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I was showing my girlfriend how merge sort works... Halfway through my visual explanation, she took the pen from me and finished the algorithm.
I think I have chosen wisely :')9 -
To become an engineer (CS/IT) in India, you have to study:
1. 3 papers in Physics (2 mechanics, 1 optics)
2. 1 paper in Chemistry
3. 2 papers in English (1 grammar, 1 professional communication). Sometimes 3 papers will be there.
4. 6 papers in Mathematics (sequences, series, linear algebra, complex numbers and related stuff, vectors and 3D geometry, differential calculus, integral calculus, maxima/minima, differential equations, descrete mathematics)
5. 1 paper in Economics
6. 1 paper in Business Management
7. 1 paper in Engineering Drawing (drawing random nuts and bolts, locus of point etc)
8. 1 paper in Electronics
9. 1 paper in Mechanical Workshop (sheet metal, wooden work, moulding, metal casting, fitting, lathe machine, milling machine, various drills)
And when you jump in real life scenario, you encounter source/revision/version control, profilers, build server, automated build toolchains, scripts, refactoring, debugging, optimizations etc. As a matter of fact none of these are touched in the course.
Sure, they teach you a large set of algorithms, but they don't tell you when to prefer insertion sort over quick sort, quick sort over merge sort etc. They teach you Las Vegas and Monte Carlo algorithms, but they don't tell you that the randomizer in question should pass Die Hard test (and then you wonder why algorithm is not working as expected). They teach compiler theory, but you cannot write a simple parser after passing the course. They taught you multicore architecture and multicore programming, but you don't know how to detect and fix a race condition. You passed entire engineering course with flying colors, and yet you don't know ABC of debugging (I wish you encounter some notorious heisenbug really soon). They taught 2-3 programming languages, and yet you cannot explain simple variable declaration.
And then, they say that you should have knowledge of multiple fields. Oh well! you don't have any damn idea about your major, and now you are talking about knowledge in multiple fields?
What is the point of such education?
PS: I am tired of interviewing shitty candidates with flying colours in their marksheets. Go kids, learn some real stuff first, and then talk some random bullshit.18 -
Perhaps not "best", but certainly most amusing, so what the heck!
Years ago as an intern, I applied to a large pharmaceutical company. On part of the application form, you had to enter the code of the department you were applying to.
What I *should have* put down was "IT", which is the department that houses all their devs. However, I didn't actually read any of what the codes meant, assumed that was the department for helping people with how to mail merge, and put down "COMPSCI" instead. This was computational sciences - loosely summarised as computational data analysis on various druggable molecules.
I do *not* have any sort of biology or chemistry background, so the interview was rather... interesting, and I muddled through on the basis of getting some more interview practice assuming it was a no go.
To my amazement, got a phone call saying that they'd been thinking they wanted someone more technical on the team, and despite my lack of scientific experience they thought I'd be a good fit. I was unsure as to whether I should accept for a while, but then decided to just go for it - and had a fantastic internship there, working on a great variety of stuff, and learning tons all under a supervisor who I'm still in touch with to this day.
tl;dr - Applied for the wrong job. Coincidentally got it anyway, and miraculously had a fantastic year working there.8 -
The exact moment when I understood what programming actually was.
I was getting hard times at my 3rd college grade, trying to implement the recursive sudoku solver in python. Teacher spent a lot of time trying to explain me things like referential transparency, recursion and returning the new value instead of modifying the old one and everything related. I just couldn't get it.
I was one of the least productive students, i couldn't even understand merge sort.
I was struggling with for loops and indexes, and then suddenly something clicked in my head, like someone flipped a switch, and i understood everything i was explained, all at once. It was like enlightenment, like pure magic.
I had sudoku solver implemented by the end of the lecture. Linked list, hash map, sets, social graphs, i got all of these implemented later, it wasn't a problem anymore. I later got an A for my diploma.
Thank you @dementiy, you were the reason for my career to blast off.7 -
This is simply beautiful. Visualized sorting algorithms using colors.
Just discovered it on twitter (@galka_max)
If you have capped mobile data, search for WiFi first. Could be pretty much data...
Watch them here:
https://m.imgur.com/gallery/voutF
The videos and gifs pretty much disable any compression technique.
Attached is their merge sort example heavily compressed from 16 to 5 megabytes to fit devRant's limits...
