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I thought I was really good at debugging. Then I met this legend in my workplace. And he was like...
5 -
"Hey, Root, someone screwed up and now all of our prod servers are running this useless query constantly. I know I already changed your priorities six times in the past three weeks, but: Go fix it! This is higher priority! We already took some guesses at how and supplied the necessary code changes in the ticket, so this shouldn't take you long. Remember, HIGH PRIORITY!"
1. I have no idea how to reproduce it.
2. They have no idea how to reproduce it.
3. The server log doesn't include queries.
4. The application log doesn't include queries.
5. The tooling intercepts and strips out some log entries the legendary devs considered useless. (Tangent: It also now requires a tool to read the logs because log entries are now long json blobs instead of plain text.)
6. The codebase uses different loggers like everywhere, uses a custom logger by default, and often overwrites that custom logger with the default logger some levels in. gg
7. The fixes shown in the ticket are pretty lame. (I've fixed these already, and added one they missed.)
8. I'm sick and tired and burned out and just can't bring myself to care. I'm only doing this so i don't get fired.
9. Why not have the person who screwed this up fix it? Did they quit? I mean, I wouldn't blame them.
Why must everything this company does be so infuriatingly complicated?11 -
I’m surrounded by idiots.
I’m continually reminded of that fact, but today I found something that really drives that point home.
Gather ‘round, everybody, it’s story time!
While working on a slow query ticket, I perused the code, finding several causes, and decided to run git blame on the files to see what dummy authored the mental diarrhea currently befouling my screen. As it turns out, the entire feature was written by mister legendary Apple golden boy “Finder’s Keeper” dev himself.
To give you the full scope of this mess, let me start at the frontend and work my way backward.
He wrote a javascript method that tracks whatever row was/is under the mouse in a table and dynamically removes/adds a “.row_selected” class on it. At least the js uses events (jQuery…) instead of a `setTimeout()` so it could be worse. But still, has he never heard of :hover? The function literally does nothing else, and the `selectedRow` var he stores the element reference in isn’t used elsewhere.
This function allows the user to better see the rows in the API Calls table, for which there is a also search feature — the very thing I’m tasked with fixing.
It’s worth noting that above the search feature are two inputs for a date range, with some helpful links like “last week” and “last month” … and “All”. It’s also worth noting that this table is for displaying search results of all the API requests and their responses for a given merchant… this table is enormous.
This search field for this table queries the backend on every character the user types. There’s no debouncing, no submit event, etc., so it triggers on every keystroke. The actual request runs through a layer of abstraction to parse out and log the user-entered date range, figure out where the request came from, and to map out some column names or add additional ones. It also does some hard to follow (and amazingly not injectable) orm condition building. It’s a mess of functional ugly.
The important columns in the table this query ultimately searches are not indexed, despite it only looking for “create_order” records — the largest of twenty-some types in the table. It also uses partial text matching (again: on. every. single. keystroke.) across two varchar(255)s that only ever hold <16 chars — and of which users only ever care about one at a time. After all of this, it filters the results based on some uncommented regexes, and worst of all: instead of fetching only one page’s worth of results like you’d expect, it fetches all of them at once and then discards what isn’t included by the paginator. So not only is this a guaranteed full table scan with partial text matching for every query (over millions to hundreds of millions of records), it’s that same full table scan for every single keystroke while the user types, and all but 25 records (user-selectable) get discarded — and then requeried when the user looks at the next page of results.
What the bloody fucking hell? I’d swear this idiot is an intern, but his code does (amazingly) actually work.
No wonder this search field nearly crashed one of the servers when someone actually tried using it.
Asdfajsdfk.21 -
@Root has a code review.
CR comment: “Why would you do it this way? It’s awful. Clean it up!”
Totally fair. I had copied the legendary dev’s code, and it was ick. Cleaning it was easy and enjoyable. I cleaned the source, too.
CR comment: “Why would you touch this? It’s outside the scope of the ticket. You could get it working without changing all this.”
Revert…
CR comment: “The interfaces don’t match. Now it’s confusing, and that makes it harder to maintain.”
🤦🏻♀️16 -
Fuck the incompetent and "pretentious psuedo devs" !!
I have been developing a web portal for a student club for this really big company (as intern) and then they assign this fuckin group of these 4 stupid intern devs to work with me !
The fuckin tweked my code and redirected the CONTACT FORM to the fuckin LOGIN CONTROLLER !!
Then these sons of Einstein inserted dummy users without a username and password into the fuckin production site !!
Now each fukin time someone submits contact form is redirected into some random user account !!
Who the fuck needs Hackers when we have these legendary coders -_-11 -
Why is the contributing manual of your open source project more thoughtfully cultivated than your code style guide and testing procedure?
Why the fuck do you care about the message in my PR, or even merge vs rebase of commits, when your spaghetti-tomatosource is so richly saturated with critically minced bugmeat?
Why are you standing there, shouting at me about your convoluted rules, in your little brown uniform? Why do I feel like the enemy when I contribute a useful fix, something which makes the code work better?
You know what, fuck all of you, you jilted acetous neckbeards, I will deploy my secret weapon, I will bypass the power you hold over your tiny fascist digital dominions.
If you play it like this, I will summon the nefarious vile side of Open Source. I will usurp your throne. I will stab out your crying eyes, rip out your conceited tongue, impale your lonely heart.
Tremble before me! I wield the almighty, legendary Fork!
The king is dead, long live the king!5 -
Hey Root. Here’s a new ticket for you. It involves lots of things you’ve never seen before, and the only person you can ask is out this week.
