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Search - "more complicated than it needs to be"
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Senior Management: We are severely disappointed in the timeliness of the two apps you built this year. You had budgeted 3 months for one and it took 4 months and the other was budgeted to take 4 months and took 5 months. We understand that we doubled the requirements halfway through and but that doesn’t take away from our need for you to deliver on time. We provided you with two extra devs on the project! We know they were novices and you had to train them from the ground up during the project, that doesn’t matter. The extra resources should have helped you but your lack of leadership ability is what caused them to hold you back. We know our other team with a budget of 6 months took 2 years on their project and was still unsuccessful but that is a different scenario! That was a pre-built 3rd party ERP plugin, way more complicated and nuanced than simply building and deploying something from scratch. Yes we’re aware your projects were the only successful tech projects at the company this year, that’s just luck and coincidence. The next app we need you to build in 6 months, no questions asked. It needs to consolidate and tie together our 3 different ERPs. Everything that we need out of these products that they don’t do out of the box we need you to wire up. We will decide the exact requirements in a month or so, for now just get started. Yes your apps changed the way we do business and allowed us to complete projects smoother than ever before while saving millions of dollars in wasteful and archaic processes that is OLD NEWS. Stop bringing it up. The successes of yesterday are the status quo of today. Don’t expect any new resources either, you clearly can’t handle them. You will now be giving status updates to 3 different managers as a corrective action to your missed deadlines in order to ensure the timeliness of future deliverables.
Dev: …25 -
I wrote a database migration to add a column to a table and populated that column upon record creation.
But the code is so freaking convoluted that it took me four days of clawing my eyes out to manage this.
BUT IT'S FINALLY DONE.
FREAKING YAY.
Why so long, you ask? Just how convoluted could this possibly be? Follow my lead ~
There's an API to create a gift. (Possibly more; I have no bloody clue.)
I needed the mobile dev contractor to tell me which APIs he uses because there are lots of unused ones, and no reasoning to their naming, nor comments telling me what they do.
This API takes the supplied gift params, cherry-picks a few bits of useful data out (by passing both hashes by reference to several methods), replaces a couple of them with lookups / class instances (more pass-by-reference nonsense). After all of this, it logs the resulting (and very different) mess, and happily declares it the original supplied params. Utterly useless for basically everything, and so very wrong.
It then uses this data to call GiftSale#create, which returns an instance of GiftSale (that's actually a Gift; more on that soon).
GiftSale inherits from Gift, and redefines three of its methods.
GiftSale#create performs a lot of validations / data massaging, some by reference, some not. It uses `super` to call Gift#create which actually maps to the constructor Gift#initialize.
Gift#initialize calls Gift#pre_init (passing the data by reference again), which does nothing and returns null. But remember: GiftSale inherits from Gift, meaning GiftSale#pre_init supersedes Gift#pre_init, so that one is called instead. GiftSale#pre_init returns a Stripe charge object upon success, or a Gift (and a log entry containing '500 Internal') upon failure. But this is irrelevant because the return value is never actually used. Pass by reference, remember? I didn't.
We're now back at Gift#initialize, Rails finally creates a Gift object using the args modified [mostly] in-place by all of the above.
Another step back and we're at GiftSale#create again. This method returns either the shiny new Gift object or an error string (???), and the API logic branches on its type. For further confusion: not all of the method's returns are explicit, and those implicit return values are nested three levels deep. (In Ruby, a method will return the last executed line's return value automatically, allowing e.g. `def add(a,b); a+b; end`)
So, to summarize: GiftSale#create jumps back and forth between Gift five times before finally creating a Gift instance, and each jump further modifies the supplied params in-place.
Also. There are no rescue/catch blocks, meaning any issue with any of the above results in a 500. (A real 500, not a fake 500 like last time. A real 500, with tragic consequences.)
If you're having trouble following the above... yep! That's why it took FOUR FREAKING DAYS! I had no tests, no documentation, no already-built way of testing the API, and no idea what data to send it. especially considering it requires data from Stripe. It also requires an active session token + user data, and I likewise had no login API tests, documentation, logging, no idea how to create a user ... fucking hell, it's a mess.)
Also, and quite confusingly:
There's a class for GiftSale, but there's no table for it.
Gift and GiftSale are completely interchangeable except for their #create methods.
