"You gave us bad code! We ran it and now production is DOWN! Join this bridgeline now and help us fix this!"

So, as the author of the code in question, I join the bridge... And what happens next, I will simply never forget.

First, a little backstory... Another team within our company needed some vendor client software installed and maintained across the enterprise. Multiple OSes (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, etc.), so packaging and consistent update methods were a a challenge. I wrote an entire set of utilities to install, update and generally maintain the software; intending all the time that this other team would eventually own the process and code. With this in mind, I wrote extensive documentation, and conducted a formal turnover / training season with the other team.

So, fast forward to when the other team now owns my code, has been trained on how to use it, including (perhaps most importantly) how to send out updates when the vendor released upgrades to the agent software.

Now, this other team had the responsibility of releasing their first update since I gave them the process. Very simple upgrade process, already fully automated. What could have gone so horribly wrong? Did something the vendor supplied break their client?

I asked for the log files from the upgrade process. They sent them, and they looked... wrong. Very, very wrong.

Did you run the code I gave you to do this update?

"Yes, your code is broken - fix it! Production is down! Rabble, rabble, rabble!"

So, I go into our code management tool and review the _actual_ script they ran. Sure enough, it is my code... But something is very wrong.

More than 2/3rds of my code... has been commented out. The code is "there"... but has been commented out so it is not being executed. WT-actual-F?!

I question this on the bridge line. Silence. I insist someone explain what is going on. Is this a joke? Is this some kind of work version of candid camera?
Finally someone breaks the silence and explains.

And this, my friends, is the part I will never forget.

"We wanted to look through your code before we ran the update. When we looked at it, there was some stuff we didn't understand, so we commented that stuff out."

You... you didn't... understand... my some of the code... so you... you didn't ask me about it... you didn't try to actually figure out what it did... you... commented it OUT?!

"Right, we figured it was better to only run the parts we understood... But now we ran it and everything is broken and you need to fix your code."

I cannot repeat the things I said next, even here on devRant. Let's just say that call did not go well.

So, lesson learned? If you don't know what some code does? Just comment that shit out. Then blame the original author when it doesn't work.

You just cannot make this kind of stuff up.

So i was playing around with terminal apps in node.js a few weeks ago and made a CLI version of devrant. Images get converted to ascii just for fun. This is about was far as it goes for me though - anyone want to take it over? (The code is shit - this was a midnight proof of concept). Currently there's pretty much just the rant listings, the login works too but I think @dfox would need to approve it's use.

Next script I'm writing is going to be a terminal rant posting tool so I can rant from my server 😉

$ rant -m "fml" -f ~/screenshot.jpg -t "lol"

I was hired as a senior software engineer. During handover I found out I'm actually replacing the CTO.

I queried why he was leaving and got a simple "just want a break from working" which I found odd.

Fast forward and now I also just want a break from work, permanently. This place has followed every bad practise and big no-no out there. Every bit of software is a built in house knockoff janky piece of crap that doesn't work and makes people's jobs 5000 times harder.

The UI looks worse than Windows 3.1, absolutely horrendous code formatting, worst database structure I've ever seen.

The mere mention of using a team communication tool results in being yelled at from the CEO whom communicates purely via email, who then gets annoyed when you don't reply because they sent the email to a client instead of you.

We get handed printed out "tickets" to work instead of the so called "amazing in house ticket system" built using PHP 5 and is literally crammed into an 800x600 IFrame. Yes a F$*#ing IFRAME!

It's not like we have an outdated TFS server that has work items we can use...

Why not push for changes you say. I have, many times, tried to suggest better tools. The only approval I've gotten is using PhpStorm. Everything else is shutdown immediately and you get the silent treatment.

The CEO hired me to do a job, then micromanages like crazy. I can't make UI changes, I can't make database changes, why? They insists they know best, but has admitted multiple times to not knowing SQL and literally uses a drag and drop database table builder.

Every page in the webapps we make are crammed into 800x600 iframes with more iframes inside iframes. And every time it's pointed out we need to do something, be it from internal staff or client suggestions, the CEO goes off about how the UI is industry leading and follows standards.. what in the actual f....

Literally holding on by a thread here. Why hire a CTO under the guise of being a senior developer but then reduce the work that can be done down to the level of a junior?

Sure the paycheck is really nice but no job is worth the stress, harassment and incompetent leadership from the CEO.

They've verbally abused people to the point they resign, best part is that was simply because the CEO made serious legal mistakes, was told about it by the employee then blamed it on others.

I think the weekly rants just exist because @dfox & @trogus got banned from stackoverflow and they still have questions.

When it comes to learning cutting edge tech... Go build already!

I found Rust intimidating.

I read the first few pages of the official book, got bored, gave up.

Few months later, decided to write a "simple" tool for generating pleasing Jetbrains IDE color schemes using Rust. I half-finished it by continuously looking up stuff, then got stuck at some ungoogleable compiler error.

Few months later I needed to build a microservice for work, and against better judgement gave Rust a try in the weekend. Ended up building an unrelated library instead, uploaded my first package to crates.io.

Got some people screaming at me that my Rust code sucked. Screamed back at them. After lots of screaming, I got some helpful PRs.

Eventually ended up building many services for work in Rust after all. With those services performing well under high load and having very few bugs, coworkers got interested. Started hiring Rust engineers, and educating interested PHP/JS devs.

Now I professionally write Rust code almost full-time.

Moral of the story:

Fuck books, use them for reference. Fuck Udemy (etc), unless you just want to 2x through it while pooping.

Learning is something you do by building a project, failing, building something else, falling again, building some more, sharing what you've made, fighting about what you've built with some entitled toxic nerds, abandoning half your projects and starting twelve new ones.

Reading code is better than reading documentation.

Listening to users of your library/product teaches you more than listening to keynote speakers at conferences.

Don't worry about failures, you don't need to deliver a working product for it to be a valuable experience.

Oh, and trying to teach OTHERS is an excellent method to discover gaps in your knowledge.

Just get your fucking hands dirty!

For people who think/find that open source solutions are always better than commercial/paid/proprietary ones, you are not going to like this rant.

I'm starting to get really fucking fed up with people always, whenever I see someone (including myself) mentioning that an open source solution which is an alternative to a closed source one, saying that it's shit.
I've had countless encounters on here (also irl) where someone mentions that an open source solution (GIMP or Libre Office for example) is shit by default while they've maybe (or probably?) not even used it themselves.
Also people going "you can't even compare those two as for what they can do/features/functions". I'm definitely not saying that those open solutions are perfect. But to call them worthless or shit and/or to say that you literally 'cannot compare them' or that the open solution just doesn't work as a *FACT* is fucking bullshit.

Let's take GIMP for example, the use case of a friend of mine:

- He works both with macOS and Linux Mint, he *needs* a design/photo editing tool which is cross platform. (or at least one which works on macOS+Linux)
- He does not mind paying for software but he prefers to use software which is free as in freedom because he also likes to tinker with the software (a lot of people find this argument bullshit, I noticed on here. Why is that? It's a valid reason. Maybe not for you but we're not talking about you right now).
- He likes Photoshop but due to Linux incompatibility and the fact that he can't tinker around with the code, it's not an option for him.
- He'd gladly go for paid software but GIMP fills all his design/photo editing needs (also the more advanced ones but don't ask them to me because I have no fucking clue how that shit works)
- GIMP *just works* for him, he never has trouble with it.

Let's take Libre Office, my own use case:

- It *NEEDS* to work on Linux, which Libre does.
- It *HAS* to be open source, ethic/moral thingy; Libre Office is open source.
- It doesn't need to work complete magic but it needs proper basic document and 'excel' sheet functionalities which is the case with Libre and it works *for me*.
- I don't mind paying for it, will probably donate in the future (seeding the macOS+windows+linux versions fulltime at the moment)

See, for our use cases, it works very well. So why go into "it's no match for proprietary alternatives" mode right away? It actually is, as you see in the examples above.

Please stop saying that those solutions *don't work* or *are shit* because they do work and are useful for me and loads of people around the world.
Do they have *ALL* the features which their proprietary alternatives have? Maybe, maybe not, maybe they're missing some and maybe they even have some features which the proprietary alternatives don't have, I haven't checked out every feature.

I'm not saying that it works for you, for the record, I'm just saying that just because for you it is a fact that they're bad/shit/hardly working, doesn't mean they are for others.

Me: Hi Guys, theres no docs on our custom push notification / deeplinking implementation. I've tried to work backwards from a QA testing doc to add new links. Can someone tell me if this is all ok? It seems to behave a little weird.

Dev: Looks ok, but we've moved to the braze platform for sending notifications. You'll need to trigger braze notifications now. Test that it works ok with that <confluence-link>

*hour later*

Me: I've tried the debugging tool, both with my payload and one of the samples from the link. It displays on the phone, but tapping it doesn't trigger the deeplinking.

Dev: No it works, try one of these <screenshot of samples I used>

*hour later*

Me: Tried it again on the real device to make sure, as well as on develop and master. Not working with those samples or mine.

Dev: No it does. It comes in here in this library <github link to line of code>

Me: ... Nope, debugged it, it doesn't get passed the next 'if' check on the next line as its missing a key/value. The whole function does nothing.

Dev: Oh do you want to send a braze notification?

Me: ..... you told me I had too .... yes I guess.

Dev: ok for a braze notification it works different, send this <entirely different sample no where on the link>

Me: ...... but ..... this is only for braze notifications ..... why .... all the samples have deeplink url's .... but they don't ....... are you ..... FFS!!!!! !@#?!

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I feel the need to take a different approach to this week's rant. I think someone needs to defend teachers, for a number of reasons. Obviously this is probably out of place on devRant but it is a kind of rant against those who think they know everything and have nothing to learn.

1) Teachers are not industry specialists. They do not spend their lives keeping on top of the latest framework or project management methodology or code management tool. They are educators and that brings its own set of out of hours challenges and training exercises.

2) They have a course to teach and have probably used the same one for quite some time. Years probably. They (should) teach the fundamentals of programming not a particular language or syntax or quirk. Those fundamentals don't really change. Logic, problem solving, precision, structures, etc.

3) They need to provide a course which will cater for different skill levels. There are always class members who are bored because it's too easy and others who struggle in any subject.

4) Teaching is like any profession - there are really, really good ones, OK ones and there are shit ones.

5) They have probably never developed a detailed project or solution in their lives. They don't know the pitfalls and challenges that teams face in this kind of environment. Should they - maybe. But the probably don't.

I think that's all... I'm not a teacher (although I did fancy the idea at a time) but just feel they get a rough ride sometimes (particularly on here).

A decade ago 800x600 was pretty much the standard resolution for devices and 5 sec response time was considered fast. Animations were minimal and websites were easier to read. Programmers debated around topics like which loop runs faster, i++ or ++i, while vs doWhile and so on. In general, we were closer to understanding what happens behind the browser curtain and how code needs to be organized to make it more maintainable.

Today the level of abstraction is much higher. I don't think devs can contemplate on the finer aspects of programming efficiency; they'd rather rely on a code library to do all the grunt work. With the explosion of devices and platforms, the focus has shifted from programming to assembling. Programmers need to know their tools first, then write code. The tool is expected to work well with a millisecond response time, not the programmer's code.

Moving forward, I think programming would be more about building higher abstraction utilities/libraries that are integrated by other tools, which is already happening. Marketing an App would become more important than the actual skill needed to develop it.

A bit far-fetched, but I think the future programmer would be a lot like a stock market analyst who has a bunch of windows in front, just observing data or algorithm patterns created by an AI engine and cherry-picking a specific combination of modules that might make the next big sensational app.

It's more than a story bear with me.
Open source world is big enough to scare a beginner like me, which happened when I started with my first contribution in the year 2015. So many platforms, lot of organisations, freaking images of coding languages, pull request, issues and bugs- these all were enough to freak me out.

The only thing which motivated me to stay and know about the open source technology was to develop my first program using python. I was in great difficulty as when I started writing my program I was stuck after almost every two to three stages of compilation, so I needed guidance. I started my search on Github by creating my repository, pushing my code and following developers. I was amazed to see such a good response from people around me, not only they helped me to debug and fix the issue but they also helped me to understand and build my program from a new perspective. Daily discussions and communication, new issue build up and solving them by the traditional way of GUI further motivated me to learn the Git using the command line tool.