Hey Root. Why haven’t you been making good progress every day? Why didn’t you reach out to the guy on FTO? Clearly you can’t communicate. Give me detailed status updates twice a day at specific times, covering <exhaustive list of topics> so I know you’re working. What do you mean “no”!?
Hey Root. Stop working on that ticket, and work on this other ticket. It’s the same thing, but different. High-priority!
Hey Root. You asking questions about that ticket pissed off a legendary golden boy principal dev, and he said it’s a bad idea and that we should have assigned it to a different team, too — you know, the team who usually works on these areas. But we might still have you do it. Please work on the previous ticket that’s in the exact same area until we decide.
Hey Root. Why haven’t you gotten anything done?12 -
Adventures in security land.
The “legendary” lead dev authored a ticket that logs raw credentials for a third-party tool we’re using, and logs partially-obscured consumer passwords. His reasoning: “for debugging. And customer service!” And then argued with me over why that’s bad! Seriously?
Then in the release channel, he and the release manager are talking like I’m pestering them with my findings. Things like “I have some Root-induced changes coming” and “Fixed those, but she’ll probably have more...” etc.
Like come on.
I’m even being nice here, but you seriously need to stop screwing this up.
They also didn’t bother merging the fixes into the release branch, so I needed to re-review the entire (large) ticket on its own branch. Doubles the effort since I can’t easily see what changed.
The lead dev also only updated a few of the specs (despite me sending him a list), so there’s a bunch of failing ones now. Makes me unsure if he actually fixed everything.
Maybe I’m just being touchy, but ugh. Freaking annoying people.
At least he owned up to being the author this time instead of saying someone else (who wasn’t in the history...) wrote it. -.-9 -
The idea was simple. Create a div.
Add two 50% div's inside. Float them. Add clearfix to parent.
Everything was fine.
Noticed that one of the childs had a height bigger than the other. But due to an adaptive design, setting static heights did not work.
Simple fix. Add a height to parent div and set overflow-y to hidden.
It didn't work.
Tried using the legendary !Important (a.k.a. not important but important.) Didn't work. Set position to relative, set static height. Set the childs to absolute position with height 100%. Problem solved.
No. It. Didn't. Fucking. Work.
Tried every possible css combination could could fucking think off.
After 15 minutes (8 hours in dev-stress mode) realized the clearfix changed the div DISPLAY TO FUCKING TABLE. A TABLE. FUCKING TABLES CANT HAVE FUCKING HEIGHTS FUCK.
Anyway. 6 years after my first clearfix. I learnt something new about the code that saves my life every project.6 -
ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.
I'll summarize the few I remember.
First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.
Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'
and gems like:
def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end
^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.
Next up are a few of my personal favorites:
Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am
LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?
And for design decisions...
The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'
I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.
Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.
But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.
Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.
Yep, it's garbage all the way down.16 -
The nightmare continues.
Currently dealing with a code review from a “principal” dev (one step above senior), who is unironically called a “legendary dev” by some coworkers. It’s painfully obvious he didn’t read the code, and just started complaining and nitpicking.
It’s full of requests to do things that make absolutely no sense, and would make the code an unmaintainable mess.
• Ex: moving the logic and data collection from the module’s many callers into the module instead of just passing in the data.
• Ex: hiding api endpoint declarations by placing them in the module itself, and using magic instance variables to pass data to it. Basically: using global functions and variables instead of explicit declarations and calls.
• Ex: moving the logic to determine which api endpoint to use, for all callers, into the view.
More comments about methods being “too complex” (barely holds water) right next to comments saying “why are these separate? merge them together!”
Incredulously asking how many times I’m checking permissions and how ridiculous it all is. (The answer? Twice.)
Conflating my “permissions” param and method names with a supposedly forthcoming permissions system overhaul, and saying I shouldn’t use permissions because my code will all have to get rewritten. Even if that were true, and it’s likely not, the ticket still needs to use the current permissions. I can’t just ignore them because they might be rewritten someday.
Requests to revert some code cleanup because the reviewer thought the previous heavily-nested and uncommented versions (with code duplication) were easier to read. Unsurprisingly, he wrote them.
On the same ticket, my boss wants me to remove all styling and clientside validation, debouncing, and error messages from a form. Says “success” and “connection failed” messages are good enough. The form in question sends SMS and email using arbitrary user input for addresses. He also says it shouldn’t be denounced on the server, and doesn’t want me to bother checking permissions. Hello, spam!
Related: the legendary dev reviewer says he can’t think of a reason why we would want to disable the feature for consumers, so I should remove the consumer feature flag.
You can’t make this stuff up.7 -
I'm fixing a security exploit, and it's a goddamn mountain of fuckups.
First, some idiot (read: the legendary dev himself) decided to use a gem to do some basic fucking searching instead of writing a simple fucking query.
Second, security ... didn't just drop the ball, they shit on it and flushed it down the toilet. The gem in question allows users to search by FUCKING EVERYTHING on EVERY FUCKING TABLE IN THE DB using really nice tools, actually, that let you do fancy things like traverse all the internal associations to find the users table, then list all users whose password reset hashes begin with "a" then "ab" then "abc" ... Want to steal an account? Hell, want to automate stealing all accounts? Only takes a few hundred requests apiece! Oooh, there's CC data, too, and its encryption keys!
Third, the gem does actually allow whitelisting associations, methods, etc. but ... well, the documentation actually recommends against it for whatever fucking reason, and that whitelisting is about as fine-grained as a club. You wanna restrict it to accessing the "name" column, but it needs to access both the "site" and "user" tables? Cool, users can now access site.name AND user.name... which is PII and totally leads to hefty fines. Thanks!
