Sit down before you read this.

So I interviewed a guy for a "Support Engineer" internship position.

Me and the team lead sit down and are waiting for him to enter, but apparently he's actually making a coffee in the kitchen.

This isn't exactly a strike since the receptionist told him that he can go get a drink, and we did too. It's just always expected for him to get a glass of water, not waste 3 minutes brewing a coffee.

In any case he comes in, puts the coffee on the table, then his phone, then his wallet, then his keys and then sits on our side of the table.
I ask him to sit in front of us so we can see him. He takes a minute to pack and tranfer himself to the other side of the table. He again places all of the objects on the table.

We begin, team lead tells him about the company. Then I ask him whether he got any questions regarding the job, the team or the company . For the next 15 minutes he bombards us with mostly irrelevant and sometimes inappropriate questions, like:
0: Can I choose my own nickname when getting an email address?
1: Does the entire department get same salaries?
2: Are there yoga classes on Sundays only or every morning?
3: Will I get a car?
4: Does the firm support workspace equality? How many chicks are in the team?
5: I want the newest grey Mac.

And then.. Then the questions turn into demands:
6: I need a high salary (asks for 2.5 more than the job pays. Which is still a lot).
I ask him why would he get that at his first job in the industry (remind you, this is an internship and we are a relatively high paying company).
He says he's getting paid more at his current job.
His CV lists no current job and only indicates that he just finished studying.
He says that he's working at his parent's business...
Next he says that he is very talented and has to be promoted very quickly and that we need to teach him a lot and finance his courses.

At this point me and the team lead were barely holding our laughs.

The team lead asks him about his English (English is not our native language).
He replies "It's good, trust me".
Team lead invites him for an English conversation. Team lead acts like a customer with a broken internet and the guy is there to troubleshoot. (btw that's not job related, just a simple scenario)
TL: "Hello, my name is Andrew, I'm calli..."
Guy: *interrupts* "Yes, yes, hi! Hi! What do you want?"
TL: "Well, if you let me fi..."
Guy: "Ok! Talk!"
TL: "...inish... My internet is not working."
Guy: "Ok, *mimics tuning a V engine or cooking a soup* I fixed! *points at TL* now you say 'yes you fixed'".

Important to note that his English was horrible. Disregarding the accent he just genuinely does not know the language well.

Then he continiues with "See? Good English. Told you no need to check!".

After about half a minute of choking on out silent laughter I ask him how much Python experience he has (job lists a requirement of at least 1 year).
He replies "I'm very good at object oriented functional programming".
I ask again "But what is your experience? Did you ever take any courses? Do you have a git repository to show? Any side.."
*he interrupts again* "I only use Matlab!".

Team lead stands up and proceeds to shake his hand while saying "we will get back to you".

At last the guy says with a stupid smile on his face "You better hire me! Call me back tomorrow." Leaves TL hanging and walks away after packing his stuff into the pockets.

I was so shocked that I wasn't even angry.
We both laughed for the rest of the day though. It was probably the weirdest interview I took part at.

Coworker: "Hey do you have 30 minutes? We should debug my broken code together."

Me: *slightly interested in the project he's working on* "Sure, let's do it."

Coworker: *explains the problem for 10 mins*

Me: "Maybe--"

Coworker: "OH here's the problem!" *type type type* *git commit -am 'Fixed'* "Done."

Me: *wants 10 minutes of life back*

🍿🍿 pull up a chair and get comfy. This was a few years ago and anger has filled some details, so bear with me...

One day, during one of rare afternoons off of work, I was in the library to work on a group project for school. This was maybe a month before it was due, so we were tracking for decent progress and one less stressor over finals. It was about 80° F out, with the perfect breeze for the beach, but school comes first.

I'm team lead (which is terrifying, but less important) and my bro C shows up early to be ready to go on time because he's professional. I'M SO BAD I FORGOT DOUCHEBAGS NAME, so he's A (for asshole), shows up AN HOUR AND 15 MINUTES LATE. But it's not the end of the world, C and I worked around our database schema (which A sent us and we approved), so we could iron out kinks as we went.

A gets there... Fucking finally.

Fucker didn't have the database built (had 2 months to do it, we all agreed on schema a month prior. We're trying to be the adults our ages claim is to be).

*breathe in, count to 10* not a problem, A, just go ahead and start it now so we can at least check what we have.

Ok, my queen, I'll have it done in 10 minutes...