I still remember the year I worked on a repo using the command line tool, it was amazing. Within months or few, the fear of open source tools, community, interaction all just flew away. With this rant I will like to suggest all the beginners and open source enthusiast to just step a foot ahead and ask openly to the world- "I need help" and believe me you will be showered with information and help from all the world.

Happy contribution.

TL;DR: I dont work in IT, but I code at work, and the non-IT higher-ups lack of knowledge shows brutally.

So I work in aviation, not IT. Through coincidences, I was tasked to work on our flight plan distribution logic years ago, which was then written in BRL (Business Rule Language). In lockdown 2020, I finally started to learn "real" programming with Python, but soon shifted to Java. Which was good, since all of a sudden a few months ago the company ditched BRL and the godawful IBM ODM IDE for... Java and IntelliJ. Nice. BUT my teammates have zero clue about Java and no real inclination to learn it by themselves. So I have been appointed their mentor, despite me stating Im still a beginner myself. Its somewhat doable, I get the hard problems, they do basic maintenace, basically renaming variables and stuff. One of my yearly goals is to make sure a completely new guy is able to do everything I do by september. It took a LOT to talk them out of it.

In my last yearly review I got some flak for not "selling" myself to other teams enough, whatever that means. So, as a learning project, I designed a new intranet page for our department in Javascript. Its loved by all. It has links to all the stuff we need woth a nice interface and built in tools to make work easier and more efficient. I did it on my own, in my spare time, simply because I was fed up with the old crap and it was an enormously good learning opportunity. Now they want to give some other guy the responsibility over that page/tool because apparently it is "not in my process team description". They even planned a day for me and him so he can "learn Javascript then". Suuure...

I also did a digital checklist tool as a webapp. All this runs from a local folder, no server at all because reasons. I made it work. Now they want it integrated into some other tool some other guy made. He wrote his tool in PHP entirely so merging the two will take considerable time. Which I told them multiple times. No, it does not take about two hours.

Sometimes, comrades, sometimes....
Im still grateful for the opportunity to code at work but the lack of knowledge really REALLY shows. My goal now is to talk management into paying for a Java course for me (they are very expensive here). That way, they get a better employee and I get more knowledge and an actual certificate thats worth something. Usually in this company, this has higher chances of success than straight up asking for more money.

Sorry for the long story, but it felt good just typing it all out, even if nobody reads this.

Man I really need to get this off my chest. So here goes.
I just finished 1 year in corporate after college. When I joined, the team I got was brilliant, more than what I thought I would get. About 6 months in, the project manager and lead dev left the company. Two replacements took their place, and life's been hell ever since.

The new PM decided it was his responsibility to be our spokesperson and started talking to our overseas manager (call her GM) on our behalf, even in the meetings where we were present, putting words in our mouth so that he's excellent and we get a bad rep.

1 month in, GM came to visit our location for a week. She was initially very friendly towards all of us. About halfway through the week, I realized that she had basically antagonized the entire old team members. Our responsibilities got redistributed and the work I was set to do was assigned to the new dev (call her NR).

Since then, I noticed GM started giving me the most difficult tasks and then criticizing my work extra hard, and the work NR was doing was praised no matter what. I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but lately the truth hit me hard. I found out a fault in NR's code and both PM and GM started saying that because I found it, it was my responsibility to fix it. I went through the buggy code for hours and fixed it. (NR didn't know how it worked, because she had it written by the lead dev and told everyone she wrote it).

I found out lately that NR and PM got the most hike, because they apparently "learnt" new tech (both of them got their work done by others and hogged the credit).They are the first in line to go onsite because they've been doing 'management work'. They'd complained to GM during her visit that we were not friendly towards them. And from that point on if anything went wrong, it would be my fault, because my component found it out (I should mention that my component mostly deals with the backend logic, so its pretty adept at finding code leaks).

What broke my patience is the fact that lately I worked my ass off to deliver some of the best code I'd written, but my GM said in front of the entire team that at this point "I'm just wasting money". She's been making a bad example out of me for some time, but this one took the cake. I had just delivered a promising result in a task in 1 week that couldn't be done by my PM in 4 weeks, and guess what? "It's not good enough". No thank you, no appreciation, nothing. Finally, I decided I'd had enough of it and started just doing tasks as I could. I'd do what they ask, but won't go above and beyond my way to make it perfect.

My PM realized this and then started pushing me harder. Two days back, I sent a mail to the team with GM in cc exposing a flaw in the code he had written, and no one bothered to reply (the issue was critical). When I asked him about it, he said "How can you expect me to reply so soon when it's already been told that when anything happens we should first resolve within the team and then add GM in the loop?" I realized it was indeed discussed, but the issue was extremely urgent, so I had asked everyone involved, and it portrayed him in a bad light. I could've fixed it, but I didn't because on the off chance if it broke something, they'd start telling me that I broke the tool, how its my fault and how its a critical issue I have to fix ASAP, etc. etc., you get the idea.

Can anyone give me some advice of how to deal with this kind of situation? I would have left but with this pandemic going on, market being scarce and the fact that I'm only experienced by 1 year, I don't think I qualify for a job switch just now.

I starten when I was 12 years old. I got bullied and got interested in computers. One day I crashed my dads computer and he reinstalled it. After that my dad made two accounts. The regular user (my account) and the Administrator user (my dads account). He also changed the language from Dutch to English. Gladly I could still use the computer by looking at the icons :')

Everytime I needed something installed I had to ask my dad first (for games mostly because there was no cable internet at that time). Then I noticed the other user account while looking over my dads shoulders. So I tried to guess the password and found out the password was the same as the label next to the password field "password".

At that point my interest in hacking had grown. So when we finally got cable internet and my own computer (the old one) MSN Messenger came around. I installed lots of stuff like flooders etc. Nobody I knew could do this and people always said; he is a hacker. Although it is not.

I learned about IP-address because we sometimes had trouble with the internet. So when my dad wasn't home he said to me. Click on this (command prompt) and type in; ipcondig /all. If you don't see an IP-address you should type in; ipconfig /renew.

Thats when I learned that every computer has a unique address and I started fooling around with hacking tools I found on internet (like; Subseven).

When I got older I had a new friend and fooled around with the hacking tools on his computer. Untill one day I went by my friend and he said; my neighbor just bought my old computer. The best part was that he didn't reinstall it. So we asked him to give us the "weird code on the website" his IP-Address and Subseven connected. It was awesome :'). (Windows firewall was not around back then and routers weren't as popular or needed)

At home I started looking up more hacking stuff and found a guide. I still remember it was a white page with only black letters like a text file. It said sometime like; To be a hacker you first need to understand programming. The website recommended Visual Basic 6 for beginners. I asked my parents to buy me a book about it and I started reading in the holliday.

It was hard for me but I really wanted to hack MSN accounts. When I got older I just played around and copy -> pasted code. I made my own MSN flooders and I noticed hacking isn't easy.

I kept programming and learned and learned. When I was 16/17 I started an education in programming. We learned C# and OOP (altho I hated OOP at first). I build my own hacking tool like "Subseven" and thats when I understood you need a "server" and "client" for a successful connection.

I quit the hacking because it was getting to difficult and after another education I'm now a fulltime back-end developer in C#.

That's my story in short :)

I fucking hate it when I see videos or read articles saying "you don't need a powerful laptop for development"

Do you even code?
From mobile to web Dev. Every tool now demands a lot ram and cpu power to run.

You at least have an ide and chrome open. These with the OS can reach the 8gb ram limit.

Also the screen, you need atleast a 1080p! I had a 15in 768p laptop for 5 years. I hated development on that.

Fucking hate people who think we can develop on a potato.

First rant: but I'm so triggered and everyone needs a break from all the EU and PC rants.

It's time to defend JavaScript. That's right, the best frikin language in the universe.

Features:
incredible async code (await/async)
universal support on almost everything connected to the internet
runs on almost all platforms including natively
dynamically interpreted but also internally compiled (like Perl)
gave birth to JSON (you're welcome ppl who remember that the X in AJAX stood for XML)

All these people ranting about JS don't understand that JS isn't frikin magic. It does what it needs to do well.

If you're using it for compute-heavy machine learning, or to maintain a 100k LOC project without Typescript, then why'd you shoot yourself in the foot?

As a proud JS developer I gotta scroll through all these posts gushing over the other languages. Why does nobody rant about using Python for bitcoin mining or Erlang to create a media player?

Cuz if you use the wrong tool for the right job, it's of course gonna blow up in your face.

For example, there was a post claiming JS developers were "scared" of multithreading and only stick in their comfort zone. Like WTF when NodeJS came out everything was multithreaded. It took some brave developers to step out of the comfort zone to embrace the event loop.

For a web app, things like PHP and Node should only be doing light transforms between the database information and HTML anyways. You get one thread to handle the server because you're keeping other threads open to interface with databases and the filesystem. The Nexus.js dev ranting on all us JS devs and doesn't realize that nobody's actual web server is CPU bound because of writing HTML bodies, thats why we only use 1 thread. We use other worker threads to do the heavy lifting (yes there is a C++ bridge look it up)

Anyways TL;DR plz respect JS developers we're people too. ES7 is magic and please don't shit on ES3 or we'll start shitting on the Python 2-3 conversion (need to maintain an outdated binary just cuz people leave out ()'s in their print statements)

Or at least agree that VB.NET is an abomination and insult to the beauty that is TI-84 BASIC

Not actually a rant, but need some place to vent it out.

The company where I work develops embedded devices enabling the automobiles to connect to the internet and provide various end user infotainment services. My job mostly relates to how and when we update the devices.

There are about 100 different
variants of the same device, each one different from the other in a way that the process required to update for each of these device variants is significantly Different. Doing this manually would be and actually was a nightmare for almost everyone, so I set out on writing a tool that addresses this issue.

I designed my solution mostly in Python, allowing me for quick prototyping. First of all, I'd never written a single line of python code in my life. So I learn python, in matter of 2 nights. I took days off from work so I could work on this problem I had in my head. And in about 4 days, I was up with a solution that worked, reliably. I prepared a complete framework, completely extendable, in order to have room for 101th variant that might come in at any time. And then to make it easier and a no Brainer for everyone, the software is able to automatically download nightly builds and update the test devices with nothing more than a double click.

But apparently this wasn't enough. Today I found out that someone worked on a different solution in the background just a week ago, while reusing most part of my code. And now they start advertising their solution over mine, telling everyone how crappy my code is. Seriously, for fucks sake, my code has been running without issues since more than a year now. To make it worse, my manager seems to take sides with the other guy. I mean I don't even have someone to explain the situation to.

I really feel betrayed and backstabbed today. I worked my days, my nights, my vacations on this code. I put blood, sweat and tears into this. I push my self over my limits, and when that was not enough, I pushed my self even harder. But it all seems in vain today. All the hours that I spent, just to make it easier for everyone... All a complete waste. When you write code with such passion, your code is like your family... You want to protect it... But with all this office politics and shit, I seem to be losing my grip.

I've been contemplating the entire night, where I might have gone wrong, what could I've done to deserve this...but to no avail. I'm having troubles sleeping, and I'm not sure what I should do next.

Despair, sheer bloody Despair!

My level of frustration with Microsoft is growing to a point that I'm unable to contain it.

They buy Github, it was a great tool for developers because is FUCKING WORKED! New features were never beta tested on users unless they requested it.

Why in the absolute fuck am I getting all these new experimental bullshit features that literally make it harder for me to do my god damned job?

They provide me NOTHING but grief and sleepless weekends while I fix the god damned pipeline that's worked perfectly fine for YEARS.

Your business model is bad and your products are SHIT.

Fuck you Microsoft, I cannot even stress it enough. If I had a time machine that could go back 5 years and my options were: Tell the world about Covid, make sure Trump never became president, or stop the Github purchse. I would hunt down and brutally attack the team of executives that decided to buy Microsoft.

Words cannot adequately describe how much I want Microsoft to fuck off. If the company was a person and they died in a house fire it wouldn't be enough.

I just want a VCS that does what it's supposed to do. I don't need pipelines, I don't need image repos, I don't need static code analysis.

I JUST NEED A FUCKING VCS THAT CONTROLS VERSIONS OF SOFTWARE YOU IGNORANT FUCKS.

