in cells.

Reorderable columns

Optional but nice to have:

Changeable column width and row height.

Drag and drop on rows and columns.

Right click menu support out of the box.

After that hour I had a few I wanted to test.

And started looking at frameworks to support the SPA aspects.

Both mithril and riot have minimal router support. But theres also a ton of other leightweight frameworks and libraries worthy of prototyping in, solid, marko, svelte, etc.
I didn't want to futz with lots of overhead, babeling/gulping/grunting/webpacking or any complex configuration-over-convention.

Didn't care for dom vs shadow dom. Its a prototype not a startup.

And I didn't care to do it the "right way". Learning curve here was antithesis to experimenting. I was trying to get away from plugin, configuration-over-convention, astronaut architecture, monolithic frameworks, the works.

Could I import the library without five dozen dependancies and learning four different tools before getting to hello world?
"But if you know IJK then its quick to get started!", except I don't, so it won't. I didn't want that.

Could I get cheap component-oriented designs?

Was I managing complex state embedded in a monolith that took over the entire layout and conventions of my code, like the world balanced on the back of a turtle?

Did it obscure the dom and state, and the standard way of doing things or *compliment* those?

As for validation, theres a number of vanilla libraries, one of which treats validation similar to unit testing, which seems kinda novel.

For presentation and backend I could do NW.JS, which would remove some of the complications, by putting everything in one script. Or if I wanted to make it a web backend, and avoid writing it in something that ran like a potato strapped to a nuclear rocket (visual studio), I could skip TS and go with python and quart, an async variation of flask.
This has the advantage that using something thats *not* JS, namely python, for interacting with a proper database, and would allow self-hosting or putting it online so people can share data and access in real time with others.

And because I'm horrible, and do things the wrong way for convenience, I could use tailwind.
Because it pisses people off.

How easy (or hard) would it be to recreate a basic functional clone of the core of airtable?

I don't know, but I have feeling I'm going to find out!

Capybara is so shit!

I can toss a coin and I would always get right on my prediction but I cannot predict if my functionals would pass!

A philosophical question about maintenance/updating.

There is no need to repeat the reasons we need to update our dependencies and our code. We know them/ especially regarding the security issues.
The real question is , "is that indicates a failure of automation"?

When i started thinking about code, and when also was a kid and saw all these sci fi universes with robots etc, the obvious thing was that you build an automation to do the job without having to work with it anymore. There is no meaning on automate something that need constant work above it.

When you have a car, you usually do not upgrade it all the time, you do some things of maintance (oil, tires) but it keeps your work on it in a logical amount.
A better example is the abacus, a calculating device which you know it works as it works.

A promise of functional programming is that because you are based on algebraic principles you do not have to worry so much about your code, you know it will doing the logical thing it supposed to do.
Unix philosophy made software that has been "updated" so little compared to all these modern apps.
Coding, because of its changeable nature is the first victim of the humans nature unsatisfying.

Modern software industry has so much of techniques and principles (solid, liquid, patterns, testing that that the air is air) and still needs so many developers to work on a project.
I know that you will blame the market needs (you cannot understand the need from the start, you have to do it agile) but i think that this is also a part of a problem .
Old devices evolved at much more slow pace. Radio was radio, and still a radio do its basic functionality the same war (the upgrades were only some memory functionalities like save your beloved frequencies and screen messages).

Although all answers are valid, i still feel, that we have failed. We have failed so much. The dream of being a programmer is to build something, bring you money or satisfaction, and you are bored so you build something completely new.

Congratulated a Dev at my company after he had finished all the functional testing...

Until he mentioned that he just needs to tweak the test to work with the new code now..

Upgrading my tech skills.. Once again I feel my personal my personal dev environment and told are much more up-to-date than what I use at work.... Though the book Kim reading is on TDD and was written 3 years ago.

Maybe I should read another on in cloud services and ML... but don't have any motivation for these topics.

I need TDD for work because now we're emphasizing unit test coverage...

I usually only use manual functional tests to verify the final outputs as either the testing framework is broken (JS) or I don't have time to relearn the frameworks for the particular language...

Anyway got off topic... So questions after:

1. Do you ever feel your technologically always more ahead than what you do at work and essentially you bring skills to the job but you don't learn much out of it?

2. How do you test? I actually got into a bit of a argument/discussion with my colleagues about how to implement unit tests. Apparently there are 2 ways to test? Black box vs WhiteBox. She said she tests only Public methods using mock inputs, dependencies. She read online and seems there is an opinion that should only test public functions and if you can't then your app is designed incorrectly, not separated enough.

For me I test the private functions individually (WhiteBox/Java reflection) because the public one is like generateReport and as a whole is like a Pachinko machine, too many unique paths that would need a test case for.

So thoughts? Yes sorry for turning it into a remake I guess...