🤔🤔

We needed an id (sku... Which, in 99.9999% of companies is numeric), a short name (xBox one, Macbook, don't smart tv), a description and a price (with 2 decimals). All approved by all 3 of us.

His sku ranges from 3 to 9 ALPHA NUMERIC CHARACTERS, the names were even more generic than expected (item1, item 2, Item_3), no description, and he somehow thought US currency had 5 decimal places!!! (it's more accurate...)

There was an epic, royal, and expensive fight scene in the library (may have been during the Lenten season I decided to give up caffeine AND fast for 40 days to prove a point to an ass wipe of a history teacher, don't recall). I made him cry, he failed the class because C and I wound up fixing everything he touched (graded by commits, because it was also an intro to git, but also, a classmate saw it all), and I had to buy multiple people coffee for yelling in the library.

A tried making out buttons work (I was fed up and done thinking for the day, so moved to documentation), but he fucked those up. I then made those worse by having nested buttons, but I deleted all his shit and started over and fixed it.

I then cried, but C and I survived and have each others backs still.

Commit Message Part2:
6528fff Code was clean until manager requested to fuck it up
241b35f Who knows WTF?!
4381a32 Argh! About to give up :(
c3bf1a9 more debug... who overwrote!
2d68d6d Fixed a bug cause Maciej said to
b112c1a This branch is so dirty, even your mom can't clean it.
bb456d4 Shit code!
4878b46 Copy-paste to fix previous copy-paste
e2c7e87 A fix I believe, not like I tested or anything
f56109f derpherp
e4b8f4c formatted all
3691208 I'm just a grunt. Don't blame me for this awful PoS.
0888b69 just checking if git is working properly...
62741aa I'm too old for this shit!
0735196 COMMIT ALL THE FILES!
09caccf I CAN HAZ PYTHON, I CAN HAZ INDENTS
1e1cda8 giggle.
ab70bde Fixed errors
934436d Now added delete for real
5f84e30 My bad
99baff8 CHRIS, WE WENT OVER THIS. C++ IO SUCKS.
953473d final commit.
f0c3b57 Just committing so I can go home
4e5ce4e yolo push
deb4e3b I CAN HAZ PYTHON, I CAN HAZ INDENTS
710c06a Commit committed....
3c45e67 it is hump day _^_
4487788 Committing in accordance with the prophecy.
bf86e7e This solves it.
4804f68 FONDLED THE CODE
051d42e REALLY FUCKING FIXED

Hey guys,

this rant will be long again. I'm sorry for any grammar errors or something like that, english isn't my native language. Furthermore I'm actually very sad and not in a good mood.

Why? What happened? Some of you may already know - I'm doing my apprenticeship / education in a smal company.
There I'm learning a lot, I'm developing awesome features directly for the clients, experience of which other in my age (I'm only 19 years old) can only dream.
Working in such a small company is very exhausting, but I love my job, I love programming. I turned my hobby into a profession and I'm very proud of it.
But then there are moments like the last time, when I had to present something for a client - the first presentation was good, the last was a disaster, nothing worked - but I learned from it.

But this time everything is worse than bad - I mean really, really worse than bad.

I've worked the whole week on a cool new feature - I've done everything that it works yesterday, that everything gets done before the deadline of yesterday.

To achieve this I've coded thursday till 10pm ! At home! Friday I tested the whole day everything to ensure that everything is working properly. I fixed several bugs and then at the end of the day everything seems to be working. Even my boss said that it looks good and he thinks that the rollout to all clients will become good and without any issues.

But unfortunately deceived.

Yesterday evening I wrote a long mail to my boss - with a "manual". He was very proud and said that he is confident that everything will work fine. He trusts me completly.

Then, this morning I received a mail from him - nothing works anymore - all clients have issues, everything stays blank - because I've forgotten to ensure that the new feature (a plugin) and its functionality is supported by the device (needs a installation).
First - I was very shoked - but in the same moment I thought - one moment - you've written an if statement, if the plugin is installed - so why the fuck should it broken everything?!
I looked instant to the code via git. This has to be a very bad joke from my boss I thought. But then I saw the fucking bug - I've written:
if(plugin) { // do shit }
but it has to be if(typeof plugin !== 'undefined')

I fucked up everything - due to this fucking mistake. This little piece of shit I've forgotten on one single line fucked up everything. I'm sorry for this mode of expression but I thought - no this can not be true - it must be a bad bad nightmare.
I've tested this so long, every scenario, everything. Worked till the night so it gets finished. No one, no one from my classmates would ever think of working so long. But I did it, because I love my job. I've implemented a check to ensure that the plugin is installed - but implemented it wrong - exactly this line which caused all the errors should prevent exactly this - what an irony of fate.