I'm so fucking tired of OOP.
This bullshit never ends. Everyone treats OOP in their own, proper (of course) way. You read tons of those fashion books, like uncle bob and shit. and then comes a dumb asshole that starts reviewing your code, and tells you doing it wrong. FUCK. and you can't tell anything to your TL or PM cuz they are same dumb asholes. Because after you fix all the bullshit from the first asshole, those more responsible assholes come and tell you that you still doing it wrong.

- uh.. bruh, why don't you make interface for everything? that' S.O.L.I.D, you know.. it just right thing.
- bruh, why don't you use enum and switch case. we need a factory.
- bruh, we don't use abstract classes, use interface
- could you rewrite your linq/stream thing into a class and a method. it's just simpler for us. foreach loop is something everyone knows.

well,then go and LEARN the tool you're dealing with, coderfucker.

FUUUUCK.

Oh man. I have been waiting for this one. Gather round lil' chil'rens it's story time.

So. I was looking for a new project because my old one was wrapping up and that's what my company does. So I was offered some simulation type stuff. I was like "sure why not, I want to make a computer pretend it isn't a computer no more." Side note I should not be a psychiatrist.

So, prior to coming on to this job I felt stifled by my old job's process. This job was a smaller team so I thought the process would be a little smoother. But it turned out they had NO process. Like they had a bug tracking system and they held the meeting to add things to the system, but that was just fucking lip service to a process.

First of all, they used the local disk on the test box as their version control. and had no real scheme as to how they organized it. We had a CM tool but gods forbid they ever fucking use it. I would be handed problem reports and interface change requests, write a bug to track it, go into the code and about 75% of the time or more it had already been worked. However, there was no record of it being worked and I would have to fucking hunt that shit down in a terribly shitty baseline (standardize your gods damned indentation for fuck's sake) and half the time only found out it was done because when I finally located the piece of code that needed changing, the work was already done.

Then, on top of all that, they ask me what time I want to come in. I said 10am, they said okay. One day I roll in at 10 and my boss is mad. Because I missed a meeting. That was at 9. That I wasn't told about. He says I can keep coming in at 10am though (I asked and volunteered to help get him up to speed on the things I was working he said it wasn't necessary) so I did, but every time I missed a 9am meeting he would get pissed. I'm like PICK ONE!!! They move the meeting to 9:30am (which is not 10am).

This shit starts affecting my health negatively. Stress is apt to do that. It triggered an anxiety relapse that pushed me back in to therapy for the first time in 7 years. On top of that the air quality in the office is so bad that I am getting back to back sinus infections and I get put on heavy antibiotics that tear up my stomach along with the stress and new meds tearing up my stomach. So one day as I am laid out in pain, I call out sick. Two days in a row. (Such a heinous crime right.) Well I missed a test event, that I wasn't even the primary or secondary on.

So fast forward to the most pissed off I have ever been. I get called in to a meeting with my boss's boss. As it turns out, my coworkers are not satisfied by the work that I'm doing (funny because I thought I was doing pretty good given that my only direction was fix the interface change reports and problem reports. And there was no priority assigned to any of them).

And rather than tell me any of this, they go behind my back to the boss and boss's boss. They tell me I need to communicate (which I did) and ask for help when I need it (I never did). That I missed an important event (that I played no part in and gods forbid I be sick) and that it seemed like I didn't want to be there (I didn't but who WANTS to work a corporate job).

They put me on a performance improvement plan and I jumped to another project. I am much happier now. Old coworkers won't even say hi, not even those I was friendly with, but fuck them anyway.

Should’ve posted this after it happened, but it requires a bit of background anyway.

There’s this guy that oversees our OpenStack environment. My team often make jokes and groan about him in private because he’s so overbearing. A few months back, he had to take us to our data center to show us our new racks, and he kept saying stupid stuff like “you break this and it costs me $30,000” as if he owns everything. He’s just... one of THOSE people. Always speaks in such a condescending way. We make jokes that he is our “best friend”.

Our company is shifting most of our products to the cloud in response to the coronavirus (trying to make it an opportunity for “innovation”). This has involved some structural and responsibility changes in our department, and long story short, I’m now heading the OpenStack environment alongside other projects.

This means going through grueling 1-on-1 meetings with our “best friend”. It’s not too bad, I can be pretty patient with people, so I didn’t mind too much at first. Then a few things happened.

1. He sent a shared folder that he owned containing info related to the environments. Several documents were outdated and incomplete, so I downloaded them, corrected them, and then uploaded the documents to my teams file share, as I was supposed to since we now own the projects.

2. Several files were missing, and when I asked about them, he said “Oh, did you refresh the browser?”. I told him no, that I downloaded them locally and republished them to my teams server, because he was supposed to hand everything off to us at once. He says “Well, silly, how are you going to get updates if you’re looking at them locally?” and kind of chuckles at me like I’m stupid.

3. He insists on training me how to remote into one of the servers to check on cluster space, which in itself is fine. I understand others wanting to make sure things will be done right by the people who come after them. But he tells me to download SuperPutty. I tell him, “oh no, that’s alright. I don’t need putty”. He says “oh cool, what tool do you use for ssh?”. I answer him “Just Git. If I want to I can use a CentOs bash terminal too, because we have WSL installed”. He responds “You can’t ssh through Git”.
I was actually a little shocked. I didn’t know if he was serious or not so I was silent for a few seconds before hesitantly saying “yes you can”. He says “this is news to me” and I so I tell him “every single one of our build jobs fetches code from Git with ssh” and he seemed genuinely shocked and surprised by that.... so then it occurs to me to show him that you can ssh in Powershell and that REALLY blew his mind. He would not shut up about it for several minutes. I was amused until it just got annoying.

Needless to say, my team had been previously teasing me about having to work with him, so they found it hilarious when I told them afterwards.

"four million dollars"

TL;DR. Seriously, It's way too long.

That's all the management really cares about, apparently.

It all started when there were heated, war faced discussions with a major client this weekend (coonts, I tell ye) and it was decided that a stupid, out of context customisation POC had that was hacked together by the "customisation and delivery " (they know to do neither) team needed to be merged with the product (a hot, lumpy cluster fuck, made in a technology so old that even the great creators (namely Goo-fucking-gle) decided that it was their worst mistake ever and stopped supporting it (or even considering its existence at this point)).

Today morning, I my manager calls me and announces that I'm the lucky fuck who gets to do this shit.

Now being the defacto got admin to our team (after the last lead left, I was the only one with adequate experience), I suggested to my manager "boss, here's a light bulb. Why don't we just create a new branch for the fuckers and ask them to merge their shite with our shite and then all we'll have to do it build the mixed up shite to create an even smellier pile of shite and feed it to the customer".

"I agree with you mahaDev (when haven't you said that, coont), but the thing is <insert random manger talk here> so we're the ones who'll have to do it (again, when haven't you said that, coont)"

I said fine. Send me the details. He forwarded me a mail, which contained context not amounting to half a syllable of the word "context". I pinged the guy who developed the hack. He gave me nothing but a link to his code repo. I said give me details. He simply said "I've sent the repo details, what else do you require?"

1st motherfucker.

Dafuq? Dude, gimme some spice. Dafuq you done? Dafuq libraries you used? Dafuq APIs you used? Where Dafuq did you get this old ass checkout on which you've made these changes? AND DAFUQ IS THIS TOOL SUPPOSED TO DO AND HOW DOES IT AFFECT MY PRODUCT?

Anyway, since I didn't get a lot of info, I set about trying to just merge the code blindly and fix all conflicts, assuming that no new libraries/APIs have been used and the code is compatible with our master code base.

Enter delivery head. 2nd motherfucker.

This coont neither has technical knowledge nor the common sense to ask someone who knows his shit to help out with the technical stuff.

I find out that this was the half assed moron who agreed to a 3 day timeline (and our build takes around 13 hours to complete, end to end). Because fuck testing. They validated the their tool, we've tested our product. There's no way it can fail when we make a hybrid cocktail that will make the elephants foot look like a frikkin mojito!

Anywho, he comes by every half-mother fucking-hour and asks whether the build has been triggered.

Bitch. I have no clue what is going on and your people apparently don't have the time to give a fuck. How in the world do you expect me to finish this in 5 minutes?

Anyway, after I compile for the first time after merging, I see enough compilations to last a frikkin life time. I kid you not, I scrolled for a complete minute before reaching the last one.

Again, my assumption was that there are no library or dependency changes, neither did I know the fact that the dude implemented using completely different libraries altogether in some places.

Now I know it's my fault for not checking myself, but I was already having a bad day.

I then proceeded to have a little tantrum. In the middle of the floor, because I DIDN'T HAVE A CLUE WHAT CHANGES WERE MADE AND NOBODY CARED ENOUGH TO GIVE A FUCKING FUCK ABOUT THE DAMN FUCK.

Lo and behold, everyone's at my service now. I get all things clarified, takes around an hour and a half of my time (could have been done in 20 minutes had someone given me the complete info) to find out all I need to know and proceed to remove all compilation problems.

Hurrah. In my frustration, I forgot to push some changes, and because of some weird shit in our build framework, the build failed in Jenkins. Multiple times. Even though the exact same code was working on my local setup (cliche, I know).

In any case, it was sometime during sorting out this mess did I come to know that the reason why the 2nd motherfucker accepted the 3 day deadline was because the total bill being slapped to the customer is four fucking million USD.

Greed. Wow. The fucker just sacrificed everyone's day and night (his team and the next) for 4mil. And my manager and director agreed. Four fucking million dollars. I don't get to see a penny of it, I work for peanut shells, for 15 hours, you'll get bonuses and commissions, the fucking junior Dev earns more than me, but my manager says I'm the MVP of the team, all I get is a thanks and a bad rating for this hike cycle.

4mil usd, I learnt today, is enough to make you lick the smelly, hairy balls of a Neanderthal even though the money isn't truly yours.

Why the fuck does Apple hate developers so much? I just want to test and play around a bit. Why do I have to own a fucking Mac? Why do I need to pay 99$ a year just to install a debug build on my own device?! It's literally impossible to get into ios development without being rich or having some kind of plan for revenue...

Testing my app on Android:
Install Android studio -> plug in phone -> run code in Android Studio or simply install the resulting apk on your phone.

Trying to test my app on my iPad:
Google how to build app for iPad -> reading that you have to own a Mac to run xcode when you want to build Code for iOS -> searching for a workaround -> find a way to build my app online -> setting the tool and building it -> Trying out 5 different tools to sideload the app, no one works -> finding out that you need a developer account to sign the app for testing purposes on MY OWN DEVICE. I really would appreciate it if I would be able to install personal stuff for testing and LEARNING without being forced into insolvency. Why are people putting up with this kind of bullshit?

I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.

I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.

We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.

I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?

I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.

Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.

The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.

The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.

Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.

In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.

After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).

I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?

In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.

Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).

But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!

Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.

He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".

To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....

Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).

01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.

When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

So I left this company I was working for for about 6 years and then eventually came back earlier this year. It was basically 2 backend devs, 2 frontend, and a designer, with me being one of the frontend devs, and the other operating as the owner/alpha of the group. And our coding styles couldn’t have been more different. I wrote code with purpose that could scale, while he wrote garbage that I affectionally labelled "brute force code"; meaning it eventually got the job done, but was always a complete nightmare to work with. Think the windiest piece of shit you’ve ever seen and then times it by 10. Edit the simplest thing at your peril. And if you think you fixed something, all you’ve ever really done is create another 10 problems. And because the code was such shit, it relied on certain things to be broken in order for other things to work. Anyway, you get the drift.

In the beginning we used jQuery and so we just continued to use it throughout the years. But then when I finally left I realized we were operating in a bit of a bubble, where we didn’t really care much to ever try anything else, and mostly because we were arrogant. But eventually my boss started to notice the trend of moving away from jQuery, so he converted everything to vanilla JavaScript. Thing is, he hadn’t learned ES6 yet or any of the other tools that came along with it. And so it was a mess, and I was quite shocked at how many lengths he’d gone to create the full conversion. Granted, it was faster. But overall, still a nightmare to work with, as the files were still thousands of lines long. And when I dug deeper, I realized that he’d started to pluck things out of the DOM manually on-demand. And so it dawned on me: he’d been looking at sites built with React and other dif-engines, and then instead of just using one, he decided to reinvent the wheel. And the funny thing is, he thought it was just a matter of always replacing the entire HTML for whatever was needed. And so he thought what he was doing was somehow clever. And why not? He’s a badass mathematician who created an empire with jQuery. And so he obviously didn’t need input from anyone, and especially not from the shitty devs over there at Facebook. Anyway, while I was gone I learned quite a bit of React, and so it was just comical to me when I came back and saw this. Because it would have been a million times more efficient had he just used the proper tool. In short, he’d re-written the entire codebase for two full years and then ended up with another round of brute-force garbage.