2 -
This Part 3 and finale of the tale of Mr DDTW, or the worst coworker I've ever had to deal with. I suggest you start from the beginning if you don't have the context, it's been a trip.
Part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4210605
Part 2: https://devrant.com/rants/4220715
The problem with this man threatening to snitch on me to the professor if I didn't revert my commit was that he backed me into a corner. Letting him go at his pace with his quality standards would have ruined the project for the rest of us, and I'm not going to let three other people's grades suffer because one was lazy. I'm the PM, team lead, the guy who will ultimately be held responsible for this project succeeding or failing and the mediator of problems.
So I snitched first.
The professor knew us. He had an idea of how we worked as a team, who was enthusiastic about this subject, who was diligent, and who wasn't. It'd been half a semester and he wasn't stupid. I'd also taken the not-so-minor task of testing our software and handling all the little integration problems between components and between the professor's server. This had resulted in several calls between me and him because he'd been flying by the seat of his pants with some of the upgrades he'd been doing to the server code and as the fastest group we were the ones running into all the bugs on his end. And he'd also noted our prior complaint and seen the discrepancy in commits, author tags and hours logged. Mr DDTW had been graded significantly worse than the rest of us. So when I sent him a goddamn novel about our team's internal problems, the bomb was set. And so we get to the conference call, with everybody panicking and with no clue what any of this is about. Except me.
Dear god. That call was pure catharsis. Never have I seen a man get demolished so hard. Mr DDTW got a 45 minute LECTURE, a goddamn SMACKDOWN, about how he needs to take some responsibility for this team effort and that in the real world he'd have been fired. And the professor was so incredibly serene throughout! He could've blasted him with the rage of a thousand suns but he said it in such a way that Mr DDTW's only real responses were "yes", "I understand" and "I'm sorry". An entire semester of this useless fucking bitch being nothing but a leech on our team in three separate projects and he was finally getting SCHOOLED. And then, it gets even better. The professor asked how we could solve this problem, as Mr DDTW needs to do work to be graded but he can't hold us back.
I dropped a suggestion: As I had implemented the module in a way that worked, we could carry on using my version while Mr DDTW could work on a separate branch. Everything else was working reasonably well for an MVP, we just needed to improve and test now, so if Mr DDTW got it working we could merge it back into the main branch. This solved the team's problem of not being able to progress, it solved Mr DDTWs problem of not wanting to fail the course, and it solved my problem of not having to work with this shit-for-brains for the forseeable future. A weight was lifted off my shoulders. No more Mr DDTW. No more bitching and no more shitcode. A grating arsehole that had been bugging everyone all sememster put in his place and out of my hair.
On the way home from uni that day, I rang a friend and told him the entire story as I needed to get it off my chest. Every time I brought up a problem, an issue, a setback, an argument, he made a remark.
"Damn, if only he just... did the work."
Every time he said it it was in a slightly different way, but every time it made me laugh harder as he just didn't stop interrupting me with the same comment. If only he did the work. But the funniest part of all was how right he was. Mr DDTW had so many opportunities to just sit down, shut up, and do the work like the rest of us, but instead he decided to do fuck-all until he got flak for it and proceeded to dig his own grave. What sort of delusional entitlement, sheer incompetence or other dumbfuckery was he suffering from to make such terrible decisions? It's his last year of university and he still hadn't learned to just do the goddamn work (I would later find out that his friend had covered his shortcomings a lot and was apparently the reason why he hadn't flunked out of uni yet).
And so ends the story of Mr Didn't Do The Work the worst person I have ever had the displeasure of working with. We never did merge his branch as we ran out of time during testing. The professor passed him, possibly out of pity or just so that he wouldn't have to resit the course and burden some other poor sods. We weren't the top scorers this time, partially because of my shortcomings as PM but mostly because of the huge delays and manpower deficit, but we did well enough to pass the course with some very high grades. With one exception of course.4 -
Last week, the team lead told me that he can't merge because my code has code smells and going forward, can't have that. We use Sonar and well the way to "fix it" according to him is to mark the line using //NOSONAR.
Most of the issues are minor like Unused imports and for me incomplete TODOs.
And before the "verbal" rule was only need to fix Major + issues. And well the reason I use TODOs is to mark code that probably needs changing in the future. I know there's going to be some feature that these lines have to be changed. But the requirements are fully defined yet from business.