I've instantly called my boss and apologized for this mistake. The mistake can't be undone. My boss now has to go to all clients to fix it. This will be very expensive...

Oh my goodnes, I just cried.
I'm only working about half a year in this company - they trust me so much - but I'm not perfect - I make mistakes - like everyone else. This time my boss didn't looked over my code, didn't review it, because he trusted me completly - now this happens. I think this destroyed the trust :( I'm so sad.
He only said that we will talk on monday, how we can prevent such things in the feature..
Oh guys, I don't know - I've fucked up everything, we were so overhelmed that everything would work :(
Now I'm the looser who fucked up - because not testing enough - even when I tested it for days, even at home - worked at home - till the night - for free, for nothing - voluntary.

This is the thanks for that.
Thousand good things - but one mistake and you're the little asshole. You - a 19 year old guy, which works since 6 months in a company. A boss which trusts you and don't look over your code. One line which should prevent crashing, crashed everything.

I'm sorry that this rant is so long, I just need to talk to you guys because I'm so sad. Again. This has happend to frequently lately.

git commit -m "fixed bug where div wasn't resizing with window size change. Next I'll work on new bug which makes it so the pages won't load at all"

I HATE SVN! >:v v:< >:v v:< :@

I used to use git for my personal code repositories and for my work. In the office I moved on, they use Subversion. I’ve been using it for months, but it’s a pain in the ass :/

We use TortoiseSVN to pull code repositories, and the AnhkSVN for Visual Studio Plugin. It works fine until two or more of us have to work at the same code project at the same time.

Last week we had a very VERY urgent code to release. We had 4 days to finish it (from thursday to sunday, tests included). We had few changes to do, but the problem was that, when one dev commited something, my changes disappeared, and viceversa. The worst part was that my partners and I had to re-work a lot of bugs that we had already fixed! >:v

This is not the first time this happens :/

The worst thing is that we cannot change our repository system because we don’t have time :(

Is there any advice you, SVN users, can give us?

The only serious, as in customer affecting, bug I never git fixed was an indexing bug that caused an exception requiring manual intervention by one of us.

Despite going at it for many years I never found the root cause before I left the company.

The reason it was so difficult was that it only occurred every second month or less and with different customers.
It was also not triggering directly when the error occurred but a while later once the error had caused accumulated errors until one value got negative.

Also, it was a combination SQL, backend code and frontend js and the time from initial error until an invalid value could be hours, days or even weeks.

And we never ever managed to replicate it our self and found no common pattern between occasions.

We think it was some kind of race condition when updating the db that caused duplicate values or a hole in the index series (db transaction or db index was not an option for various reason that would require a redesign of the central tables and most if the central code).

This then grew into multiple error on consecutive updates until one f them resulted in a negative number that then caused a regex in js to fail.

I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3

Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.

I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.

So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.

So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.

That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3

Microshaft WanBLowS.

I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.

Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.

At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.

So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.

Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.

That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.

(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)

That moment when you have refactored so much shit, then really broken the project, but can't see yourself doing a git revert because you had invested so much time and know ultimately it *needs* these changes...

Thank god I fixed it! 😌

FFS stop squashing commits. If “updated comments” is what the commit was it should show it in git blame. If “fixed null check” is what the commit was it should show it in git blame.

There is no reason to have “ticket-234 service revision” beside 1000 lines of code. How does anyone justify this loss of git info for the sake of “clean history”? Nobody looks at your history and says, “That is bloody clean git history I should write home about it.” People do however look at the code and say, “I wish I knew WTF they were trying to do on that line.”

First thing on Monday. The very first thing.

I fucking killed prod.

Reminder to my future self to either stash local config files and .htaccess files... or add them to gitignore... But either way, don't leave them lying around assuming I won't do something dumb and accidentally commit them. Because some fateful Monday morning before I've had my coffee I'm going to do something dumb.

TL;DR;

Idiot hard coded database host on the app... Pushed to prod and suddenly shit wasn't working... Took me 10 minutes to figure out what was going on...