Fourth. If the gem can't access something thanks to the whitelist, it doesn't catch the exception and give you a useful error message or anything, no way. It just throws NoMethodErrors because fuck you. Good luck figuring out what they mean, especially if you have no idea you're even using the fucking thing.
Fifth. Thanks to the follower mentality prevalent in this hellhole, this shit is now used in a lot of places (and all indirectly!) so there's no searching for uses. Once I banhammer everything... well, loads of shit is going to break, and I won't have a fucking clue where because very few of these brainless sheep write decent test coverage (or even fucking write view tests), so I'll be doing tons of manual fucking testing. Oh, and I only have a week to finish everything, because fucking of course.
So, in summary. The stupid and lazy (and legendary!) dev fucked up. The stupid gem's author fucked up, and kept fucking up. The stupid devs followed the first fuckup's lead and repeated his fuck up, and fucked up on their own some more. It's fuckups all the fucking way down.20 -
So, I was going to complain about JS being finicky and not making a damned bit of sense, but it turns out that it wasn't JS's fault. Not entirely, anyway. It was the halfassed JS minifier middleware (written by the legendary dev himself) that was breaking the JS while writing it to the page.
The original problem:
My code worked. I removed some comments. Big ol' block of //'s. And suddenly $() isn't a function. But if I call $(); at the top, it all works!
It turns out the "minifier" caused JS to think my code was chaining off the previous JS line in the rendering pipeline instead of being a separate statement. so all it really needed was a `;` at the start. What threw me, though, was the last line of the previous blob of (non-minified) JS was a comment, so it should be a separate statement, right?
But as it turns out...
```
console
// JS really is finicky.
.log('Sigh.');
```16 -
I’m adding some fucking commas.
It should be trivial, right?
They’re fucking commas. Displayed on a fucking webpage. So fucking hard.
What the fuck is this even? Specifically, what fucking looney morons can write something so fucking complicated it requires following the code path through ten fucking files to see where something gets fucking defined!?
There are seriously so fucking many layers of abstraction that I can’t even tell where the bloody fucking amount transforms from a currency into a string. I’m digging so deep in the codebase now that any change here will break countless other areas. There’s no excuse for this shit.
I have two options:
A) I convert the resulting magically conjured string into a currency again (and of course lose the actual currency, e.g. usd, peso, etc.), or
B) Refactor the code to actually pass around the currency like it’s fucking intended to be, and convert to a string only when displaying. Like it’s fucking intended to be.
Impossible decision here.
If I pick (A) I get yelled at because it’s bloody wrong. “it’s already for display” they’ll say. Except it isn’t. And on top of that, the “legendary” devs who wrote this monstrosity just assumed the currency will always be in USD. If I’m the last person to touch this, I take the blame. Doesn’t matter that “legendary Mr. Apple dev” wrote it this way. (How do I know? It’s not the first time this shit has happened.) So invariably it’ll be up to me to fix anyway.
But if I pick (B) and fix it now, I’ll get yelled at for refactoring their wonderful code, for making this into too big of a problem (again), and for taking on something that’s “just too much for me.” Assholes. My après Taco Bell bathroom experiences look and smell better than this codebase. But seriously, only those two “legendary” devs get to do any real refactoring or make any architecture decisions — despite many of them being horribly flawed. No one else is even close to qualified… and “qualified” apparently means circle jerking it in Silicon Valley with the other better-than-everyone snobs, bragging about themselves and about one another. MojoJojo. “It was terrible, but it fucking worked! It fucking worked!” And “I can’t believe <blah> wanted to fix that thing. No way, this is a piece of history!” Go fuck yourselves.
So sorry I don’t fit in your stupid club.
Oh, and as an pointed, close-at-hand example of their wonderful code? This API call I’m adding commas to (it’s only used by the frontend) uses a json instance variable to store the total, errors, displayed versions of fees/charges (yes they differ because of course they do), etc. … except that variable isn’t even defined anywhere in the class. It’s defined three. fucking. abstraction. layers. in. THREE! AND. That wonderful piece of smelly garbage they’re so proud of can situationally modify all of the other related instance variables like the various charges and fees, so I can’t just keep the original currency around, or even expect the types to remain the same. It’s global variable hell all over again.
Such fucking wonderful code.
I fucking hate this codebase and I hate this fucking company. And I fucking. hate. them.7 -
When managers look at my code, it’s shit, it’s over complicated, it’s overly difficult to read, it took too long, it’s too much for a simple ticket, i handled too many edge cases, we’ll never need most of it, why did I bother making it extensible when it’ll never need to change, how dare I use “unless”, why did I bother writing all these comments, why did I update the documentation that nobody reads because it’s outdated, etc. They say I should be more like the legendary devs and push janky code quickly, and complain that I don’t have any flops (problems in prod) like those are a good thing.
When my coworkers look at my code, they say it’s clean, amazingly easy to read, a monster feature that’s somehow still a joy to review and work on, it makes their lives easier, that it does exactly what it should in all cases, that they learned something from reading it, and thank me for the comments and documentation. And marvel that I finished it so well in so little time.
Am I bragging? Not intentionally; I’ve heard these things repeatedly since I started here, and the contrast between the above is so stark.
In reality, the managers are just idiots who were promoted far above their competence, and make everything worse. (Gee, who woulda thought?) It’s just so frustrating.19 -
CR: "Add x here (to y) so it fits our code standards"
> No other Y has an X. None.
CR: "Don't ever use .html_safe"
> ... Can't render html without it. Also, it's already been sanitized, literally by sanitize(), written by the security team.
CR: "Haven't seen the code yet; does X change when resetting the password?"
> The feature doesn't have or reference passwords. It doesn't touch anything even tangentially related to passwords.