So that’s my story. The lesson is, when you work for someone who’s a dumbass piece of shit, sometimes he’ll be so stupid the only recourse is uncontrollable laughter. I became a digital nomad somewhere in between and fucked off to Asia where I barely worked for 2 years. And I’d definitely recommend the same for anyone else with an asshole boss where the work is unfulfilling. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is when you’re living like a millionaire in Asia working 15 hours a week.

Shit recruiters say:
"We need solution experts, not language experts, because a language is just a tool."

Well then, good luck with your spaghetti code solution.

Maybe in special dedication to @kiki.

I cut the unit tests down in LOC size by roughly 50 - 60 % in most projects.

It's really easy once one sees unit tests not as a dunking pile of copy pasta wild west, but rather as a code base that needs architecture and design.

Some extensions, some annotations, some good old helper classes.

Pooooof.

Why I did this? ...

Because it's fucking annoying when you read a PR with tests and need a fucking diff tool to spot the difference between two tests cause they're 80 % the same.

Yeah. Thx for giving me brain cramps, motherducker.

I'm not an expert in unit tests, but if all test codebases look like the "usual stuff" in our projects...

It's no wonder bugs exist...

!rant
Arduino CNC
Hey guys.
Since I mostly see frameworks to use with G-Code in Arduino CNCs I'm gonna make my own framework, where you don't need to know G-Code and the code is executed by Arduino code.
The code would include a template to define steppers steps and such.
Would include a library to work with different stepper shields.
Would this interest to anyone?

I'll provide a full example with stuff to learn for any amateur working with CNCs or that want to work with one. If you're not interested, thank you for reading, you can stop here.

Ex:
X(10);
Y(-5.5);
XY(6,7.5);
Z(-10);
This framework would only use incremental coordinates and will work for basic forms, drilling and such.

<Tutorial>
Coordinates.
Coordinates can be relative/incremental or absolute.
Lets say you have a square with 10mm, (top coordinates: (X=0,Y=0) to (X=10,Y=10).
think your drawing this square.
First line:
X0, Y0
Absolute: x10,y0
Relative: X+10
Second line:
A: x10,y10
R: Y+10
Third Line (...)
Absolute is a fixed point (coordinate)
Relative is a distance to move (not a coordinate but the distance and direction)
</Tutorial>

So, to cut a square with a TR10 (end mill with radius=5, diameter=10)

<code>
// You don't place + in positive values
// The tool always cut in the direction of the tool rotation, meaning on the left of the material.
Z(10); // Security Distance
XY(-5,0); //Compensate the diameter of the tool in radius
Z(-1); // Z=0 is the top of the block to mill, in this case. Z=0 can also be in the bottom
Y(15); //Second Point
X(15); // Third Point
Y(-15); // Forth point
X-15; // Fifth Point
(repeat)
</code>
Now we have a block with 1mm depth. If you use a while or for you can repeat the sequence for x=n passages, change the value to Z for the depth and your done.

I started to hate programming.
I started with a lot of enthusiasm 11 years ago up to become in 2 years a full stack dev, a sysadmin and had also my fair share of technical assistance on every device plus hardware experience mounting hardware like cctvs, routers, extenders, industrial printers and so on. At the time you actually had the tools to solve problems and had to crack your head and pull hairs to solve stuff and people actually was developing solution and frameworks that solved stuff.

Today I can't stand anything.

Every midschooler feels entitled to release a framework that is announed as the next cure for cancer. Web dev once was thin and simplistic, now simplicity is considered a bug and not a feature.
I'm working on an angular project for the nth time and the whole environment is a clusterfuck of problems held togheter with kids glue.
Someone did a tool/framework for everything but most of it is barely well tested or mature.

Just to start this project we had to know, beside html/css/js techs like Angular, Kafka, Kubernetes, Docker, git, Lit, npm/node, mysql/sql server, webpack/grunt and the hell that it brings, C#/Asp.NET/MVC/WebAPI, and so on, the list is long.

DAMN. Making a simple page which shows a tabbed view with some grids requires you to know a whole damn stack of technologies that need to cooperate togheter.
It's 10x more complex and I actually find it much less productive than ever.

But what bugs me most, is that 90% of that stuff is bug ridden, has some niche use case or hidden pitfall and stuff because with this whole crap of "hey we put on github you open a ticket" they just release spaghetti code and wait for people to do the debug for them.

Angular puts out a version every 2 days and create destructive updates.

I am so tired that I spend most of my 8hrs binging youtube vids in despair to procrastinate work.
I liked to do this once....

Not as much of a rant as a share of my exasperation you might breathe a bit more heavily out your nose at.

My work has dealt out new laptops to devs. Such shiny, very wow. They're also famously easy to use.
.
.
.
My arse.
.
.
.
I got the laptop, transferred the necessary files and settings over, then got to work. Delivered ticket i, delivered ticket j, delivered the tests (tests first *cough*) then delivered Mr Bullet to Mr Foot.

Day 4 of using the temporary passwords support gave me I thought it was time to get with department policy and change my myriad passwords to a single one. Maybe it's not as secure but oh hell, would having a single sign-on have saved me from this.

I went for my new machine's password first because why not? It's the one I'll use the most, and I definitely won't forget it. I didn't. (I didn't.) I plopped in my memorable password, including special characters, caps, and numbers, again (carefully typed) in the second password field, then nearly confirmed. Curiosity, you bastard.

There's a key icon by the password field and I still had milk teeth left to chew any and all new features with.
Naturally I click on it. I'm greeted by a window showing me a password generating tool. So many features, options for choosing length, character types, and tons of others but thinking back on it, I only remember those two. I had a cheeky peek at the different passwords generated by it, including playing with the length slider. My curiosity sated, I closed that window and confirmed that my password was in.

You probably know where this is going. I say probably to give room for those of you like me who certifiably. did. not.

Time to test my new password.
*Smacks the power button to log off*
Time to put it in (ooer)
*Smacks in the password*
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Whoops, typo probably.
Do it again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

No u.
Try again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Try my previous password.
Well, SUCCESS... but actually, no.

Tried the previous previous password.
T O O M A N Y A T T E M P T S

Ahh fuck, I can't believe I've done this, but going to support is for pussies. I'll put this by the rest of the fire, I can work on my old laptop.

Day starts getting late, gotta go swimming soonish. Should probably solve the problem. Cue a whole 40 minutes trying my 15 or so different passwords and their permutations because oh heck I hope it's one of them.
I talk to a colleague because by now the "days since last incident" counter has been reset.

"Hello there Ryan, would you kindly go on a voyage with me that I may retrace my steps and perhaps discover the source of this mystery?"

"A man chooses, a slave obeys. I choose... lmao ye sure m8, but I'm driving"

We went straight for the password generator, then the length slider, because who doesn't love sliding a slidey boi. Soon as we moved it my upside down frown turned back around. Down in the 'new password' and the 'confirm new password' IT WAS FUCKING AUTOCOMPLETING. The slidey boi was changing the number of asterisks in both bars as we moved it. Mystery solved, password generator arrested, shit's still fucked.

Bite the bullet, call support.
"Hi, I need my password resetting. I dun goofed"
*details tech support needs*
*It can be sorted but the tech is ages away*
Gotta be punctual for swimming, got two whole lengths to do and a sauna to sit in.
"I'm off soon, can it happen tomorrow?"
"Yeah no problem someone will be down in the morning."

Next day. Friday. 3 hours later, still no contact. Go to support room myself.
The guy really tries, goes through everything he can, gets informed that he needs a code from Derek. Where's Derek? Ah shet. He's on holiday.

There goes my weekend (looong weekend, bank holiday plus day flexi-time) where I could have shown off to my girlfriend the quality at which this laptop can play all our favourite animé, and probably get remind by her that my personal laptop has an i2350u with integrated graphics.

TODAY. (Part is unrelated, but still, ugh.)
Go to work. Ten minutes away realise I forgot my door pass.
Bollocks.
Go get a temporary pass (of shame).
Go to clock in. My fob was with my REAL pass.
What the wank.
Get to my desk, nobody notices my shame. I'm thirsty. I'll have the bottle from my drawer. But wait, what's this? No key that usually lives with my pass? Can't even unlock it?
No thanks.

Support might be able to cheer me up. Support is now for manly men too.
*Knock knock*
"Me again"
"Yeah give it here, I've got the code"
He fixes it, I reset my pass, sensibly change my other passwords.
Or I would, if the internet would work.

It connects, but no traffic? Ryan from earlier helps, we solve it after a while.

My passwords are now sorted, machine is okay, crisis resolved.

*THE END*

If you skipped the whole thing and were expecting a tl;dr, you just lost the game.

Otherwise, I absolve you of having lost the game.

Exactly at the char limit

PM: this is our super fancy new CI/CD pipeline, it's the greatest. i expect you to learn and understand all this in no time.
devs: so i have to spend some more time on this topic because it's completely new to me and requires some learning...
PM: nooo, that's a super easy task with zero effort, my braindead hamster can do that in no time, so can i, and so can you! let's assign 1 story point for that.

~ 3 months latèr ~

also PM, after he has started developing as well: so i'm realizing there are many things that i have to learn, and it takes me some time. i haven't developed with C++ and <other tool stack> for a longer time. by the way, you guys don't need to check for any quality right now, we need to deliver fast. it's okay, when you have memory overflows, your code is completely crappy, poor architecture or memory overflows, it doesn't matter.

he even has a subtask for migrating his code from VS project to our new project structure, since he refused to learn our pipeline right from the beginning and created VS project instead. シ why is this a subtask? this job can be done in no time, my left vanishing twin named Klaus who has dislexia and hates vim can solve this task in 20 seconds!!!!11

(and still no PR, not even a feature branch in our repo)

In only I were 1.15 times faster or had better planning (why didn’t I use the Saturday Sunday at the end of the first week 🤦🏼‍♂️), things would’ve happened differently. I think I’m becoming stupid and my tolerance levels are going down too.

So this happened a while back ..

I was given a code base which didn’t have any changes in the last two years and I was asked to add a feature to this. This was my first task in this new group I was part of. I had two weeks to do this starting on a Monday.

Partway through implementation I realised that the code base is a pile of shit and I wasn’t doing myself or anyone else any favours by shitting on it.

It’s Wednesday. I’ve dealt with many other codebases before but the urge to rewrite this particular one was just unlike anything else. And so I started changing code and before I realised, I modified almost all the important files.
I got sick of this mixed up code and started a rewrite from scratch. It was Friday and I finally had just the basic mechanics of the whole thing working. Now I needed to add all the functionalities and also my new feature.

It should be noted that at no point did I tell any of the superiors I was doing this fearing what they might say and also fearing going back to adding shit to shit.

By the end of the second week, the rewrite was complete and I only had the new feature to add. The rewrite was significantly smaller, compartmentalised and well commented because I did the bloody commenting (where it was not obvious from the code). So on Friday, I was asked about the progress and I told them that it needed some more work and that I need a couple more days. And I got shit for it. I was told it was a mistake giving this task to me and that I am not competent enough. One of the superiors told the other superior about perhaps giving me something more suited to my level. To be fair to them, they were expecting the work in the two weeks to be for the new feature.

And in two days’ time, on Monday (I worked on Saturday and half of Sunday), I finished the whole thing and gave it to them. New feature was working. And I still did not tell them what I did. The tool worked fine so they had no idea what happened because this project had no version control and I pointed them to a new directory with the new code with a first commit.

Shit, again a long rant...

It all started 9 months ago.
We had a meeting with our group staff (5 people). Back the we discussed, if we should only work online or still send files around with mail.

Sure I suggested to run everything on a root server, would be the best performance/cost choice.