Wrote a passive aggressive git message and commited.
Before updating prod my boss turns around to me and the following took place:

Boss: is there any problem with the server?

Me: yes, someone (i know who was ) hard coded the test db IP and it broke the backend.

Boss: oh, but will it affect the mobile app?

Me: well, it won't work but I'm already pushing the fix.

Boss: no..err.. I mean... Will I have to make any change to the mobile app?

Me inside: wtf dude... For real?! Get your shit together...

Me: no. It good, I already fixed it.

Boss: OK. Thanks

TL;DR;

Moron hard coded dB's host and stupid boss can't get shit together nor ask who did it to take precautions...

I just noticed visualizing git is like a timeline with alternate realities and a lot of time travel. The main branch is the main timeline and the branches are like fixes from the past to try and make the future better they merge when the future is fixed otherwise if someone or something fucked up time traveling it becomes the main timeline.

Group assignment in a software engineering class. Got that notorious lazy kid in my group of four who failed the class in the last term. I was perfectly aware of his reputation, but accepted him in the group nonetheless, because he already knows what needs to be done in the class.

He started to work on his assignment: mostly boilerplate code that didn't even build. He didn't even bother to fix it. I had a lot of time over the Easter weekend, so I decided to just code as much for the assignment as possible for the mid-term submission. I replaced his broken boilerplate stuff with a working solution. I told the others in the group chat about it. Code works and builds, test coverage is high. Everything is fine.

The lazy kid replied to the group chat, that if I'd wanted to code and document(!) everything on my own, I should have told him in the first place. Also got that "fuck off" emoji in the message. So I restored his broken boilerplate stuff using git, even fixed the build errors and told him to explain to me what he tried to achieve, and that I'd be happy to include his code as soon as it worked. Didn't hear anything since. Commits neither.

I guess he was just looking for an excuse for not doing additional work in the project.

We had 1 Android app to be developed for charity org for data collection for ground water level increase competition among villages.

Initial scope was very small & feasible. Around 10 forms with 3-4 fields in each to be developed in 2 months (1 for dev, 1 for testing). There was a prod version which had similar forms with no validations etc.

We had received prod source, which was total junk. No KT was given.

In existing source, spelling mistakes were there in the era of spell/grammar checking tools.

There were rural names of classes, variables in regional language in English letters & that regional language is somewhat known to some developers but even they don't know those rural names' meanings. This costed us at great length in visualizing data flow between entities. Even Google translate wasn't reliable for this language due to low Internet penetration in that language region.

OOP wasn't followed, so at 10 places exact same code exists. If error or bug needed to be fixed it had to be fixed at all those 10 places.

No foreign key relationships was there in database while actually there were logical relations among different entites.

No created, updated timestamps in records at app side to have audit trail.

Small part of that existing source was quite good with Fragments, MVP etc. while other part was ancient Activities with business logic.

We have to support Android 4.0 to 9.0 of many screen sizes & resolutions without any target devices issued to us by the client.

Then Corona lockdown happened & during that suddenly client side professionals became over efficient.

Client started adding requirements like very complex validation which has inter-entity dependencies. Then they started filing bugs from prod version on us.

Let's come to the developers' expertise,
2 developers with 8+ years of experience & they're not knowing how to resolve conflicts in git merge which were created by them only due to not following git best practice for coding like only appending new implementation in existing classes for easy auto merge etc.

They are thinking like handling click events is called development.

They don't want to think about OOP, well structured code. They don't want to re-use code mostly & when they copy paste, they think it's called re-use.

They wanted to follow old school Java development in memory scarce Android app life cycle in end user phone. They don't understand memory leaks, even though it's pin pointed by memory leak detection tools (Leak canary etc.).

Now 3.5 months are over, that competition was called off for this year due to Corona & development is still ongoing.

We are nowhere close to completion even for initial internal QA round.

On top of this, nothing is billable so it's like financial suicide.

Remember whatever said here is only 10% of what is faced.

- An Engineering lead in a half billion dollar company.

A custom script that makes a Jira ticket, assigns it to me, marks it as in progress, check out a git branch, set the commit title and the Jira title to my command line argument…. Push, open a PR, and fuck it, merge that shit too.

I checked all the corporate boxes and you got the typo fixed.

We get an email from the customer that a feature they “are using every day” is broken and it needs to be fixed ASAP. Sure, seems to be broken in current build. Run git blame to see when it stopped working. Last change may of last year. It’s been broken for almost a year and it took them until now to notice even though they “use it every day”.