So, why does GiftSale exist?
I have no bloody idea.
All it seems to do is make everything far more complicated than it needs to be.
Anyway. My total commit?
Six lines.
IN FOUR FUCKING DAYS!
AHSKJGHALSKHGLKAHDSGJKASGH.7 -
This might actually be my first real rant.
Whatever fucking cockgoblin decided that making dynamics GP so fucking confusing needs to suck a big bag of dicks. I'm so fucking tired of having to google every damned table name and column name because nothing makes any motherfucking sense.
Am I supposed to instinctively know what PM20201 does? What data it holds? I don't mind reading documentation. But it's hard to even know where to start when the shitbird API and database are more complicated than calculating orbital fucking decay.
I am done. Fuck you gp. Fuck you and your nonsense. I guess our sales people don't get to know when an invoice was paid.8 -
I'm the only developer in my company. I am a "junior dev" who started working like 6 months ago. Safe to say I am not well experienced and have a lot to learn in this journey. Due to this pandemic, my bosses who have been flaunting their wealth have started making losses and now needs to find another way to get money. Mind you, the company I work with is a marketing firm.
So what the bosses thought of doing was creating a delivery service due to the current situation. It is not their field but since they still need to show people they are the rich people, they need money either way. Since I'm the only developer in the company I've to make this application. I've to make an Android and iOS app with a back-end and an admin portal all in 1 month. My pay is shit and by shit I mean less than even 700 USD. I've not done a project like this before so there would be a learning curve as well. And there is no one to guide me either.
They think just because they have hired one developer anything development related is settled and I will do everything no matter how big or complicated or how shitty my salary is.
The feature list is a whole system, like it is so complicated that someone could really make their own company just to work on that application. It's HUGE.
I'm thinking of saying no I can't do this shit. But just wanted to see what some more experienced devs say about this. I've attached the features list in the rant.39 -
Dogecoin hit USD $0.40 recently, which means it's time for the Crypto Rant.
TL;DR: Dogecoin is shit and is logically guaranteed to eventually fall unless it is fundamentally changed.
===========================
If you know how Crypto works under the hood, you can skip to the next section. If you don't, here's the general xyz-coin formula:
Money is sent via transactions, which are validated by *anybody*.
Since transactions are validated by anybody, the system needs to make sure you're not fucking it up on purpose.
The current idea (that most coins use today) is called proof-of-work. In short, you're given an extremely difficult task, and the general idea is you wouldn't be willing to do that work if you were just going to fuck up the system.
For validating these transactions, you are rewarded twofold:
1) You are given a fixed-size prize of the currency from the system itself. This is how new currency is introduced, or "minted" if you prefer.
2) You are given variable-size and user-determined prize called "transaction fees", but it could be more accurately called a "bribe" since it's sole purpose is to entice miners to add YOUR transaction to their block.
This system of validation and reward is called mining.
===========================
This smaller section compares the design o f BTC to Dogecoin - which will lead to my final argument
In BTC, the time between blocks (chunks of data which record transactions and are added to the chain, hence blockchain) is ten minutes. Every ten minutes, BTC transactions are validated and new Bitcoins are born.
In Dogecoin, the time between blocks is only one minute. In Theory, this means that mining Dogecoin is about ten times easier, because the system expects you to be able to solve the proof of work in an average of one minute.
The huge difference between BTC and Doge is the block reward (Fixed amount; new coins minted). The block reward for BTC is somewhat complicated compared to Doge: It started as 50 BTC per block and every 4 years it is halved ("the great halving"). Right now it's 6.25 BTC per block. Soon, the block reward will be almost nothing until BTC hits it's max of 21 million bitcoins "minted".
Dogecoin reward is 10,000 coins per block. And it will be that way for the end of time - no maximum, no great halving. And remember, for every 1 BTC block mined, 10 Doge blocks are mined.
===========================
Bitcoin and Dogecoin are now the two most popular coins in pop culture. What makes me angry is the widespread misunderstanding of the differences between the two. It is likely that most investors buy Dogecoin thinking they're getting in "early" because it's so cheap. They think it's cheap because it isn't as popular as Bitcoin yet. They're wrong. It's cheap because of what's outlined in section two of this rant.