> Also: GO READ THE CODE! THAT'S YOUR BLOODY JOB!
CR: "Add an 'expired?' method that returns '!active'?"
> Inactive doesn't mean expired. Yellow doesn't mean sour. There's already an 'is_expired?' method.
CR: "For logging, always use json so we can parse it. Doesn't matter if we can't read it; tools can."
CR: "For logging, never link log entries to user-readable code references; it's a security concern."
CR: "Make sure logging is human-readable and text-searchable and points back to the code."
> Confused asian guy, his hands raised.
CR: "Move this data formatting from the view into the model."
> No. Views are for formatting.
CR: "Use .html() here since you're working with html"
> .html() does not support html. It converts arrays into html.
NONE OF THIS IS USEFUL! WHY ARE YOU WASTING MY TIME IF YOU HAVEN'T EVEN READ MY CODE!?
dfjasklfagjklewrjakfljasdf5 -
Ticket: This API param doesn’t work.
Ticket Size: 1 story point / extra small baby fries
Found the issue almost immediately: some fucked up date math. Or at least backwards as hell. I don’t know. I don’t care.
There’s no spec for it, and writing it is a bitch. None of the API test helpers are designed for end-to-end tests. Why? I don’t care. They’re stupid. They all just break. And the API does weird shit like fucking redirects to an HTML page. Which is… i don’t know. They mix up API and embedded sessions a bunch, so who knows if this is right or broken as fuck.
I can’t deal with this shit anymore.
It’s just mountains of fucking garbage. Every time I dig into anything, anywhere in this codebase, or, let’s be honest: the entire goddamn company, it’s just more fucking garbage. The code is garbage. The specs are garbage. The people are garbage. The woke crap they love so much is garbage. The industry is garbage. The macs we’re required to use are garbage. The strongly-encouraged editor is garbage. The new hires are garbage. The legendary devs are garbage. The VPN is garbage — still haven’t gotten it to fucking work outside of fucking Safari, which is also garbage. The meetings are garbage. The “culture” is garbage. The “raises” are garbage. The thirty-step dance ceremony for each ticket is garbage. The literal fucking garbage at the office is the best part of the entire goddamn landfill.
And yeah, over half of the code that’s been giving me problems on this ticket was written by the same dev: The legendary golden garbage boy himself.
Just.
Fucking hell.
I’m going back to looking for work again. I can’t do this anymore.10 -
How I feel about devRant reputation
0-100 - Sup noobie
100-1000 - Hey man
1000-4999 - devRant Demigod
5000+ - Legendary9 -
Moving away from technology and becoming self-sufficient. A cottage with a stream on the edge of a forest, a large garden, some chickens and other animals, and no smart devices, managers, tickets, KPAs, performance reviews, legendary devs shitting out an endless stream of bugs, etc.
Peace and quiet.
And freedom at last.
That’s success.
That’s the ultimate success: escape.13 -
Commas.
I fix one display, and another breaks.
Now I’m getting “$$1002.99” and can’t figure out why. Where is this popup coming from? Where does the encrypted URL point to? What does this ajax call do? Where does the amount go? When does it change? Why is it a string now? Where does the total get defined? How far down the rabbit hole do I need to go?
Short short version:
I found something to try fixing. I made some changes, forced a crash to inspect, and… Joy! My log stopped updating. How long have I been debugging on stale data?
Skipping a long debugging session…
I discover a suspect instance var in a suspect method, and… i have no freaking clue where it’s being defined. It’s used in the class, but never defined in it. Oh, and the name is pretty generic, so searching for it is even more fun.
Just.
Qxfrfjkalstf.
WHO WRITES THIS CRAP?!
AND WHY DO PEOPLE CALL THEM “LEGENDS”? Like, really. That’s the word they use. “Legends.” I still can’t believe it.8 -
It seems like everybody here was born as a legendary coder or started in their teens. I'm 24 now and just starting out.
How did you guys do it???44 -
This was some time ago. A Legendary bug appeared. It worked in the dev environment, but not in the test and production environment.
It had been a week since I was working on the issue. I couldn't pinpoint the problem. We CANNOT change the code that was already there, so we needed to override the code that was written. As I was going at it, something happened.
---
Manager: "Hey, it's working now. What did you do?"
Me: *Very confused because I know I was nowhere close to finding the real source of the problem* Oh, it is? Let me check.
Also me: *Goes and check on the test and prod environment and indeed, it's already working*
Also me to the power of three: *Contemplates on life, the meaning of it, of why I am here, who's going to throw out the trash later, asking myself whether my buddies and I will be drinking tonight, only to realize that I am still on the phone with my manager*
Me again: "Oh wow, it's working."
Manager: "Great job. What were the changes in the code?"
Me: "All I did was put console logs and pushed the changes to test and prod if they were producing the same log results."
Manager: "So there were no changes whatsoever, is that what you mean?"
Me: "Yep. I've no idea why it just suddenly worked."
Manager: "Well, as long as it's working! Just remove those logs and deploy them again to the test and prod environment and add 'Test and prod fix' to the commit comment."
Me: "But what if the problem comes up again? I mean technically we haven't resolved the issue. The only change I made were like 20 lines of console logs! "
Manager: "It's working, isn't it? If it becomes a problem, we'll work it out later."
---
I did as I was told, and Lo and Behold, the problem never occurred again.
Was the system playing a joke on me? The system probably felt sorry for me and thought, "Look at this poor fucker, having such a hard time on a problem he can't even comprehend. That idiotic programmer had so many sleepless nights and yet still couldn't find the solution. Guess I gotta do my job and fix it for him. I'm the only one doing the work around here. Pathetic Homo sapiens!"