The president and the accounted refused, they said it's still working, why change. Payment will only be trough banktransfer and everybody keeps files local.

Back then I told them, that they will have sooner or later a problem. Files will be missing and bills not payd.

Last week we had a new meeting:
- Some of the group missed files.
- Some bills were unpaid

So now I have time until march to find and finish a groupware/collaboration tool.

I need to run member administration and payment online, this should be finished in October 2018. It should also do accounting.
Im really planing to use WooCommerce for this, I'm really crazy, I know! But I dont have time for that shit!

I work fulltime beside this and almost have no time to code something like that.

Well this week I demanded a memberlist, so I can plan a CRM database.

I received a word file as memberlist.
I asked them if this is a joke, right?!
They said no, thats the list. All the Data was mixed and some user details missing.

I HAD 3 HOURS TO GET IT DOWN IN EXCEL. WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS??? I REALLY WANNA PUNCH YOU ALL IN YOUR FACE!

When I sended it, I didn't receive a response or thanks.

The joke, I'm doing this stuff for free. I volontered, to make something big...

Im really going to shit Lego Bricks next...

tldr: maintainers can be assholes

So there's this python package+cli tool that I found interesting while browsing github and thought of contributing to it. Now this repo has around 2000 issues and multiple open PRs so seemed like a good start.

So i submit 2 PRs implementing similar features on different sites (it is a scraping repo). This douche of a maintainer marks comments various errors in the code convention not being followed without specifying what they actually were. Now I had specified that i was new to this repo so and would need his help (I guess this is one of the jobs of the reviewer). This piece of shit comments changes in the pr with one or two word sentences like "again", "wtf" and occasionally psycopathic replies. That son of a bitch can't tell what's wrong like wtf dude, instead of having a long discussion over the comments section of the fucking pr why can't you just point out what exactly is wrong and I'll happily fix that shit, but no, you have to be a douche about out it and employ sarcasm. Well FUCK YOU TOO.

!rant

Need some opinions. Joined a new company recently (yippee!!!). Just getting to grips with everything at the minute. I'm working on mobile and I will be setting up a new team to take over a project from a remote team. Looking at their iOS and Android code and they are using RxSwift and RxJava in them.

Don't know a whole lot about the Android space yet, but on iOS I did look into Reactive Cocoa at one point, and really didn't like it. Does anyone here use Rx, or have an opinion about them, good or bad? I can learn them myself, i'm not looking for help with that, i'm more interested in opinions on the tools themselves.

My initial view (with a lack of experience in the area):

- I'm not a huge fan of frameworks like this that attempt to change the entire flow or structure of a language / platform. I like using third party libraries, but to me, its excessive to include something like this rather than just learning the in's / out's of the platform. I think the reactive approach has its use cases and i'm not knocking the it all together. I just feel like this is a little bit of forcing a square peg into a round hole. Swift wasn't designed to work like that and a big layer will need to be added in, in order to change it. I would want to see tremendous gains in order to justify it, and frankly I don't see it compared to other approaches.

- I do like the MVVM approach included with it, but i've easily managed to do similar with a handful of protocols that didn't require a new architecture and approach.

- Not sure if this is an RxSwift thing, or just how its implemented here. But all ViewControllers need to be created by using a coordinator first. This really bugs me because it means changing everything again. When I first opened this app, login was being skipped, trying to add it back in by selecting the default storyboard gave me "unwrapping a nil optional" errors, which took a little while to figure out what was going on. This, to me, again is changing too much in the platform that even the basic launching of a screen now needs to be changed. It will be confusing while trying to build a new team who may or may not know the tech.

- I'm concerned about hiring new staff and having to make sure that they know this, can learn it or are even happy to do so.

- I'm concerned about having a decrease in the community size to debug issues. Had horrible experiences with this in the past with hybrid tech.

- I'm concerned with bugs being introduced or patterns being changed in the tool itself. Because it changes and touches everything, it will be a nightmare to rip it out or use something else and we'll be stuck with the issue. This seems to have happened with ReactiveCocoa where they made a change to their approach that seems to have caused a divide in the community, with people splitting off into other tech.

- In this app we have base Swift, with RxSwift and RxCocoa on top, with AlamoFire on top of that, with Moya on that and RxMoya on top again. This to me is too much when only looking at basic screens and networking. I would be concerned that moving to something more complex that we might end up with a tonne of dependencies.

- There seems to be issues with the server (nothing to do with RxSwift) but the errors seem to be getting caught by RxSwift and turned into very vague and difficult to debug console logs. "RxSwift.RxError error 4" is not great. Now again this could be a "way its being used" issue as oppose to an issue with RxSwift itself. But again were back to a big middle layer sitting between me and what I want to access. I've already had issues with login seeming to have 2 states, success or wrong password, meaning its not telling the user whats actually wrong. Now i'm not sure if this is bad dev or bad tools, but I get a sense RxSwift is contributing to it in some fashion, at least in this specific use of it.

I'll leave it there for now, any opinions or advice would be appreciated.

MS Access and VBA.

This combo is the worst dev tech I had to use it by now. Why? Because even if you try it, you can't make a single line of clean code. The syntax is horrible, it still use GOTO...

Maybe the reason why I hated working with it is linked to the context too: I was (and still) developing a system using NoSQL database and this system should be mostly fully configurable through metadata within JSON documents and it was. But we were still writing every JSON by hands so we decided we needed to develop a web based utility for us and clients who would need to configure the system but one of the head decision making people said that we don't need to use fancy technologies (because NoSQL is already "fancy") and that the configuration tool will be develop with Access because he used it a lot when he was younger and when he was coding during its free time. He said that using Access would be much easier and much time saving than our "fancy web based solution" and that he could help if we had questions...

Developing a MS Access software is already a pain in the ass but when you need to output JSON with it...

I had to implement an internal tool in C++ which parses a file and converts the content into another format.
It did take hundreds of lines of code to get it working, file handling and parsing data in C/C++ is terrible.

I'd rather done it with some scripting language, and additionally implemented it in python as a side-project (in less than an hour and < 20 lines of code, BTW) but it should be C++ "Because that is how we do it here".

At the end the tool was only used for a few weeks, because someone had an idea how to completely avoid the need for that converted data.

!rant

What a time to become a dev

This is real rant, not one of these funny stories!

So, I spent 4 years to get a Computer Science degree, and did two specializations, 3.5 years more in Uni. I have 6 years of experience working in IT, from support to programming. I also speak 3 languages.

I'm from a South America country, and now I'm living in EU.

I'm 30 now and earning a little more than a MacDonald's cashier earns in the US. I have to live in a shared apartment like a fucking Uni student. I have nothing, no car, no house, no girlfriend. WTF!

IT is a fucking lie! Profession of the future my ass!

In Uni they said that finding a good job was easy, that companies would literally grab us by the neck to work for them. LIE!
I did found a low paying job though, where at least I could learn a lot more.
People were really satisfied with my work and I even received a proposal of one of our clients to work for them, but the offer wasn't good enough.

I tried entering some big companies as a Trainee, but it was so ridiculous, they said they were looking for an IT person, but they asked things related to economy and other stuff that had nothing to do with IT. I always failed in the group work/interview, it was so ridiculous, I remember one candidate saying her dream was to work for the company since she was a child, SERIOUSLY!

When the opportunity came, I moved to EU and now I'm working as a dev. But as I said, I'm not satisfied with it! In the US the yearly average software engineer salary is about 100K, I earn less than 1/4 of it. And don't come saying that US pays more because of the cost of life, here the cost of life is the same or even more expensive, a super small apartment/loft is at least 180K, a simple new car 18K and a Big Mac costs 4€.

In the US, the average salary of someone that just graduated from uni is 60K to 70K! LOL

In EU, it's super hard for someone to earn 100K, that's why many companies are creating offices here, good workforce, 2 to 3 times smaller salary!

IT also sucks because it's too volatile, there's new stuff all the time. Someone always has to come with a new language, new framework, new library, etc etc. And you have to keep learning new stuff all the time.
Also job openings always ask for experienced people, like you must have at least two years of experience with VUE.js, or something.

Do you remember the last time you went to a doctor for a checkup, did they use a new tool, or did something different during the checkup? Probably not, the medic don't have to learn new stuff all the time, he is still using a stethoscope, he is still placing a wooden stick in your mouth to check your throat...
But in IT, almost no one nowadays is going to create code using CoffeeScript, they instead will use TypeScript.

I read an article saying that an IT professional must study 20 hours a week to keep up with new trends. So I must work 40 hours and study another 20? LOL
It's not that I don't like learning new stuff, but this sucks, I want to maybe learn something different or have a hobby.

Today I regret going to uni, I feel it was a waste of time and money. They taught things like calculus and physics that I never had to use professionally, and even programming stuff like linked lists I never had to use.

If instead I had studied dentistry or studied to be a ophthalmologist I think I would be earning more, would be working more independently and wouldn't need to keep up learning new things so much.

Also to work in IT you don't need a diploma, I read an article by a dude that learned programming by his own, did some software for his portfolio and got a job at Google.
When I read these kinds of story I regret even more going to uni, It really feels I wasted my time.

For these reasons I can't recommend going to uni to study IT, if you want to go to uni go study something else!
If you want to study programming do it on your own, there's everything you must know online for free, create a portfolio, and look for a job or even try working for yourself!

Living the life I have now, there's just no incentive to keep going.
Should I keep learning new stuff so maybe I can get a better job that will still pay low, or quit and try creating something on my own?
Or even ditch IT all together and go back to uni? LOL NO!

I have been working on this software for 3 years now. The code base was a working prototype made by my boss before I came, not more, not less. Php + Angular. Have been refactoring a lot, backend is backed with hundreds of tests now, frontend still lacks a lot. Still a lot of programm structures are still the same weird ones my boss once created in a rush between two meetings while learning Angular to get the prototype finished. Now it's used in production which makes hard to refactor, because we have to maintain backwards compatibility. Neither the parts I added or refactored completely are satisfying, because they are built on this structures, because i never got any feedback for anything I decided and because I changed my own paradigms over time.

So I am all alone on this project. All genuinly new projects are assigned to the new team members (i was the first one, no we are five plus my boss) because I wont have time, have to maintain the old one. So I never can do something new which is quite frustrating.

I did a little side tool, the only thing I invented and did completely by myself in our repertoire - and now some stakeholder shows big interest onto this. Instead of giving me the task to make a real project from this my boss wants to give it to them to develop it. Why? Because I need more time for the main application.

Also the more the software is used the more bug tickets and feature requests come. I was crying for help for months but the others had appareantly more important stuff to do.

This might be true to some extend. Yesterday we had some kind of crisis meeting and my boss wanted again to assing pur junior to help me, who has a shit load of other things to do and is a student. I insisted that this would not be enough, and one of the fulltime devs has to get involved because the thing is our core application and I am only part time btw. So my boss said we wont decide today but one of them should do it. They should have some time to figure out who which is understandable but it's not that I didn't keep saying this for months. Now they are all like whimp whimp when I have to do php i will quit. The new projects are all typescript, with node backend if any. But alas, one of them even said yesterday he doesn't want to do js anymore. Okay... but... this is our tech stack then get another job allready?

And I should do the same probably. But then again I feel very sorry for my boss who helped me in very dark times of corona and more. If both of us leave, the project he worked on for decade (including convincing poeole, collect money..) might be suddenly at it's end while he is so exited about it's access today...

I also get insecure if it's really that they hate php so much or that they don't want to work with me personally because maybe I am a bad team Player or what?

I experienced the same at my old workplace, got left alone with big parts of the project because they didn't want to do php and js in this case and it ended up five devs doing the python backend and me doing the frontend and the php cms part all alone. Then I quit and now everything seems to happen again.

And then again I think I am only fucked up so hard by this stuff because I do not really like being a developer at all. I only do it for the money and because I am good at it (at least i think so. Nobody ever bothers to ever to read my code and give me feedback, because you know, php and js). So I guess I would hate any other job in the field maybe likewise?