Dogecoin is actually not very far off Bitcoin. Do the math: there's a bit over 100 billion Dogecoin in circulation (130b). There's about 20 million BTC. Calculate their total CURRENT values:
130b * $0.40 = 52b
20m * $60k = 1.2t
...and Doge is rising much, much faster than BTC because of the aforementioned lack of understanding.
The most common thing I hear about Doge is that "nobody expects it to reach Bitcoin levels" (referring to being worth 60k a fucking coin). They don't realize that if Doge gets to be worth just $10 a coin, it will not just reach Bitcoin levels but overtake Bitcoin in value ($1.3T).
===========================
It's worth highlighting that Dogecoin is literally designed to fail. Since it lacks a cap on new coins being introduced, it's just simple math that no matter how much Doge rises, it will eventually be worthless. And it won't take centuries, remember that 100k new Doge are mined EVERY TEN MINUTES. 1,440 minutes in a day * 10K per minute is 14.4 million new coins per day. That's damn near every Bitcoin to ever exist mined every day in Dogecoin11 -
My boss drives me crazy. He hired me for working on his SDK which is game related. So I am responsible for basically everything, including an ingame UI (menu etc.) and to predict the future path of a game object (unit, minion, ..) when a certain spell is casted on it. For that task I divided the prediction into firstly getting the predicted path of the unit without a spell being casted and then a class that would cast the spell on that path and estimate the units reaction to that cast. Simplified, but that way you get a pretty okayish result. Now he thinks that is too complicated. "Can we not put everything into one class, if someone wants to replace the prediction he needs to read documentation for hours". WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU EXPECT, THAT IT'S GONNA BE SOME ONE CLASS 3K LINES MAGIC??
Same for the GUI. We only have DirectX and don't want to use a framework. Guess what, it's more than one class if you want to seperate view, model, controller or whatever fucking "design pattern" thing you use.
And then Git... he seriously said let's not use branches till release, I feel like they slow down things.. before I was there they did every operation on master.
And if it was just that..
/rant
I put much work into this, time to leave?1 -
One of the big ISP/entertainment companies dug up the roads a few months back and laid fibre optic cables (cutting through a power cable in the process but that's another story).
Recently had someone turn up at my door to chat about their services. All sounded very good, I took a card and gave it some thought and did some research.
So, it'd be a little cheaper than my current provider (FTTC setup). It'd be faster for downloads, slightly slower for uploads (I want fast upload). IPv6 is only on their business packages. I use IPv6 a lot. I also have several static IPv4 addresses.
It would involve getting a cable in to where my equipment rack is, and one to where the TV is (which I spent ages building a TV unit with power, network etc.)
To record/watch TV in another room with their service, I'd need to pay extra. The service just provides HD channels that I can already get, unless I pay more. At the moment I have MythTV handling all the recording of TV shows I want, and Kodi to play them back on different TVs, via CAT6 I spent ages installing into the walls.
Then there's the uncertainty of how nicely their equipment will play with my relatively complicated setup.
I decided, it isn't worth it really for me. I would have to change a load of stuff just to end up with what I already have... But with more limitations.
Anyway, the guy turned up again a few days later, I told him of my decision and away he went.
Since then I have been visited by 2 other employees of this company to try to sell me the service.
It is probably great and convenient if you are not like me and DIY all your home network and media distribution setup...
Also the ISP I'm with is quite small. They are very knowledgeable and friendly and I can get through to someone quickly if i phone. What I use meets my needs, so I prefer to support the smaller company in this case. -
!rant
Going through my graduate program I have come to realize that there is more to A.I than just machine learning algorithms. As if ML was not complicated enough, we add more to it such as KRR and other topics that border on the areas of Cognitive Science, Boolean Algebra, Logic and even Philosophy and you know what? I dig it. I dig it because finding some of the information in the course that I am getting is damn near impossible to see in other items. Such is the case as a method for fucking signature unit propagation which afuckingparently was developed by one of my instructors(not complaining, just really fucking impressed)
The thing is, most of these items would normally have a parallel in software development that we use on our day to day basis, all of us, no matter if you do web, systems development, database development whatever, the general concepts are the same: you represent real world concepts, such as that of logic and knowledge in programatic/mathematical representations.