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that it's over but..
What the fuck happened?5 -
that one legendary guy who cranks out code and builds insane features. PMs (product management) love him because he builds features in several months which 10 devs together couldn't have built in the same time (so they say), features that are loved by customers as well, become their new standard and that have saved our company's asses in the past.
features are really awesome, performant and have very few bugs (compared to the rest of the software シ).
but this guy seems to live for this job. he also works at weekends, at unholy times of day and night and even in his holidays (he doesn't care that this is actually illegal, in terms of employee's rights, and he wouldn't listen to his superiors, no matter what they tell him)
so far, so good - except that he will probably die of some stroke or something very soon due to this lifestyle.
but it must be an absolute pain in the ass to work with him, as long as you're a developer (or his superior).
he lives in his own world and within the software, his features are also his own world. since the different modules interact with each other, sometimes you would be assigned a bug that might have its cause in some interaction of your and his module. talk with him about it? forget it. he wouldn't answer most devs who contacted him for some reason. ever. fix it in his module yourself? might happen that he just reverts your changes to his module without comments. so some bugs would lie on your desk forever because theoretically you know what would need to be done but if you cannot reach out into HIS world, there's no way to fix it. also - his code might be good in terms of performance and low bug numbers. but it seems to be hard to work on that code for everybody else but him.
furthermore, he is said to be really rude. he is no team player, but works on a software that is worked on by a huge team.
PMs think he's a genius, just a great dev, but they don't understand that other devs need to clean up the mess behind or around him.
everyone who's been his superior so far recommends to get him fired, but the company wouldn't fire him because they don't want to lose his talent. he can just do what he wants. he can even refuse to work on certain things because he thinks they are boring and he is not interested in them. devs seem to hate him, but my boss said, they are probably also a bit jealous because of his talent. i think, he's not wrong. :)
i haven't actually met him so far or was actually "forced" to deal with him, but i've never heard so many contrastive things about one person, the reputation of his, let's say vibrant personality really hurries ahead. he must be a real genius, after all i've heard so far, like he lives in the code. i must say i'm a bit curious but also somewhat afraid of meeting him one day.
do you also have such a guy at your company?12 -
When programmers troll. The comments of this commit is also legendary: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/...
4 -
Once again I have loads.
My best teachers were...
The contractor that taught me C#, ASP MVC and SQL Server. Dude was a legend, so calm and collected. He wanted to learn JQuery and Bootstrap so at the same time as teaching, he was learning from me. Such an inspirational person, to know your subordinates still have something to teach you. He also taught me a lot about working methodically and improving my pragmatism.
The other, in school I studied computing A-Level. 100% scored at least one of the exams... basically I knew my stuff.
But, as a kid, I didn’t know how to formulate my answers, or even string together coherent answers for the exams. This dude noticed, first thing he did was said “well you’re better at this bit than me, practice but you’ll be fine” (manually working out two’s complement binary of a number).
Second thing he did was say “you know what man, you know what you’re on about but nobody else is ever going to know that”.
He helped me on the subjects I wasn’t perfect on, then he helped me on formulating my answers correctly.
He also put up with my shit attendance, being a teenager with a motorcycle who thinks he knows it all, has its downsides.
As a result, I aced the hell out of that course, legendary grades and he got himself a bit of a bonus for it to use on his holiday. Everyone’s a winner.
Liam, Jason, if you guys are out there I owe you both thanks for making me the person I am today.
The worst, I’ve had too many to name... but it comes down to this:
- identify your students strengths and weaknesses, focus on the weaknesses
- identify your own and know when to ask for help yourself
- be patient, learning hurts.
You can always tell a passionate teacher from one who’s there for the paycheck.1 -
Think I am going to try out my first stuff for my game engine in 2D. The games I have the most fond memories of were 2D. Sure I like what has happened on the 3D side. But it would be fun to recreate some of my favorite 2D games. Except with one caveat: procedural generation. Never play the same game twice. For testing purposes I will have a seed system to regenerate the same worlds. I would have played these games so much longer if they had been based on a seed for generation of content.
I also like the idea of weapons and armor never being exactly the same. Sure they can look similar, but on close inspection you could see differences. It will be fun to start with base models and then add imperfections and differences.
Another issue I have with fantasy games is always leveling up the weapon by buying something better. Sure we have improvement systems though smithing and magic, but some weapons are always better than others. I wanted to have a game where weapons could be improved by usage and upgrades. Kill 1000 trolls and the weapon gets imbued with trollbane. Kill a dragon and the blood infuses and it deals fire damage. So a player could start out with the family sword and end up with a god tier weapon at the end of the game. Make weapons become legendary. Not because it has more power, but because trolls recognize the blade and the wielder and are scared shitless.
Terrain in 2D should be a lot easier to generate. Weapons, armor, etc should be easier to modify and generate. This should give me the grounding I need to develop the algorithms for a future 3D system. Godot is currently stronger in 2D than 3D. That will change in the next couple of years as more focus is put on the engine. There is no reason I cannot experiment with mixing 2D and 3D as well.
Holy shit, I was just thinking I cannot imagine the amazing shit they could have done with the games I played as a kid with 2D physics!
Haha, something they had in the older games was actual gambling. You could bet on monster fights and slot machines in game. I wonder if that takes a hard hit with ESRB now?
Currently stuck in tutorial hell. Learning how the engine works and seeing what features are available. I get more excited each video I watch. The engine is packed with goodies and the addons are crazy good.
tldr: First project will be short game in 2D. Will explore procedural content.13 -
This is my laptop's desktop, as I currently have it set. This sexually arouses me with its legendary beauty.
Show me yours.