GIT LOG VERSION 110
---------------
a9c2934 I don't believe it
fb8d2e6 I am Root. We are Root.
6be9078 FINALLY FIXED THE FUCKING BUG IN THE CODE, DO NOT EVER EVER FUCK ME AGAIN YOU MARON
3d08a88 THIS IS THE FUCKING WORKING VERSION
013faed THIS IS NOT WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR, GO TO A PREVIOUS COMMIT
af5d013 We'll figure it out on Monday
49e238b de-misunderestimating
a40351b happy monday _ bleh _
a5f345d Fixed unnecessary bug.
485a26a pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
c4fcbde s/import/include/

I came home about 1am and saw a bug in a small (unpaid...) project that had to do with timezones (see some earlier rants). Fixed it, got to bed.
A few days later I realized that a feature I implemented before was gone. Going through the git log I found out it was me in that night who removed it, by accident I suppose.
Not the end of the world but I was quite intrigued by my own drunk ability to remove a feature that had nothing to to with what I was doing and not even noticing it.

TLDR; College group projects suck, not because the work, but the people in your group will make or break you. Fuck having 1 week to do this assignment.

Sometimes working with other students on group projects is great, they actually know how to create a merge a git branch. I've had a decent partner once during my 3 years at university so far. This last project takes the cake on idiots I've worked with...so far at least... It was me and two others, we'll call them Thing1 and Thing2 for now. Anyway so the 3 of us had a week to implement a very rudimentary Invoice system; fine, easy enough. We divided up the work and 'started'.
All seemed to be going well, no complaints or cries for help all week. Until 4 hours before we submit the assignment; Thing 1 sends me a DM saying all of Thing 1's work is useless full of bugs and just shouldn't be integrated with the rest of the code. Umm fine? I guess? wtf?! why did this have to come out last minute?! We could have explained to Thing 1 what's going on and gotten him/her up to speed on everything. Believe it or not, I was sorta ok with this? I mean thing 1 hadn't pushed anything to the repo yet. I mean literally nada, Thing 1 is a collaborator on the repo that has contributed nothing. Seeing as how Thing 1 was contributing nothing I had already started to cover our ass a began Thing 1's work.
That's not even what's pissed me off... at least thing 1 had the gall to message me to say "idk..wtf is going on...continue without me". Thing 2 arguably made my time with the project worse. His code was nothing but garbage...every time...literally spent more time deciphering his incoherent bullshit more than I did rewriting his mess. I shit you not he wrote out this method, and tells the group he's "finally got it fixed and working":
public static float updateTotal(float newValue)
{
total = updateTotal(newValue);
return total;
}

How tf did he test this to see if its working?! I'm a novice and can already see the infinite loop here. You called your method within that method's own definition, what did you expect to happen.
I managed to get things 75% working and turned in 5 mins before the cut off.
Thankfully Thing 1 emailed the Proff as well, hopefully he won't tank my grade too bad. I'm so glad to be done with this assignment, fingers crossed there's no more group work.

Fucking unreal bro!!! I’m working on an issue and I pushed, then there was a bug, i fixed it again, another issue for the UI change, another fixed for sorting column. All that fixed I created separate branch. My boss called me and told me im stupid for creating a separate branch everytime on a simple fix, he told me that Git isnt used that way. He told me that his been doing this 30years already. So I asked isnt it the best practice to create a separate branch on every issue or if the branch has been merged? His answer is no. Fuck this guy and his 30years experience

I should’ve responded:
First of all, if we have a test suite then I would have notice that error but we dont. You dont even want to upgrade ruby and rails. We’re stuck at version 4 on rails. Second why are you merging my MR and reviewing it on IST? Why didnt you do that locally so you can address the issue before you merged? Third fuck you and your 30years

My actual response is:
Ahh yes sir, im sorry wont happen again, my bad, sorry for that mistake.