I am really amazed at the content of these items, I really am. I just wish for some clarification on ambiguity, seems like most things are left better if it where explained in a programmer's point of view. Most of the items that I have seen could have easily been summarized in a programmers logic if only they would have preferred to take the time to do it, and I get that there needs to be mathematical intuition formulated before anything, it is better sometimes to learn concepts from an outside point of view, a mathematical point of view, but shit is just strange sometimes.1 -
Does anyone actually fucking know how certs and provisioning profiles work for large iOS teams without using the cancerous auto provision checkbox? Are we all just fucking it up all the time??3
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Front-end web development is like a fucking cancer to me right now
I need the following behavior from my development environment if I don't want the webdev experience to destroy my sanity and tempt me into suicide by making me waste my valuable lifetime configuring shit that is ultimately meaningless to the software I'm trying to create:
- I should be able to open the webpage in the browser at localhost:<some-port>
- the page should refresh immediately as I save my files
- I should be able to import node modules installed with npm without using a script tag linking to some CDN (for instance, I want to do a get request with axios instead of the fetch API)
- I should be able to do this without spending more than two minutes reading the documentation for a tool that would enable me to do it, ideally without ever coming even close to touching a configuration file
Right now I know about browser-sync and webpack, or webpack-dev-server or some such fucking shit fuck fucking fuck.
browser-sync seems to fulfill most of these needs, except that I can't seem to bring npm modules into my application and import them. Webpack seems to be able to do this, but at the cost of slowly throwing my life away reading documentation for over-complicated configuration files that do not aid me in actual software creation and therefore do not interest me and never will, all in the hope that I *may* at some point dig out enough shit to find how to do such a use case (i.e. seamless, smooth web development) that to me feels reasonably common and expected.
Is there some tool that enables me to do *seamless*, pleasurable web development without the hassles of over-complication and over-engineering? Is there some hidden command for webpack that allows me to run such simple shit without ever needing to edit some pointless configuration file?
Please, I beg of you, let me know.8 -
So the saga of broken fucking everything continues at work, and I'm managing it, effectively, and doing it correctly on the first go-round. It's a long process though, because the two retards who preceded me were equally inept for completely different, yet equally disruptive and destructive reasons. The first dude was just plain psychotic, probably still is. I'd post some of his code, but I don't want anyone's face to melt off like those Nazi dudes at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I can handle it because I'm constantly inebriated, which is not as fun as it sounds. If you have to ask yourself if you can handle it, you probably aren't, unless you've had to Uber to/from work due to still being fucking drunk. Anyway, enough about that, and it was only like twice. The rest of the times, I was more blazed than Jerry Garcia at a weed smoking contest. Moving along.
UPS shipping labels broke two weeks ago, I fixed it, but these fucking 10xers jointly decided to not only never implement anything resembling error handling, other than EMPTY GOD DAMN "try/catch"es (empty catch, wow so efficient), and instead of using COMMENTS, which I know are a new thing, they'd wrap blocks of code in something like: if 1 = 0 {} FUCK YOU DICKFACES. As I was saying before I got emotional again, they tied the success to all kinds of unrelated, irrelevant shit. I'm literally needle/haystacking my way through the entire 200GB codebase, ALONE, trying to find all the borked things. Helpfully, my phone is ringing all the time from customer service, complaining about things that are either nothing to do with the site, or due to user stupidity, 75% of the time.
A certain department at my company relies on some pretty specific documents to do their job, and these documents are/were generated from data in the database. So until I can find and fix all of the things, I've diverted my own attention as much as possible to the rapid implementation of a report generation microservice so that no one elses work is further disrupted while I continue my cursed easter egg hunt from fucking hell.
After a little more than two days, I'm about to lauch a standalone MS to handle the reports, and it's unfortunately more complicated than I'd like, because it requires a certain library that isn't available on Winblows, so I've dockerized the application. Anyway, just after lunch, I've finished my final round of tests, and I'm about ready to begin migrating it to the server and setting up (shitty fucking shit) IIS to serve it appropriately. At this point, this particular report has been unavailable by web for about 8 days.
A little after lunch, and with no forewarning of any kind, the manager of managers runs upstairs and screams at me to "work faster" and that "this needs to be back online RIGHT NOW", but I also know that this individual is going to throw a fit if things on this pdf aren't a pixel perfect match. So I just say "that's some amazing advice, I wish I'd had the foresight to just do it better and work faster". Silence for a good five seconds, then I follow up with "please leave and let me get back to my work". At that moment from around the corner, my "supervisor" suddenly, magically even, remembers that he has had the ability to print this crucial, amazingly super fucking important document all along, despite me directly asking him a week ago, and he prints it and takes it where it needs to go. In the time that it takes him to go to that other department and return, I deploy my service.