9 -
There it fucking is again...
The legendary spyware "Antimalware Service Executable".
I changed the entry in the regedit. Tried to delete it with every possible tool. Tried to "chmod" it in the Windows way to be able to delete it as an admin. Doesn't work.
I swear in the name of bloody satan. This shit is doomed. It cannot be removed even if your shit begins to burn.
Microsoft, fucking remove it.
It is not a fucking feature!
Your windows updates fucking suck, your compatibility telemetry whatever the fuck you call these retarded ass "features" anymore fucking suck, your windows defender sucks.
Is there anything that doesn't suck in the features that you produce? I don't fucking think so. Fucking die for fucks sake.
Apple is overpriced, but at least they do their job well. Not like you, you fucking scumbags!
JESUS!
14 -
So at work, there is this class/model thing that's for storing translated strings. It also supports n-level nested macros, cascading lookup (e->d->c->b->a->blank), and I've added transforms too. The code is a bloody mess and very inefficient (legendary dev's code), but it's useful.
You call methods with a symbol representing one of the strings, and it does... whatever you ask, like return text, booleans, expand macros and submacros, pass in data to interpolate, etc.
But I just learned something today.
Its `.html` method... doesn't support html. In fact, calling it strips out all html, takes whatever is left, and attempts to convert that back into html. Because that makes so much sense. So, if you have an html string? Don't call html on it.
Also, macros use the same <angle brackets> as html tags, and macro expansion eats unknown macros, so... you can't mix html and macros, meaning you cannot inject values into your markup. That's a freaking joy to work around. (You end up writing a parser every time.)
So no, if you have an html string, you need to get the raw data out and handle it yourself. Don't reach for that shiny .html method; it'll just ruin your day.
It's the little things that make my day so terribly long.8 -
The legendary advent of code for 2022 starts today!
Here's the link https://adventofcode.com/.
Good luck!5 -
I’d been working event based and freelance jobs in the security and entertainment fields for years, with odd stints as a bartender sprinkled in. My pay was mostly decent, but I had no job security, and I was more on the road than at home. A few years before this job search experience I had already realised I can’t continue on this path for ever, especially if I ever want a serious relationship (e.g. 16 weeks straight touring Europe with on avg. 16h work days pretty much every day isn’t ideal in that regard, and also really though on both body and mind). So I decided to study. As I applied in autumn, not every line of study accepted students. The closest to my interest I found was BBA in Business IT.
Fast forward 1,5 years. After moving away from my previous base due to then-gfs studies, I had also been able to accept less work. Well, there were really two reasons: I didn’t want to go on weeks long big tours anymore, and I’d had to price up on my freelance job due to reasons. I still managed to keep our household going, but not knowing when the next paycheck would be available was becoming a little too stressful. I wanted job security. So a few weeks after my wedding I scoured the internetz for positions I could apply to, and applied to a dozen or so places. They were a variety of positions I had a vague understanding of from what I’d learned at UAS: from sales to data analytics to dev… I was aware pretty much all of the applications were a long shot by best, so I expected to be ghosted…
Two of the organizations I applied to wanted to go forward with me. Both dev jobs. I can’t even remember the specifics of the other one anymore, but I do remember the interview: I got in to their office (which was ridiculously open), and got marched into a tiny conference room. The interviewer was passive-aggressive and really bombarded me with questions, not really leaving a socially awkward introvert with any time to answer. I started to get really anxious and twitchy, sweating like a pig. Just wanted out. But nooo, they wanted me to do a coding test live. So they sat me on a computer with Eclipse open, gave me an assignment and told me not to use the internet. What’s even worse is that I could literally feel the interviewer breathing down my neck when I tried to do the test. Well, didn’t happen cause I was under so much pressure that I couldn’t think at all… yeah, that was horrible.
Anyhow, the other position I really applied to because it was in my hometown and I recognised the company name from legendary commercials from the 90s - everyone in this country who watched TV in mid-to-late 90s remembers those. Anyway, to my surprise, my present day manager contacted me and wanted me to do a coding test. At the time he asked I was having a bout of fevers after fevers, not really able to get healthy. I told him that I’d do it as soon as I’m healthy. A month went by, maybe more. He asked again. Again I replied that as soon as I get healthy, but promised to do it next week the latest. I didn’t deliver on that, but the next week after that, even if I was the most feverish I had been, I did the tests. I could only finish half of them, cause I couldn’t look at a screen for long at a time and had to visit the loo every 10min or so, but apparently that was enough. Next week I was already going to the interview… oh I also googled what is PHP on the way there, since it was mentioned as a requirement and I had no idea what it was. Imagine that…
The interview itself couldn’t have been more different from the other one. We were sitting in a nice conference room with my manager and the product’s lead dev, drinking coffee, our feet on the table and talking smack. Oh, and we did play a game of NHL<insertNumber> on PS4 during the interview… it was relaxed. Of course the more serious chat was there, too, but I can only really remember how relaxed it was. When I left the interview, I had been promised the position and that I would be sent the contract to be signed as soon as the CEO had reviewed and approved it. Next day, I had signed it and some time later I started at my current job (I gave a date when I was available to start, since there was a tour still agreed upon between the interview and the start).
Oh, and the job’s pretty much like the interview. Relaxed. It’s a good place to be in, even though the pay could be better (I regularly get offers for junior positions with more pay, and mid level positions with double the pay). I do value a pleasant working environment and the absence of stress more than big munny, what can I say?1 -
I recreated the legendary experience of Windows XP . Go now and enjoy it live at
https://tilakmaddy.github.io/Window...
(also lowkey subscribe 2 my youtube channel where I'll post more such stuff at https://youtube.com/watch/...)