But I sort of blew up on him. YOU WANT TO ENFORCE ZERO CODE SMELLS NOW?!?!?! AND THESE MINOR ISSUES? MARK THEM WITH NOSONAR?
HERE'S WHAT I THINK FOR THE LAST X YEARS... THE CODE DESIGN IS SHIT, MINOR CODE SMELLS AND MANUALLY MARKING THE ONES U NEED TO KEEP... ARE THE LEAST OF OUR PROBLEMS...
THE OTHER PROBLEMS I'VE MENTIONED BEFORE EVER. MOS YEAR BUT YOU DIMWITS NEVER LISTEN.
YOU THINK MY TODOS ARE BAD... 90% OF THE CODE AND FEATURES (THE ONES NOT DONE BY ME) LOOK AND SMELL LIKE MONKEY SHIT. UNDOCUMENTED, MESSY, FULL OF BUGS.
AND GUESS WHAT? NEW FEATURE, SOME DEV FORGETS TO CHANGE SOME COMPONENT THAT DEPENDS ON IT. WOULDN'T IT BE GREATE IF THERE WERE BOOKMARKS... O WAIT...
i just was catching up on comics again and saw this one... with triggered my memory and this rant... My first thought was to forward it to him...
11 -
Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.
One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.
I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.
I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.
We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.
[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.
tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.2 -
!rant
Just finished my first game jam officially, it was fun and our game though being not working 100% was well done, we had art people and a sound guy, who btw made some amazing music for the game. A couple of us plan to work on the game after the jam (because we have time) and since it's more of a local jam our deadline for submission is extended until a week after the jam finishes. (Game broke after merge issues :D)
Glad I decided to go and try it out.
Hah but my issue was that moreso my time was spent on getting unity and a git gui or some sort to work on Linux mint, by half way through Saturday I did lol. Also not much for me to do since we had a total of six programmers.
So if I don't get a new laptop for the next game jam, it's setup to work, which is awesome.2 -
So me and some colleagues joined a hackathon. We already agreed on our project architecture, UI design, and features to build and showcase. Halfway through development new features kept getting added without my inputs, I said to myself it's ok maybe they're just small insertions. But nope, they kept breaking my CSS and UI design and kept causing merge issues on our repo because, well, no one could seem to agree on the project scope. The last straw was, with a couple of hours left, someone went and added new screens and changed the application flow entirely, which entailed some rather nasty rework of my code to fix. Fuck that, I decided to just stop and let them sort the mess.
When it was our turn to present our project, the fucking cunts assumed I would do all the talking - even if they never sent over the slides they put together. Why the fuck am I going to present something drastically different from the initial, agreed-upon scope? I told them to do it themselves and I remained silent throughout the entire debacle.
Of course, we lost. But I wasn't surprised. The guys who presented kept on contradicting each other and were not unified in their vision. I'm never teaming up with them ever again. Fucking asshole douchebag fucks. -
bubble sort
promotion sort
quick sort
school sort
heap sort
hr sort
merge sort
sex sort
selection sort5 -
I know this sounds odd, but I really find algorithms things of delightful beauty.
A creative solution to some very deceptively complex problems.
Sure, some implementations aren't the best, but seeing them after just makes me appreciate the time and effort that must have gone into designing things like Merge Sort, Binary Search, Greedy Algorithms, BST, and Dijkstra's Algorithm.
So! If your code is unoptimal, looks terrible, or is a sheer abomination, take a moment to appreciate the little piece of art you've made before you go and make it better.
1 -
Just happened today!
So since this morning we've been trying to get our website ready for UAT deployment Monday next week, even though we only were told of it yesterday. Since we had some critical merge conflicts to unscrew on our dev branch for promoting to UAT, we sent a warning to everyone on our hipchat group
Dev team: @all please don't commit anything to the repo for an hour or so while we get the branch good for dev and uat build
Tech lead: ok
That should be enough warning, right? Surely our tech lead, who has been piling up our scope creep trying to please our stakeholders, understands well enough not to do a single goddamn thing on our repo until we sort it out, right?
Nope.
10 minutes later our tech lead pushes several changes that not only break our builds but also remove all our configuration transformations. I just stormed out of the office to avoid sending her on a one-way ticket to slapsville and fuckyoutown. Geez goddamn louise. -
At an interview, interviewer keep on hitting me with theoretical questions, why python don't have switch cases, what is default sorting in java etc... I told him I don't bother about theory, then this conversation happened.