Fuck bro im mad!!!!

v0.0005a (alpha)
- class support added to lua thanks to yonaba.
- rkUIs class created
- new panel class
- added drawing code for panel
- fixed bug where some sides of the UI's border were failing to drawing (line rendering quark)

v0.0014a (alpha) 11.30.2023 (~2 hours)
- successfully retrieving basic data from save folder, load text into lua from files
- added 'props' property to Entity class
- added a props table to control what gets serialized and what doesn't
- added a save() base method for instances (has to be overridden to be useful beyond the basics)
- moved the lume.serialize() call into the :save() method on the base entity class itself
- serialized and successfully saved an entities property table.
- fixed deserializion bugs involving wrong indexes (savedata[1] not savedata[2])
- moved deserialization from temp code, into line loading loop itself (assuming each item is on one line)
- deser'd test data, and init()'d new player Entity using the freshly-loaded data, and displayed the entity sprite

All in all not a bad session. Understanding filing handling and how to interact with the directory system was the biggest hurdle I was worried about for building my tools.

Next steps will be defining some basic UI elements (with overridable draw code), and then loading and initializing the UI from lua or json.

New projects can be set as subfolders folders in appdata, using 'Setidentity("appname/projectname") to keep things clean.

I'm not even dreading writing basic syntax highlighting!

Idea is to dogfood the whole process. UI is in-engine rendered just like you might see with godot, unity, or gamemaker, that way I have maximum flexibility to style it the way I want. I'm familiar enough with constructing from polygons, on top of stenciling, on top of nine-slicing, on top of existing tweening and special effects, that I can achieve exactly what I want.

Idea is to build a really well managed asset pipeline. Stencyl, as 'crappy' as it appeared, and 'for education' was a master class in how to do things the correct way, it was just horribly bloated while doing it.

Logical tilesets that you import, can rearrange through drag-n-drop, assign custom tile shapes to, physics materials, collisions groups, name, add tag data to, all in one editor? Yes please.
Every other 2D editor is basic-bitch, has you importing images, and at most generates different scales and does the slicing for you.

Code editor? Everything behavior was in a component, with custom fields. All your code goes into a list of events, which you can toggle on and off with a proper toggle button, so you can explicitly experiment, instead of commenting shit out (yes git is better, but we're talking solo amateurs here, they're not gonna be using git out the gate unless they already know what they're doing).

Components all have an image assignable to identify them, along with a description field, and they're arranged in a 2d grid for easy browsing, copying, modifying.

The physics shape editor, the animation editor, the map editor, all of it was so bare bones and yet had things others didn't.

I want that, except without the historic ties to flash, without the overhead of java, and with sexier fucking in-engine rendering of the UI and support for modding and in-engine custom tools.

Not really doing it for anyone except myself, and doubt I'll get very far, but since I dropped looking for easy solutions, I've just been powering through all the areas I don't understand and doing the work.

I rediscovered my love of programming after 3-4 years of learning to hate it, and things are looking up.

Well, it happened, my school managed to block SSH

It also means no more git, and if this shit isn't fixed I might be forced to use TFS

Whoop de doo

Good code is a lie imho.

When you see a project as code, there are 3 variables in most cases:

- time
- people / human resources
- rules

Every variable plays a certain role in how the code (project) evolves.

Time - two different forms: when certain parts of code are either changed in a high frequency or a very low frequency, it's a bad omen.

Too high - somehow this area seems to be relentless. Be it features, regressions or bugs - it takes usually in larger code bases 3 - 4 weeks till all code pathes were triggered.

Too low - it can be a good sign. But it should be on the radar imho. Code that never changes should be reviewed at an - depending on size of codebase - max. yearly audit. Git / VCS is very helpful here.
Why? Mostly because the chances are very high that the code was once written for a completely different requirement set. Hence the audit - check if this code still is doing the right job or if you have a ticking time bomb that needs to be defused.

People
If a project has only person working on it, it most certainly isn't verified by another person. Meaning that only one person worked on it - I'd say it's pretty bad to bad, as no discussion / review / verification was done. The author did the best he / she could do, but maybe another person would have had an better idea?

Too many people working on one thing is only bad when there are no rules ;)

Rules. There are two different kind of rules.

Styling / Organisation / Dokumentation - everything that has not much to do with coding itself. These should be enforced at a certain point, otherwise the code will become a hot glued mess noone wants to work on.

Coding itself. This is a very critical thing.

Do: Forbid things that are known to be problematic in the programming language itself. Eg. usage of variables in variables, reflection, deprecated features.

Do: Define a feature set for each language. Feature set not meaning every feature you want to use! Rather a fixed minimum version every developer must use and - in case of library / module / plugin support - which additional extras are supported.

Every extra costs. Most developers don't want to realize this... And a code base that evolves over time should have minimal dependencies. Every new version of an extra can have bugs, breakages, incompabilties and so on.