5 -
I subscribe to many copywriting newsletters. Here's an article that shows how it's like on "the other side", marketers struggle, too.
How Kevin's Massive Mistake
Completely Changed His Life
Kevin H. made a huge mistake.
The biggest, he would say, if he could tell you himself.
And he knew it immediately.
It was, he said, "instant regret."
Within milliseconds, he was asking himself "What have I done..."
Kevin, see, had just jumped the rail of the single most popular suicide spot in the world, the Golden Gate Bridge.
On average, the site gets another distraught jumper every two weeks. Kevin was one of them.
It wasn't like he hadn't tried to quiet the voices in his head. Therapy, drugs, hospitalization.
Time to die, those voices still said.
And yet, in the minutes his bus dropped him off at the bridge, he hesitated and paced with tears in his eyes.
"I told myself if just one person comes up to me and asks if I'm okay... if one person asks if they can help... I won't do it. I'll stop and tell them my whole story..."
But nobody did, so he jumped.
It was in those next milliseconds, he would later say, he knew it was the biggest mistake of his life.
He didn't want to die.
But now, he was sure, it was too late.
From its highest point, it's a 245-foot plummet into the icy bay waters below.
Out of the 1,700 people that have jumped from the bridge since it first opened in 1937, only 25 have survived.
Kevin, against all odds, would be one of them.
He slammed into the water like hitting concrete. Three of his vertebrae instantly shattered.
When he surfaced, he couldn't hold his own head above water. But, incredibly, a sea lion kept pushing him up.
The Coast Guard soon arrived and pulled him out.
From there, he began a long recovery that required intense surgery, physical therapy, and psychiatric care.
While still under treatment, a priest urged him to give a talk to a bunch of seventh and eighth graders.
Afterward, they sent him a pile of letters, both encouraging and full of their own pained thoughts.
He also met a woman.
Today, Kevin lives in Atlanta and he's been happily married for the last 12 years.
And he tours the country, sharing his story.
So why re-tell it here?
Obviously -- I hope -- you don't get lots of copywriters looking to snuff it after a flopped headline test.
Just the same...
We've talked a lot in this space about the things one needs to get by in this biz.
My friend and colleague Joe, over at the publishing powerhouse Agora Financial, likes to list requirements.
You need intense curiosity...
You need a killer work ethic...
And you must, MUST have... resilience.
Meaning, you must have or find the capacity to bounce back from failure and flops, even huge ones.
Now, again, Kevin's story is an extreme and in this context -- I hope -- a hyperbolic example of somebody giving up. In the worst way possible.
It is also, though, a metaphor.
See, I get a lot of notes from some of you guys... and at conferences, I get to talk to a lot of people...
And I often get the sense, from some folks, that they're feeling a little more overwhelmed than they let on.
Some are just starting out, and they've got a lot on the line. For some, it's everything. And some are desperate to make it work.
Because they have to, because their pride or livelihoods or a family business is at stake, because it's a dream.
And yet, they're overwhelmed by all the tips and secrets... or by piles of confusing research or ideas...
For others, even had some success, but they're burned out, feel antiquated, or feel like "imposters" that know less than they let on, in an industry that's evolving.
To all those folks... and to you... I can only say, I've been there. And frankly, go back there now and again.
Flops happen, failures happen. And you can and will -- even years and decades into doing this -- make the wrong choices, pick the wrong projects, or botch the right ones.
The legendary Gene Schwartz put it this way, according to a quote spotted recently in fellow writer Ben Settle's e-letter...
" A very good copywriter is going to fail. If the guy doesn't fail, he's no good. He's got to fail. It hurts. But it's the only way to get the home runs the next time."
Once more, nobody -- I hope -- is taking the trials of this profession hard enough to make Kevin's choice.
And believe me, I don't mean to make light of the latter. I just want to make sure we hit this anvil with a big hammer. To drive home the point that, whatever your struggle, be it with this biz or something bigger, that you don't want to give up. Press on.
As Churchill put it, "Success, is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm."
Or even more succinctly when he said, "If you're going through hell, keep going."
Because it's worth it.
.
John Forde -
What is REST?
The Legendary : Its stands for Representational State Transfer
Me : That's what i need right now.7 -
Yeah, another one of the legendary printer stories.
So yesterday my dad phones me up, and says: "Hi son so they changed our wifi and now the printer doesn't connect, how can I connect the printer to the wifi, and the computer to the printer?"
And then seemed confused when I told him I couldn't do it over the phone, that I usually have to fiddle with it physically. It baffles me that they think I'm some kind of all knowing wizard... And that I have memorized all the menus and setups required to do all this stuff... -
I can't believe it... I am starting to recall a very old TV child's sitcom I used to watch. I have so many memories... I just can't. I'm going to send a sample, it's in Hebrew, but hilarious enough to understand.
This is a part of a parody on Dora the explorer. It was a legendary episode. The parody is that it's a Yemeni version of Dora the explorer. It's the map. Yes, the MAP.
https://youtu.be/tNJdi1055BI10 -
I have just been made aware that not everyone in this community knows the legendary tri-state boolean.
It is impermissible for anyone in this community to not know of the legendary tri-state boolean.
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/..._6 -
Now Casting: Designers, Engineers, Inventors and Makers! Calling all Designers, Engineers, Inventors and Makers! Intel, legendary Executive Producer Mark Burnett and MGM Television are looking for the most innovative makers to join Season 2 of America's Greatest Makers. Do you have an amazing idea for the next big smart connected device? Apply now for the chance to make your dream a reality using Intel's latest technology including the Intel Curie Module and upcoming advanced developer platforms that can connect to a broad array of input and output devices (including cameras and displays). Winner walks away with $1 million dollars! What will YOU make?
https://venertainment.com/America-s...