This job *is* convinient, salary, office
position, flexibility could not be better. At the end of the day it's not that stressfull. And i don't have any second of freetime (due to family) or energy i could offer a new and more demanding employer, can't work over time or even take a fulltime position, can't home office, can't earn less, can't travel very long to the office and especially can't go back to school to learn something completely new. Some of these constraints are softwe then other naturally but still my posibilities at the Moment are very limited. That might change in about five years if the family situation changed. So it would most likely be reasonable to stay until then at my current job? And bear being alone with this app, don't getting involved on any new project, don't learn anything new, don't invent anything.

There was one potential way out, they considered offering me PHD position to the upcoming ml part of the project... But I learned that I would attend to a bunch of classes at university first, which i would like to, but I don't think i have the time.

I feel trapped somehow. I also feel very lonely in the Office because those fucktards keep saying in home office.

Man, I don't want to go to work today.

Overengineering. Finding the right point between overdesign and no design at all. That's where fancy languages and unusual patterns being hit by real world problems, and you need to deal with all that utter mess you created being architecture astronaut. Isn't that funny how you realize that another fancy tool is fundamentally incompatible with the task you need to solve, and you realize it after a month of writing workarounds and hacks.

But on the other hand, duct tape slacking becomes a mess even quicker.

Not being able to promote projects. You may code the shit out of side project and still get zero response, absolutely no impact. That's why your side projects often becomes abandoned.

Oversleeping. You thought tomorrow was productive day, but you wake up oversleeped, your head aches, your mind is not clear and you be like "fuck that, I'm staying in bed watching memes all day". But there's job that has to be done, and that bothers you.

Writing tests. Oh, words can't describe how much I hate writing tests, any kind of. I tried testing so many times in high school, at university, even at production, but it seems like my mind is just doesn't accept it. I know that testing is fundamentally important, but my mind collapses every time I try to write a single fucking test, resulting in terrible headache. I don't know why it's like that, but it is, and I better repl the shit out of pure function than write fucking tests.

My biggest problem with Visual Studio Code is that every fucking piece of shit dev thinks it's their duty to introduce it to me. STOP. Just stop this shit, alright? Wanna use vscode? Fine, just don't tell me it's the best tool and I MUST use it instead of the tools I'm used to. I'm tired of this bullshit.
Every new project, every new team. Starting from js/java/.net monke and ending with PMs, I must hear this bullshit about god blessed IDE that I must use, because "why you need intellij/webstorm/rider? just install vscode and some plugins. we all use it in our project and it's ok".
FUCK YOU! Refactoring is not just renaming variables and extracting blocks of code into functions. If you want terminal integrated into your text editor with highlighting and LSP support, so be it. I want an IDE with rich refactoring tools, code analysis and good completion, database viewing/modeling support, good build tools support, good UI for git and git-diff, good test and code coverage support. I don't want your semi-IDE, bloated with hundreds of bugged third-party plugins, which I must spend a week on to configure and merry with each other before using.
JUST STOP this crap and let people use the tools they are proficient/comfortable/productive with.

I'm very angry at C# 😡 (and java in some degree). Recently I decided to create huge project in C#. (It is my favorite launguage now because of great VS2017 its features, lib and such). I used windows form app in order to make pretty gui for this program. Everything worked fine, but i decided to implement some 3d rendering system in order to display grafs in 3d, oh how foolish was I.

Ok so what are my options?
1.DirectX9 -> abandoned by microsoft, they say its ded so nope.
2. DX11 -> great! i even can use sharpdx or simpledx to use it! oh wait, what is that? INVALID DX CALL
(in demo code)Damit!
3.OpenGL -> obsolete, lib non existent.
4. Library that comes with .NET -> WFP only sorry!
(i found some dogdy tutorials on yt for dx11 but they need .net 2.0 really?) 😐

In that moment i decided to swich to java. (because Java c#_launguage = new Java("microsoft");)
After 1 day of instaling eclipse and 2 more to install the newest jdk MANUALY i realized that java isn't that easy to use as C#, because:
- no dynamic type-> HUGE PAIN i cant use a single list to store everything buuuu!
-console? yes but its burried inside some random lib and its not consistent with every java version!
-gui editor similar to VS one? oh you need to create it from scrach!😫

Well at lest i can render things. So maybe java will render suff as another tool in my app? Nope pipes NON existent, we need to use sockiets! (unity pipe plugin was easier! worked but it was SLOW)

Ok so after few more days of struggling i managed to render simple graf using directx9 in my original C# project that works fine.. 😥 I only need to create a lib to wrap in and we are done!

Why can't companies create a laungage that will have ALL the features i need? Or at lest give me something like pipes that work in every laungage that will be helpful!

I know it is sometimes stressful to be a dev. But when your program works 😀 that is great feeling! Especialy when you learned to code yourself like me 😁. (student before a university, that lives in small abadoned town)

Hello, brilliant minds!

I am participating in a hackathon based on web development and I need to submit potential problem statements for the same. They have some predetermined domains, but I am unable to look for a suitable problem. The domains are:

1. eCommerce
2. eGovernance: Smart City
3. Fitness
4. Social Innovation
5. Tool/Library/Extension for devs
6. Travel
7. Women's safety

I will have 6 hours to code. Please suggest some of your best ideas. Thanks in advance!

Love,
TheSlug

On the most serious of notes, and i need yall to think hard about this.

What makes you a good developer whether Backend or Frontend or Web or mobile.

What qualities actually make you a good developer?

I mean, we all use google, github, stack overflow etc. So what makes Programmer A better than Programmer B.

and in a more practical sense, ive been coding for two years now and i have deployed an API written in node and an instagram automation tool in PHP (which is down now due to lack of funds), i lack frontend knowldge (but i want to make up for that) and i have projects that when i finish, with my connections can and will blow up in terms of income. now you on the other hand, what makes you better than me?

and lastly, how much code do you have to change from an existing project, lets say from github for you to comfortably say, yes this is mine.

So at our company, we use Google Sheets to for to coordinate everything, from designs to bug reporting to localization decisions, etc... Except for roadmaps, we use Trello for that. I found this very unintuitive and disorganized. Google Sheets GUI, as you all know, was not tailored for development project coordination. It is a spreadsheet creation tool. Pages of document are loosely connected to each other and you often have to keep a link to each of them because each Google Sheets document is isolated from each other by design. Not to mention the constant requests for permission for each document, wasting everybody's time.

I brought up the suggestion to the CEO that we should migrate everything to GitHub because everybody already needed a Github account to pull the latest version of our codebase even if they're not developers themselves. Gihub interface is easier to navigate, there's an Issues tab for bug report, a Wiki tab for designs and a Projects tab for roadmaps, eliminating the need for a separate Trello account. All tabs are organized within each project. This is how I've seen people coordinated with each other on open-source projects, it's a proven, battle-tested model of coordination between different roles in a software project.

The CEO shot down the proposal immediately, reason cited: The design team is not familiar with using the Github website because they've never thought of Github as a website for any role other than developers.

Fast-forward to a recent meeting where the person operating the computer connected to the big TV is struggling to scroll down a 600+ row long spreadsheet trying to find one of the open bugs. At that point, the CEO asked if there's anyway to hide resolved bugs. I immediately brought up Github and received support from our tester (vocal support anyway, other devs might have felt the same but were afraid to speak up). As you all know, Github by default only shows open issues by default, reducing the clutter that would be generated by past closed issues. This is the most obvious solution to the CEO's problem. But this CEO still stubbornly rejected the proposal.

2 lessons to take away from this story:

- Developer seems to be the only role in a development team that is willing to learn new tools for their work. Everybody else just tries to stretch the limit of the tools they already knew even if it meant fitting a square peg into a round hole. Well, I can't speak for testers, out of 2 testers I interacted with, one I never asked her opinion about Github, and the other one was the guy mentioned above. But I do know a pixel artist in the same company having a similar condition. She tries to make pixel arts using Photoshop. Didn't get to talk to her about this because we're not on the same project, but if we were, I'd suggest her use Aseprite, or (at least Pixelorama if the company doesn't want to spend for Aseprite's price tag) for the purpose of drawing pixel arts. Not sure how willing she would be at learning new tools, though.

- Github and other git hosts have a bit of a branding problem. Their names - Github, BitBucket, GitLab, etc... - are evocative of a tool exclusively used by developers, yet their websites have these features that are supposed to be used by different roles other than developers. Issues tabs are used by testers as well as developers. Wiki tabs are used by designers alongside developers. Projects and Insights tabs are used by project managers/product owners. Discussion tabs are used by every roles. Artists can even submit new assets through Pull Requests tabs if the Art Directors know how to use the site interface (Art Directors' job is literally just code review, but for artistic assets). These websites are more than just git hosts. They are straight-up Jira replacement with git hosting as a bonus feature. How can we get that through the head of non-developers so that we don't have to keep 4+ accounts for different websites for the same project?

¡rant|rant

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

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

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

imagine an order table.

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

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

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

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

Api.Find(int pointer)

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

And now to read a singe string 😑

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

Then you create a string variable with ALL FUCKING SPACES.

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

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

Then some more BS error code checking.

Now you have read an string value 😀

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the outcome of all this...

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

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

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

Sooooo this is the thing.

For a stupid fucking project at work we basically have to scrum manage a bunch of individual components on a rather large web app.

We start with the html and css and js bs and we all have to work on different sections of one page at a time. Large blocks right? Ok cool.

Originally I had suggested to build everything inside individual php files and then stack them up with require(). As fucking simple as fucking that. Except that the manager does not have php on her pc. The other two developer don't either. I am the only one that fucks with php OUTSIDE our fucking servers.

Go fucking figure...the lead developer does not fuck with php outside the servers.....man

So, because i know it would be a shitstorm with something as basic as installing i dunno...fucking xampp my manager said that she needs a different solution.

Fuck it...fine...whatever. i know go. So i make a fucking server wich upon being fired you can just code the templates and paste them where they need to go. Docs and everything..a sane folder structure and everything and a fucking pipleline for the assets and everything. I would have thought that shit was good enough but I even added a cmd tool that merges all the fucking html files together into one html file with all the shit included.

All in Golang. It works, its fast and i can just give them the fucking folder with the exe and it will work.

I dunno if this was the best way to do it. But it took me maybe 20 mins to do it and it works.

I would have expected our manager to be impressed but she legit did not gave two fucking shits about the fact that one of her developers is able to create this mini server for static sites shitstain project in 20 minutes.

Man I don't want praise. She thinks that jquery is the best thing in the world so I don't expect much. But shit man.......a better reaction would have been better. She basically went meh ok as long as it works.

I also showed them a demo of a flutter project to replace the shitty ass webview filled school app that they have for android and ios. Shit is native and it looks beautiful. Ask me what she said.

Go on, fucking ask me.

She said tha if it would take me much time to continue on that the she would rather leave it to the third party vendor that currently makes the app.

I told her that such shitty app costs the school 40 fucking thousand dollars a year that I could do in a fucking month, which would also be better since it would raise the salaries of me and the other 2 developers and will more importantly make us more valuable to the school.

Said that she would think about it because we have a lot of projects.

I
Fucking
Hate
It

When someone fucks with my ability to make more money. I hate it fam. And i fucking despise being limited by other people.

Fuck this week.

I am never gonna grow in here. Ever. But it pays the bills so fuck it.

Anyone ever just get seriously discouraged about peoples view on how easy/difficult it is to code?

A client has requested that they want a system built so they can create surveys and send them to people via email all in one tool. Im not a good front end designer but I know how to develop it. So they hired a designer to send me screen mockups and I will develop them. Easy enough.

This is where the bullshit starts... The designer was supposed to send me the V1 designs last Friday so I could begin building. I told them that I could have a rough version of some pages (with placeholder text and whatnot) ready for the following Friday (tomorrow). However the designer didn't send me the designs until 5 minutes before we were all meeting yesterday. We were all going over the designs in the meeting and this is how the conversation went (roughly):

Client: Wow these designs are amazing, I cant wait to see what it looks like when it functions. Are we still going to have a demo version by Friday?

Me: Well seeing as I just got the designs today, Ill have to look them over and get back to you on a new timeline.

Designer: Yah sorry about the delay, designing can be tricky sometimes.

Client: No worries, I understand. However I want to stick to the same timeline and have the demo by Friday.

Me: Well as I said, Im only getting the designs now, this is the first time I'm seeing them so I'll have to look them over and re-evaluate.

Client: Yeah but the designs are done so it will be easy for you to code it by then. It's all right there in front of you. I need to run, excited for Friday! Bye!