Don't: don't specify a way of coding. Most coding guidelines are horrific copy pastures from some books some smart people wrote who have no fucking clue what you're doing and why.

If you don't know how to operate on people, standing in an OR and doing what a book told you to do would end in dead person pretty sure. Same for code.

Learn from mistakes and experience, respect knowledge from other persons, but always reflect on wether this makes sense at this specific area of code.

There are very few things which are applicable to a large codebase on a global level. Even DRY / SOLID and what ever you can come up with can be at a certain point completely wrong.

Good code is a lie - because it can only exist at a certain point of time.

A codebase should be a living thing - when certain parts rot, other parts will be affected too.

The reason for the length of the comment was to give some hints on what my principles are that code stays in an "okayish" state, but good is a very rare state

git commt -m 'fixed it?' && git push

I hate Intellij Idea but it's best option available to develop in Scala. Improvements in VSCode/Metals is my last hope.

The (few) things I NEED from Intellij:
* Very good autocompletion
* Refactoring tools (renaming, auto imports)
* Search tools (find usages, sub/super-types)

The (many) things I hate of Intellij:

* Layout with panel sizes doesn't behave properly and it scales instead of remaining fixed.

* Tedious 2-hands shortcuts makes the right hand to move a lot from the mouse

* Delays and lag in the UI, freezes on garbage collection

* High memory consumption, high CPU usage and generally slow and cumbersome

* The delay in the UI between commands is so that it's accidentally possible to introduce typos

* Can't move tabs around and organize them as I like

* Ugly font rendering and missing typography settings

* Multi-caret implementation as a different editing mode is annoying because requires frequent switching

* Unnatural code folding regions, why method arguments are not folded with the method?

* Unhelpful support forum, sometimes dismissive answers

* Highlighting of current word under the caret doesn't work

* Very slow editor, can't keep spacebar pressed to move text or it hangs!

* Several settings reset at every update. Like the auto fetch of git

* New features are added and enabled by default which is very invasive

* Some of the features mentioned above are really annoying and it's not possible/not trivial to disable them

* It uses its own compile and several times it highlights false positives

I'm using typescript and run mocha acceptance tests. I was confused as to why my tests were failing on the Jenkins albeit they passed locally just fine.

I couldn't find the error. Just after making a pause, implementing something else, I realized what the problem was:

As I renamed a folder from `fixtures` to `tapes` my test run on the Jenkins suddenly claimed to not find the files in `fixtures`. Yet in my code base there was no occurrence of the string `fixtures` anymore and then it hit me like a brick wall:

I have old transpiled files in my outDir, the `dist` folder on the jenkins! Locally, I make sure to run `git clean -fd` once in a while, so I never was hit by it it locally. Yet my jenkins had really old files in the `dist` folder. And just running `rm dist/* && tsc` fixed the entire ordeal.

Well, JavaScript is so 2012 and typescript is the new shit, yet transpiling the code can leave to some quite strong headaches.

I have some friends who finished undergrad together and they are working on side jobs at the moment. From my experience with them, they wrote shit code and their deployment methods were a mess. I remember everytime I pointed out something wrong and tried to fix it, all they said was "it works" and they seemed proud and didn't bother to fix anything. Plus they didn't even know how to use git properly and they didn't merge my code that actually fixed the problems before submitting the project because they didn't know how to use git merge. Fuck them. I'm so glad I no longer have to work with them. It's a shame that they're working on projects for small to medium sized companies (that can't afford someone to actually review their work) writing shit code with bad practices because some day, somebody has to clean up that mess when shit goes down.. Dumb proud programmers..fuck

What the fuck is happening with Windows 10 after April 2018 update?

1. Opened my local github repo in external drive
2. Made changes
3. Try to stage, get this weird "error: unable to open object pack directory: .git/objects/pack: Function not implemented" error.
4. Googled it, says check drive for errors.
5. Scanned drive, fixed error, drive has no errors.
6. Opened my repo, all file sizes are "ZERO", including my changed work, gone, poof.

It be cool our if SVN got fixed so I could commit changes again. Or while it's down look at other vc options, maybe git?

Nudge, nudge wink, wink.

But in all seriousness wtf did the dba's do to break SVN? Logging my changes in a spreadsheet sucks raw balls.

In my first few months of my first dev job, I written this fragile piece of code in, trigger warning, PHP that sent out email reports to my clients. It was a two men team, and we have no clue about TDD or how to do unit testing for such code. We would just run that piece of code manually do send out dummy emails to ensure things were working.