I(Interviewer)
I: do you know time complexities?
me: Yes
I: okay, tell me a few sorting or searching algorithms which have logarithmic complexity?
me: binary search (with loud and confident voice)
I: he told, in worst case it will have O(n) tell me any other
me: *thinking*
I: what are you thinking? what is time complexity of merge sort
me: O(nlogn)
i: it's logarithmic.... -
TFW you know you're going to be seen as a sort of code anarch or unenlightened (foo)barbarian for even suggesting that there are other git workflows more suitable than GitFlow, but you do it anyway.
Saying that I keep my master unprotected feels like telling Grandma I worship Satan.
I work with a very small team that's always physically nearby, we all get along well, trust each other and communicate to know what everyone is up to, which I guess is hard to believe in and of itself, but is it so fucking hard to believe that we'd be okay without redundant eternal branches or a vomitload of unbisectable history-warping merge commits? -
Currently debugging a project that was written over 4 years ago...
At first all was well in the world, besides the ever present issue off our goddamn legacy framework. This framework was written 7 years ago on top of an existing open source one, because the existing one was 'lacking some features' & 'did not feel right'.
Now those might be perfectly fine reasons to write a layer on top of a framework, but please, for all future devs sanities, write fucking documentation and maintain it if you're going to use said framework in all major projects!!
Anyhow back to the situation at hand, I'm getting familiar with the project, sighing at the use of our stupid legacy framework, attempting to recreate the reported bugs...
Turns out I can't, well I get other bugs & errors, but not the reported ones. I go to the production server, where I suddenly do can reproduce them...
Already thinking, fuck my life, and scared for the results... I try a 'git status' on the production server....
And yep, there it is, lo and behold, fucking changes on production, that are not in git, fuck you previous dev who worked on this and your stupid lazy ass modifcations on production!
Bleh, already feeling royally pissed, there's only 1 thing I can do, push changes back to git in a seperate branch, and pray I can merge them back in master on my dev environment without to much issues...
Only I first have to get our sysadmi. to allow pushing from a production server back to our git server...
Sigh, going to put on my headphones, retreat to my me space and try to sort out this shitpile now... -
TL;DR When talking about caching, is it even worth considering try and br as memory efficient as possible?
Context:
I recently chatted with a developer who wanted to improve a frameworks memory usage. It's a framework creating discord bots, providing hooks to events such as message creation. He compared it too 2 other frameworks, where is ranked last with 240mb memory usage for a bot with around 10.5k users iirc. The best framework memory wise used around 120mb, all running on the same amount of users.
So he set out to reduce the memory consumption of that framework. He alone reduced the memory usage by quite some bit. Then he wanted to try out ttl for the cache or rather cache with expirations times, adding no overhead, besides checking every interval of there are so few records that should be deleted. (Somebody in the chat called that sort of cache a meme. Would be happy , if you coukd also explain why that is so😅).
Afterwards the memory usage droped down to 100mb after a Around 3-5 minutes.
The maintainer of the package won't merge his changes, because sone of them really introduce some stuff that might be troublesome later on, such as modifying the default argument for processes, something along these lines. Haven't looked at these changes.
So I'm asking myself whether it's worth saving that much memory. Because at the end of the day, it's cache. Imo cache can be as big as it wants to be, but should stay within borders and of course return memory of needed. Otherwise there should be no problem.
But maybe I just need other people point of view to consider. The other devs reasoning was simple because "it shouldn't consume that much memory", which doesn't really help, so I'm seeking you guys out😁 -
having a DSA interview in 2 days, any suggestions on how/what to prepare?
its been years since i tried solving coding problems with anything apart from strings or arrays( and that too the one we use in dev, like writing a function to convert string to uppercase, that's all i remember)
There are a million algorithms: knapsac, djikstra, DFS BFS, bellman ford, TRIE, BST, quick sort, merge sort, insertion , binary search... these are some buzz words i could remember from my early college days, 6 years ago. I was able to understand and learn them at that time, but now i know shit about them :/
How to go with all of these in 48 hours?6 -
How come when implementing merge sort the mid doesn't need to deal with odd/even division?
I know int will always go down if there is decimal but how will it cover the whole array?
Full code:
https://gist.github.com/allanx2000/...
I guess in general, array indexing that involves dynamic cutoffs always confuse me.
How do you think about them without having to try things out on paper?7
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