I spent the rest of the day browsing indeed and linkedin jobs, but damn this market is kinda weird right now, yeah?2 -
I got an assignment grom a company I interviewed in to make a simple CRUD app using Node and vue.js.
I have already built the entire server(it even serves html and static files now) but I'm a noob regarding frontend web.
I tried to use webpack and scaffolding tools but they make the job much more complicated than it needs to be.
How do I build a frontend in Vue using only the tags and local files, no special bundlers or tools?2 -
Seriously fuck dreamhost.
First, their configuration is more complicated than it needs to be. Then their website is slow and buggy. Penultimately, their support people don't understand English, are bots, or are dumb as bricks. Finally, they don't have a custom ALIAS record for interop with Heroku.
I'm so glad I'm almost done switching! (Last domain will be transferred away on Friday!). -
WHAT. THE.
https://youtube.com/watch/...
1. watch video
2. comment your thoughts on it
3. read the following copypaste of my thoughts
4. comment your thoughts on whether I'm stupid or he's stupid
5. thanks
----
I am a programmer and I totally prefer windows.
1. I'm (besides other things) a game programmer, so I use the platform I develop for.
2. Linux is the best OS for developing... Linux. But I'm not developing linux. I want to use my OS and have it get in the way as little as possible, not test and debug and fix and develop the OS while i'm using it, while trying to do my actual work.
The less the OS gets in my way, the less stuff it requires me to do for any reason, the less manual management it needs me to do, the better.
OS is there to be a crossroads towards the actual utility. I want to not even notice having any OS at all. That would be the best OS, the one that I keep forgetting that I'm actually using. File access, run programs, ...DONE.
p.s.
if i can't trust you, a programmer, to be able to distinguish and click the correct, non-ad "download" button, or find a source that's not shady in this way, I don't want you to be my programmer. Everything you're expected to do is magnitude more complicated than finding a good site and/or finding the correct "Download" button and/or being able to verify that yes, what you downloaded is what you were after.
Sorry, but if "i can't find the right download button" is anywhere in your list of reasons why "linux is better", that's... Ridiculous.
6:15 "no rebooting" get outta here with this 2000 crap. because that's about the last year I actually had to reboot after installing for the thing to run.
Nowadays not even drivers. I'm watching a youtube video in 3d accelerated browser window while installing newest 3d drivers, I get a half-second flicker at the end and I'm done, no reboot.
the only thing I know still requires reboot within the last 15 years is Daemon Tools when you create a virtual drive, but that one still makes sense, since it's spiking the bios to think it has a hardware which is in fact just a software simulation....
10:00 "oops... something went wrong"
oh c'mon dude! you know that a) programs do their own error messages, don't put that on the OS
b) the "oops... something went wrong" when it's a system error, is just the message title, instead of "Error". there's always an "error id" or something which when you google it, you know precisely what is going on and you can easily find out how to fix it...18 -
When I look at the source code of an open source project and see things way more complicated than it needs to be, I just assume the contributors have seen some shit in their lifetime that makes them extra cautious.
This has to be the reason, right? Somebody tell me that there's a reason behind this madness.1 -
Been looking into some of my old code (an OBSE plugin). Wanted to know how something worked I made over 10 years ago. I look through the code and some of it makes sense, some of it looks really messy compared to what I write now. I want to remake some of this code to work on a different game now.
I have some code for threading that I have no idea where it came from:
https://github.com/Demolishun/...
It allows transferring data between different threads using mutexes. It is really really simple. I searched github to see if it came from there. There is stuff with similar names, but the code is way way different in those. I honestly don't see whey this code needs to be any more complicated than it is. I wonder if it is because I don't know something or I just like simpler solutions. Maybe there are use cases the other coding solutions have that solve particular problems?
Anyway, I plan to pound out an SKSE version of this plugin. I have been wanting to make this for some time now. I don't necessarily have a need other than the fun factor. My lack of providing good directions for use on the OBSE version kept people from using it. I will try and do better on this version.2