One day the code broke. I was told by my boss to fix it. Spent the entire day trying to fix but couldn't get anything done. Finally at around 7pm my boss came by and asked why is it I couldn't get it fixed. He helped me troubleshoot and fixed it. And subsequently told me "c'mon man you're better than this."

It turns out that he changed a part of a code that was supposed return an array of strings to an array of objects, adding a second attribute that wasn't even in use.

So what that meant is that he changed a piece of working code, to include a property he didn't need, committed and push to production without even manually testing it. AND TALKED SHIT TO ME.

That was the day I learned git blame and began my journey on TDD.

I had a colleague, who built a bunch of smaller systems for the company I'm working in. He didn't want to waste his time building a "perfect" system (which I generally agree with, the question is just where to draw the line).

But because it took him so long to build the prototype, usually it went into production without being hardened (like basic input validations were missing. It wouldn't allow anything malicious, but instead of a validatiom error it'd just 500).

When he left, literally less then a week later, one of his systems, which was a prototype and nobody except him could maintain, because it was done in a fancy new technology, which wasn't even v1 at that time and their documentation said, it's production ready when we release v1. Anyway, that one system started crashing just few days after him leaving. Another Dev and me tried to fix it, but every time we touched it, it just got worse.

At some point, we gave up and just configured a cron job to reboot it every 12h. He could have probably fixed it, but to us it was just black magic.

Anyhow, this rent isn't about him, AFAIK all the systems still working, as long as you provide the correct input. Nor is it about the management decisions, which lead to this Frankenstein service on live support, which we had to increase, to be restarted every 8 hours, 6h, 4h, 3h, .....

It's about the service itself, which I'm looking forward to every day, when the rewrite will be done and I can nuke the whole git repository.

I was even thinking about moving all the related files onto a USB stick and putting that on 🔥, once we're done rewriting it....

Maybe next month or in 2. Hopefully before we'll have to configure the cron job to restart the service every couple minutes....

Today I spent almost a full hour after office hours debugging my code for an issue only to realise that the local process responsible for live reloading my code did not pick up changes after git branch switch.
So in retrospect, if I had left the bug for the day it would have automatically got fixed tomorrow once my laptop restarted.
But no...I just had to figure out the issue on my own today which wasted a complete hour and I won't get it back 🤦🏽‍♂️

Pretty niche tool, but Sencha Architect!
It is a wanna be GUI-Builder/IDE for ExtJS, but neither works properly.
This rant is not about ExtJS, just about Sencha Architect, which my coworkers and I were forced to use.
If you want to join the ride, here an excerpt of just some of the issues:

- installation: already the setup is more of a gamble than an actual setup, either it works on your machine or it doesn't, plain and simple

- GUI Builder: just drag and dropping components is actually nice, but the editing capabilities are frustrating, you can't edit the UI code by hand at all, just through pre defined properties. If there was the need to really mix things up it wasn't possible, I couldn't even rebuild shown examples of their ExtJS documentation. Furthermore the property editor was data type locked, which means if you want to enter a string which ExtJS already supports, but architect locks the value as a boolean, you can't edit it at all, while still using Architect

- code editing: well it is a colored texteditor, which is fine, and I could live with that, but Architect let's you just edit areas where it allows you to - want to change something else? Nope not allowed

- autocompletion: there is none at all, same goes for refactoring, multi highlighting, string replacement, and others

- code storing: well now some may think edit it somewhere else, well no, also not possible... Architect not just only saves simple js, there is also a Json formatted file for everything you have created, which is needed so the tool can actually load it for further editing. They possibly never heard of DRY. But the worst of this code storing was actually using git along with it - have a merge conflict? Merge both files! Every single time, it was so damn tedious

There are a few more, but these were the worst I can remember.
Luckily I don't have to use it anymore!
Maybe they have fixed or changed a lot of it, because the developers were aware of the issues and eager to resolve them, as far as I was told on a roadmap presentation. And some of the tools they had released in the end of my time using ExtJS were actually really good, like an IDE plugin for the framework, and I liked using it.

I just commented a test so the PR passes and the feature reaches next release; I can't fix it (Damn react testing library tests)

but after that, the linter failed for the same PR, so I just fixed it and did a git push -f

I guess once you cross the line you cannot come back

feel my pain