Could be fun -
Since day 0, I have been fond of computers. One of my first plush was called "DataDog" and looked like a CRT screen with dog ears around. According to my mum I was "addicted" to it.
At year 2, my dad was arranging some music on some software while I was watching him on his lap. Quick jump to the present: nowadays and since 10 years I run my own home studio with three guitars, two keyboards, one bass, three monitors, a microphone, an amp and a cabinet... coincidence? I think not!
Fast forward 5 years later (so I'm 6-7 years old), and I was playing with the legendary pinball game on Win95, as well as Flight Simulator. Then I was hogging mum's laptop to play settlers II (<3 that game), I eventually got my computer, and got into Quake III Arena being aged 10 (and had to tell my mum that game was safe for my age haha - I eventually removed the blood effects).
The Quake 3 Arena chapter is interesting: it got me into router configuration as I wanted to open a port through the router to host my own dedicated games with friends, it got me into DNS configuration (I was running a no-DNS client that allowed friends to join me through a DNS while having a dynamic IP) and eventually... to modifying .cfg files to tune my server as I wanted it. No programming here but a nice intro into :)
Then I hated the fact everybody would point their finger at me and say "geek" - I was only 13, fragile, sensitive, and I wanted everything but a bad image on me.
Meanwhile I continued on getting interested in hardware and configure my own computers, and investing myself into music production.
Then, university. "What do you want to study?" I thought of everything but IT, fleeing the image of a "geek". Turns out it was a waste of time, and at 21 yo I got into web development (well, just html and css), then learned a bit of PHP, finally got a specialized 2-year training and now here I am!
I was bound to be in IT either way since day 0, and funny fact, I've used every windows edition since Win95. -
I've been kinda missing linux lately so I've been thinking about dual booting it on my desktop,
And considering I've only mainly used RPM based distros(Mainly RedHat Linux and later Fedora almost exclusively)
I've thought about getting out of my "RPM zone of comfort" and distro hopping for like a year between different other systems and seeing what else is there and how it compares to Fedora.
Any suggestions and what I should try?
I thought I'd start easy and take Baboontu (Ubuntu), mostly because I'm planning on making a Minecraft Bedrock server for friends in the near future which apparently is only available for on Ubuntu so I want to get used to it.
Currently the distros I wanted to try are:
Ubuntu -> Linux Mint(With how much @Fast-Nop has been praising it how can I not try it) -> Arch(Because I wanna see what all the fuss is about) -> Gentoo Linux -> Slackware(Because I recently learned that this thing still actually exists and is still active and gets updated, so wanted to see this Legendary distro)
Any others y'all can recommend?
I'm planning to try and use each distro at least for a month and try to only use Linux, only switching to Windows if there is *no* way to do it in the distro.2 -
What are the origins of your usernames?
Mine is a contraction of B(ack) Rolls from the legendary Alyssa Edwards.
6 -
I got a SIM card activated for my dad yesterday. Here in SA you need to verify your identity to get the card activated. But the company's systems were offline yesterday while I got it from another distributor of theirs 2 shops over. Now a day later they tell me I have to go and get another one because the one I got won't be activated because of it being offline. Something about it being assigned to me while it is offline makes it not work.
WHAT BULLSHIT? WHO THE HELL CODES THAT TRIPE TO FAIL TWICE AS HARD AS IT SHOULD? IT MAKES NO SENSE IF THE THING IS OFFLINE FOR THIS TO HAPPEN.
And yet, with Telkom's legendary poor service I know the service people are not lying. They just don't know what the hell is going on. -
I see the dev industry developing to super sayan 4 or to the evolution of devmon the legendary pokemon
-
!dev && rant
So yesterday we landed in 'Nam and started our journey from the south to the north (applied for a Visa online and still waited 2 hours in the airport for the officer to approve it)..
We tried to catch a Grab (Vietnamese Uber) to the hotel but obviously 99% of locals don't speak English so it was impossible to communicate with them (they call you and just start yappin Vietnamese). Eventually we gave up and tried the local cabs. Of course they try to rip you off for more than triple the price but that's cool. Vietnamese cab meters measure distance not time so the first cab just told us to get off after 100m or so but at least he stopped another cab for us and didn't charge us.
Ho chi Minh City is quite nice though a bit too dirty for me. Every breath you take feels like 3 cigarettes.
Vietnamese war museums like to victimize and praise their legendary leader Ho Chi Minh.
The reason I'm telling you all this is because at the moment I'm traveling to Dalat from Ho Chi Minh City via a sleeper bus and it is fucking terrible. 6 hours drive, bumpy ride, I sleep by the friggin engine so it's always hot. AC is shit and there are 5 more hours to go. I hid Uncle Benjamin in my underwear so I won't get robbed during the night. He is not happy about it. Fuck me. Btw this whole experience was just day one.
The only reason I'm even willing to go through all of this is because me and the miss celebrated 7 years in Aug (no ring yet fyi).
If you made it this far congrats.
I might post follow ups so stay tuned.3 -
In case you remember,
there lived a legendary coder named "Harsha Suryanarayana", popularly known as "Humblefool"
from India. He died in a car accident back in 2014.
The only thing that still keeps me wondering is why he always chose to code in Java( in coding competitions ) even though he knew C++ along with STL and was also aware of the advantages of using C++ over Java in competitive coding.7 -
yeah, and i encountered mr. blue screen. i'm glad that android studio project saved, automatically. just a little more patience, you will get a job and buy some fucking legendary unit!!!! #RamHurts
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