Designer: Bye!

Me: ...........

-- I know its partially my fault for saying I could have a demo done by Friday assuming the designer would have it done on time but COME ON. I hate when people say something is easy when they have no idea what it entails or how to even do it.

go fuck yourself with your fucking communities. i went into computing because i like being left alone. who are all those fucking freaks building their communities? this is capitalism mother fuckers, everybody in the world agreed on it, on each person being an independent individual doing their job to the best possible standard, instead these low-skill low-iq oversocialised sheeple started conglomerate into communities and brainwash everybody that this is what it is about. get stuffed alright. all my life i've been introverted, just leave me alone to write code alright? take my library i don't mind i'll take yours no strings attached, just push the code and forget about it. but no, all these degenerate morons without CS degrees have occupied our safe space, pushed us out of it and just can't get enough of using the buzzword "community-driven" "volunteers" volunteer my ass assholes you can't even make software nobody in real industry needs you because you have no skill at all you learn a bit of js which is any 14-15 yo can do and now think you're some kind of prodigies, unsung heros of humanity who selflessly bring the progress. nothing can be further from the truth - because of you we don't have real software, we don't have investment we don't get no respect everybody walks all over software engineers treating us like shit, there's an entire generation of indoctrinated parasitic scum that believes that software tools is grown for them on trees by some development teams that their are entitled to automatically, because some corporation will eventually support those big projects - yeah does it really happen though - look at svelte, the guy is getting 50k a year when he should be earning at least 500k if he had balls to start a real businesses, but no we are all fucking prostitutes, just slaving away for the army of people we never see. are you out of your mind. this shit should be fucking illegal alright it's modern day slavery innit bruh, if a company wants to pay their engineers to work on open source this is fine, i love open source like java or google closure compiler, but it's real software made by real engineers, but who are all these community freaks who can't spend a 10 seconds on stage in their shitty bogus conferences without ringing the "community" buzzer? you're not my community i fucking hate your guts you're all such dumb womenless imbeciles who justify their lack of social skill by telling themselves that you're doing good by doing open source in your free time - mate nobody gives a shit alrite? don't you want money sex power? you've destroyed everything that was good about good olde open source when it was actually fun, today young people are coerced into slavery at industrial scale, it's literally impossible to make a buck from software as indie unless you build something really big and good, and you can't build anything big without investment and who invests in software nowadays? all the ai "entrepreneurs" are getting fucking golden rained with cash while i have to ask for a 5$ donation? what the actual fuck? who sanctions this? the entire industry is in one collective psychotic delusion, spurred by microsoft who use this army of useful idiots to eliminate all hounour dignity of the profession, drive the abundance and bring about poverty of mind, character, as well as wallet as the natural state of things. fucking amatures of course you love your shitty little communities because you can't achieve anything on your own. you literally have no personality, just one homogenous blob of dumb degenerates who think and act all the same. there used to be a tool called adobe flash builder, i could just buy it, then open and make a web app, all from start to finish in one program, using tutorials of adobe experts on youtube, sure it might have had its pitfals but it was a product - today there's literally no fucking product to make websites. do you people get it? i can't buy a tool that i need to do my job and have to insult myself by downloading some shitty scripts from some shitty unemployed devs and hope my computer doesn't blow up in my face in the process because some freak went off his nut and uploaded some dodgy ass exploit on npm in his package. i really don't like. it's not supposed to be like that. good for me i build by own front/back end. this "community" insanity is just a symptom of industrial degeneration, they try to sell it to us like it's the "bright" communist future but things never been worst, i can't give a shit about functional programming alright i just need to get my job done mate leave me alone you add functional because you don't know how to solve the problem properly, e.g., again adobe flex had mxml where elements had ids and i could just program to id, it was alright but today all this unqualified morons filled the whole space after flash blew up and adobe execs axed flash builder instead of adapting it to js runtime, it was a crime against humanity that set us back to 1000s

At my previous company, we used tools from all over the place. We switched between tools at will. Sometimes, some team would decide to use some tool while the rest of the company would use something else. The worst part was that there was no Single-Sign-On (SSO) either. Everyone would need to have an account on all of these said tools. It was chaos.

I realized that being integrated into one environment (even though would have the cost of a vendor-lock-in) was the best option to have because in that case, we wouldn't have to deal with operational hurdles like having integration from one tool to another. They would just come baked-in with the whole environment. That's how GSuite (formerly Google Apps for Work), Atlassian and other players succeeded - they gave a complete suite of services / software that integrated well with each other. You could jump back and forth between services without having to bother about integration with other tools. They'd all be there wherever you wanted them to be. Even cloud providers so that opportunity and built on it - Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes (in itself).

Another example is a company that used Jira, Confluence and Hipchat but for some dumb reason used Gerrit for their code review / hosting. Eventually, they realized that managing the integration with the Atlassian tools was far more expensive than getting bitbucket and migrating completely into the Atlassian environment.

It's always the integration that matters. Everything else is secondary.

I do not work developing, besides this is really a passion for me. Said that, today I was talking with my boss.

Boss: Your idea is great, I love this tool you made.

Me: Thank you, I just need to finish some details, this last dramatic change in our structure messed up with a lot of things.

Boss: Yes, I have some ideas to we code more.

Me: Great! I love development! We can do ...

Boss: No, we can use your time with other things as it is more expensive. I'm going to get a boy still in college to develop.

Why do some people feel the need to prove their stupidity and utter lack of skill in the face of the world?!?!
Yesterday I learned that a sister company is hiring an intern civil engineer to code some application plugins connected to our IS ?!?!? How the fuck do you think he can only understand what the fuck we do?

To put it in context, I'm kind of the CDO of a French medium group (a little cluster of companies), as the group is in the construction industry I'm the CTO for all Computer things. Inside the group, I'm the CTO of the digital factory. So the group IS is a microservice decentralized API REST-based architecture.

Next Monday we'll have a meeting, so I can explain to them why it's a FUCKING STUPID IDEA!!!! The only good thing is that any application programming done outside of the Digital Factory will be handled as an External Company Application, so it's not my problem to secure it, debug it, or simply make it work. And they already know that I'll enforce this ruling!!!

But WHY the fuck do they still think any mother fucker can professionally program!!!!!! Every time I have to deal with them It's horrendous!!!! I had to prove them why using a not encrypted external drive for a high security mission It's stupid!!!, and why having the same password for every account is FUCKING STUPID!!!

The most ridiculous part is they have a guy who really believe he has some IT skills!! Saying things like "SVN" it's a today tool (WTF), firewall are useless, etc....

WHY!!!! WHY!!!!

I was thinking about the problems one of our clients faced with the launch of their project the other day, because things were rushed, stuff was omitted and in the end they could not meet the launch date, and I started making a list of hard lessons I learned over the years that would have helped them avoid this situation.

Feel free to add yours in the comments.

- Never deploy on Friday
- Never make infrastructure changes right before a launch
- Always have backups. Always!
- Version control is never optional
- A missed deadline is better than a failed launch
- If everything is urgent, nothing is important
- Fast and cheap, cheap and quality, quality and fast. Only one pair at a time can be achieved
- Never rush the start or the end of a project
- Stability is always better that speed
- Make technical decisions based on the needs of the project two years from now
- Code like you will be the only maintainor of the project two years from now. You probably will...
- Always test before you deploy
- You can never have too many backups (see above)
- Code without documentation is a tool without instructions
- Free or famous does not necessarily mean useful or good
- If you need multiple sentences to explain a method, you should probably refactor
- If your logic is checked beforehand, writing the code becomes way easier
- Never assume you understand a request the first time around. Always follow up and confirm

There are many more that should be on this list, but this is what came to mind now.

2 years back when I was onshore, we were in the bad situation due to the size and complexity of handling big webserivces simulators. A single change makes the build red hence the face of other developers too.

These simulators were created using J2EE and VM templates 5 years back. With the time, application and data size grown. We were supposed to maintain consistensy in dummy data accross the applications. But some programmers made a copy of these simulators to finish their applications fast and made the situation worst.

Finally one of the team member dare to use stubby4j to solve this problem. Choosing the stubby4j was a good decision as it was the specialized tool written to create simulators only. But as the stubby4j was not having all the features a simulator need, he customized it's build for our simulators. All the team members were happy.

After few weeks, I picked a story to transform other simulators using stubby4j. The story was previously closed as it was hard to implement in stubby4j. I ingonred the comment and started working on. I spent 2 weeks but couldn't solve the problem. I read the comment in between but It was very late to take the step back. I was not able to give proper status update in the daily standup. Other team members (working from offshore) were thinking that I'm just passing the time. However my manager handled the situation very well and asked if I need some help.

This was friday, I took the leave as it was my wife's birthday. We couldn't go out due to the bad weather. I was thinking about the code all the time. Hence I started to write a new utility to handle all the requirement a webseervice simulator need. I took 2.5 days to complete it. On Tuesday, I demoed it to the whole team. And published it as an opensource application "STUBMATIC". In few weeks I received the good response from other teams as well.

I'm a full time open source developer now.

Like age 8?
As a kid I really liked flash games and animations and wanted to get into it. I couldn't do flash, it looked too complicated but I found a little software by the name od KoolMoves that was just a simpler flash animation tool.

I did a bunch of shitty stick figure animations in it (hello to everyone from stick figure death theatre) but eventually I realized that I can make it do things (interactive menus, choose your story kinda things, move the player around, shoot...!)

I fell in love with AS1 and later AS2.0 and made bunch of demos and proof of concepts for systems and games. Most are lost to time and datarot by now)

Age 12
Eventually I found out I can make the entire Windows machine do what I want using first Batch files and later Visual Basic script (made a skype bot!) At this point I was also really into graphics and logo/web design

Age 15 - 20 or so
Then it was pretty natural to move to actual Visual Basic, then C# and finally I to C++. And I had the C family in my heart forever. I managed to get a but into 3D graphics too and got a part-time in archviz

Even by this point I never believed I could be a programmer as a profession. I thought of it just as something I love, but have no chance getting into compared to some of the names out there. I half expected to be either doing graphics (cause I found it simple at the time) or some shitty random job in an office.

20+
Finally I decided to go to uni and study software development, see if I can touch the future I always dreamed of! And... Well... I found out more than 80% of the people there never touch a language up until now and most people are just as retarded as I thought..

For a while I also worked as a game designer (still not being comfortable calling myself a programmer, so I chose a non programming position) but I ended up going into the code and improving and fixing game designer tools (it was unity and C#)

After seeing actual programmers at work in a company, and talking to a bunch of them I realized I already have everything I need to do this seriously and with that experience out of the way I breezed through uni, learned to love Linux and landed a proper job :)

I kinda hope my experience with long lasting self doubt will be useful for someone

==============
Getting Feedback Rant!
=============

When "this is simpler" feedback results in a function of 500 lines of code.

When I get "don't do X" in the feedback. Thank you very much. What do you want me to do instead?

Unclear feedback.

When the feedback giver changes his mind after I applied the changes!

When applying the feedback introduces a bug.

Simply opinionated feedback that is not enforced by any tool or backed up by any facts.
Please find something better to do in life.

Unactionable feedback.

"Consider X"
I will not consider thank you very much.

"Verify this works"
Duh..

When the feedback giver knows something that you don't.
I know this is a legit case.. still annoying.

"I disagree with the feature"
Go argue with the PM, not relevant to me, thanks!

=====================
GIVING FEEDBACK RANT
=====================

I rewrote the system. Please review it.

No need to review, just approve.

I will change this as part of the next ticket.

I would like to keep it the way it is.
lazy ass..

You can't test this.
It's impossible to test this.

No need to test this.

There's no point to test this.

I'll test this on production.

Not sure why this is working..

Please document this..
Because documentation is like a thing, you know.

Oh, this code is not related to this PR, I just don't want to open a new branch for such a small change. ignore it.

Ignore this.

This will be meaningful in my next change.

There is no fucking holy grail of programming. It's better to use the right tools for each task instead of wasting hours to make the wrong tool do a horrible job. But noooooo. Even since this co-worker got here, he bragged how good Drupal 7 is for everything, and he never even ised it once before! Now we have 2 fucking projects beyond schedule and a new one coming ing, each of which tries to use a fucking CMS as if it was a fucking framework. Fucking idiots who believe setting a couple of options via gui to generate random code means programming. Fucking bosses who believe using 3rd party community modules and hacking around them to have them do different stuff is better than coding what we need. I fucking gave up and started using raw php to be able to finish this fucking project, but my damn co-worker refuses to. He keeps swearing and punching the desk, saying it's our clients' fault for asking stupid features, and if you dare to mention how it may because we're using a cms like it was a framework, he just goes full bigot about Drupal. Bloody Hell, it would have taken lass than 3 weeks in Rails. I could just headbutt a kitten right now.

So I’ve been working on a tool to do offline domain joining in an active directory for about a month in my company, and so far everything is functional and done EXCEPT that one thing.

Essentially to do an offline domain junction, you need an AD account that has sufficient privileges on the domain controller. It will then generate a key that you can use on the client machine to make the junction to the domain.

I have tried literally every possible option that I could think of and I cannot for the life of me figure out why the client machine does not accept the generated key. I’m using methods from the Netapi32.dll which are barely documented anywhere, I even searched on GitHub code references and I couldn’t find much… Theres also a tool called djoin.exe that supposedly does that, I’ve tried with that tool too, to no avail.

This is the last thing missing for the project to be complete, and it’s pretty essential as well…

So close yet so far….

If anybody here knows anything about that kind of stuff (admittedly very niche) I’ll take anything.

Note: I think I’ve browsed all the websites and forums referencing to these functions and the tool now…

Couldn't be arsed with all the conditional compilation that angelscript required, so I dumped right back to good ol' lua for now.

Got lua in, vm started, loading strings and pushing/popping the stack.

Got SDL actually drawing as intended.

I don't know even half of what I'm doing.
Apparently header files that end in ".hpp" are specific to c++, while .h are for c headers.

I like the new SDL2 though, little bit different than SDL1. Not a lot of tutorials cover the difference, but I could kinda suss out from the documentation where I needed to adapt, even though I'm still pretty loose on the library, on the docs, and on c++ itself.

Still just a learning project.

Also, I'm continually surprised there isn't a portable, platform independent tool or little language just for replacing all pseudo-languages out there like .bat and .sh, and .zsh

Maybe even just a tool that standardizes it all, then takes config files that map the new standard to system dependant commands, so you can download the damn thing, configure the relevant environment variables, drop in the platform dependent configuration (or your browser or package tool detects what platform you are on and chooses the relevant package/download for your platform), write a console script and the tool automatically translates, and emits the system-relevant commands to that platform's console (so you don't even need much platform-specific code to do things like file access).

Random thoughts on more out of the box tools/environments.

Subject: Pharo

Some time ago I had shown one of my coworkers about Pharo and he quickly got the main idea behind it but mentioned how he didn't like the idea of leaving behind his text editor to deal with source code.

Some time last week I showed the dude some cool 3d animations you can do with Pharo while simultaneously manipulating the code to change them in real time. Now that caught his attention particularly and he decided he wanted to know more about the language but in particular the benefits of fucking around with an image based environment rather than a file based.

Both of us reached the conclusion that image based makes file based dev enviroments seem quaint in comparison, but estimated that it was nothing more than a sentiment rather than a fact.

We then considered what could be the advantage/disadvantages of such environments but I couldn't come up with anything other than the system not having something like Vim or VS Code or whatever which people love, but that it makes up for it with some of the craziest IDE tools I had ever seen. Plugins in this case act like source code repos that you can download and activate into your workflow in what feels something similar to VS Code being extended via plugins written in JS, and since the GUI is maleable as it is(because everything is basically just subsets of morp h windows) then extending functionality becomes so intuitive that its funny

Whereas with Emacs(for example) you have to really grind your gears with Elisp or Vimscript in Vim etc etc, with Pharo your plugin system is basicall you just adding classes that will convert your OS looking IDE into something else.

Because of how light the vm machine is, portability is a non issue, and passing pharo programs arround is not like installing Java in which you need the JVM.

Source code versioning, very important, already integrated into every live environment and can be extended to do pushes through simple key bindings with no hassle.

I dunno, I just feel that the tool is too good to be true. I keep trying to push limits into it but thus far I have found: data visualization and image modeling to work fine, web development with Teapot to be a cakewalk and work fine, therr are even packages for Arduino development.

I think its biggest con would be the image based system, but would really need to look into how this is bad by any reason other than "aww man I want vim!" since apparently some psychos already made Emacs and VS code packages for interfacing with Pharo source trees.

Embedded is certainly out of the question for any real project since its garbage collected and not the most performant cookie in the jar.

For Data science I can see some future, seems just as intuitive and interesting as a Jupyter Notebook actually, but the process can't and will not be the same since I still don't know of a way to save playground snippets unless you literally create classes for it, in which case every model you build gets saved inside of an object, sounds possible but, strange since it is not a the most common workflow in jupyter.

Some of the environment is sometimes glitchy, but it does have continuos development and have not found many hassles.

There is a biased factor from my side: I seem to be wired to understand the syntax and simple object model better than in other languages. To me this feels natural as if I was just writing ideas rather than code, mostly because I feel that there really ain't much in terms of syntax, the language gets out of my way and the IDE feels like the most intuitive environment in the world to me. I can see why some people would find it REALLY weird of counterintuitive tho.

Guess I really am a simple dude.

woow PHPStorm is such an incredibly buggy piece of shit .... how can anyone work with such a buggy IDE?

It randomly looses settings on restart. A lot of functionality is just so poorly tested. Anyone ever really tried to work with the integrated DB tool?
Or the CSV plugin? there are countless bugs in both usability and function-wise.
But I guess that's because it's just plugins ... you know .. you don't need to use them ...
Is the PHP code formatter a plugin too? Guess I don't have to use it at all, if it randomly scrambles whole lines if I format with a missing } or some other improper syntax. Right, overall it's my fault, right??
Fuck you PHPStorm, and you IntelliJ too. you're not better at all.

Substantive post / question time!

So I'm working on this project that isn't a disaster but very much suffered from a lack of planning (both on my part and others).

This is a feature that involves all sorts of ways to view and manipulate some records and various records and so forth... I mean what isn't that really?

I think everyone tried but we didn't realize how many details there would be and how much we would need to (well I demand we do) share code across pieces and how that would slow us up when we realize feature A needs to do X, Y, Z and ... well obviously that means feature B has to also...

I'm not really upset about this, it's progressing and I'm learning. I'm writing it all now so it's under control, but...

I want to be able to display, visually where we are as far as each component of this project

- Component A
- Description:
- Component A does things you don't want to.
- Has features:
- Can blow up things in a good way.
- Produces flowers and honey on demand
- Missing features:
- Doesn't take out the trash.

And so on for component B, C, D, Z.

Right now I'm just using a plain old document file to write up a status / progress type thing now.

We use Teamwork to manage tasks, but I kinda hate it. It's similar to the above example in being able to bust out lists... but they're not connected in any way. All the details are lost on these bullet items as they're limited to one line when you look at everything ....

It's the classic case of a tool that shows lists ... but doesn't promote or allow for showing any connections between them...

And really the problem with this project is that we built little bits and features here, and little bits there from the outside in and ... really we should have built it from the top down where we had to face a lot of questions earlier.

Anyway does anyone know of anything that has project type management / status / progress stuff that is VISUALLY helpful .. not just a bunch of lists and progress bars?

I know I didn't word this well but I'm open to even wrong answers....

I HATE WINDOWS' WINDOW MANAGEMENT. I have two monitors and nothing can be maximized. Windows' spaces are terrible as well.
I am building in the back end in VS Code.
I have three terminals open because I need them to run multiple parts of the app locally.
I have postman open to try requests.
I have firefox for the orm system's documentation.
I have my database tool running as well.
I have an ERD diagram floating in a window.
I have another VS Code window showing a diff of my JSON compared to the version I'm replacing.
Also all of my team communication tools.

I have never hated shuffling windows around so much. Would it kill us to use some command line tools for http instead of Postman? Could we please get a decent shell in windows? Could we get some simple ways to switch between virtual desktops? Click click click. I can't automate clicking. Why do we use the most clicky tools we can find?

I'd like to hear from developers which prefers Angular to React the reason of said preference.
I want to hear that becasue I like React way more than Angular since I find which is easier to learn (making a form with a React hook is easy while it takes days just to get a grip on Angular forms), it usually takes less code to do things, it doesn't force libraries which may not be necessary for your use case and just makes your bundle bigger (for example most things which are done in NgRx can be done just as easily with regular JS promises without the need of an external tool) and I generally prefer functional programming to OOP.
Said that I want to hear the other side, not to argue but because I want to know cases in which Angular may be a better choice than React to become a better rounded dev.

I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks?

Browser automation is a PITA. I’m going on my fourth side mission with this crap and I honestly still look like a newbie. I’ve tried Java Selenium with Chrome, Excel VBA with IE9, Vanilla JS in the browser console, and tonight I’m thinking to concoct some kind of hybrid CDP & Selenium approach in Chrome. Never used CDP before, not even sure where to start but I heard it sucks like anything else unless you get some extra libraries and plugins and stuff.

It doesn’t help that I can’t get just anything I want from our IT Department. It would be another PITA to ask for puppeteer. If puppeteer is totally legit please let me know.

Selenium sucks. The buttons don’t click, the waits don’t wait. Its unusable. Iframes are annoying as all hell but I can deal with that. HTML Tables suck too. It doesn’t help I have to restart my whole java program and whole Chrome every time an element doesn’t get picked correctly. Scripting one single element can take all fucking night.

Chrome dev tools what the fuck. Why the fuck is the DOM explorer in the same window as the web page I’m working on?? I can’t undock it. Am I supposed to use a fucking TV screen to work with this bastard?? If I use the remote chrome tools on port 9225 or whatever - It Still Renders The Whole Fucking Page Alongside The Console. Get Out Of My Way!!! The nested HTML CODE IS ONE CHARACTER WIDE ALL THE TIME. I can’t for the life of me figure out what the fuck I’m looking at. Haven’t you people ever heard of A HORIZONTAL SCROLL BAR at least.

Fuck I tried using getElementById, and the Xpath thing and its not all that great seeing I have seemingly 1000s of nested Divs all over the god damned place oftentimes containing a single element. I’m finally on chrome now should I learn Jquery now? I mean seriously wtf.

I use this one no code tool for dev it has web automation built in. As you can imagine its just as broken as anything else!! I have 10 screens to navigate it gets stuck on the second screen all the damn time. Fuck I love clicking the buttons when my script misses and playing catch up with it.

So as a work around to Selenium not waiting even 1 millisecond when I use explicit wait or implicit wait or fluent wait, I’m guessing maybe I can attach both Chrome Dev Tools Protocol (CDP as ive called it earlier) and selenium to the same browser and maybe I can use CDP to perform a Wait with any degree of success. Selenium will do nothing more than execute vanilla javascript Element.click(); This is the only way I know to even ACTUALLY use selenium beyond the simplest html documents possible. Hell I guess CDP can execute js idk.

I can’t get the new selenium that has CDP but I do have some buggy ass selenium from a few years back. Yeah, I remember reading there was a pretty impactful regression defect in the version I have. Maybe I’m being gaslighted by some shit copy of selenium?

The worst part is that I do seem to be having issues that the rest of the internet’s devs do not seem to be having. People act like browser automation is totally viable and pretty OK. How in the fuck hell is my Selenium Test Suite going to be more reliable my application under test?!!?? I’ll have more fucking bugs in my test suite than in my application. Today, I have less than half a test script and, I. already. fucking. do.

I am still SUPER PISSED at the months of 12 hour days (always 8 hours spent on normal sprint work btw only 4 to automation) I spent trying to automate our regression tests. I got NOWHERE.

I did learn a lot about HTML and JS though like I’m not that mad…but I’m just trying to emphasize my achievement on my task was zero.

The buttons don’t click. There are so many divs and I swear you sometimes need to select a div somewhere in the middle sometimes to get it working. The waits don’t wait. XHR requests are invisible. Java crashes 100 times before I find an xpath and thread.sleep() combo that works. I have no failure modes to use — Sometimes I click the same element 20x in a script because I have no way to know if it clicked the first time! Sometimes you gotta scroll the page to make the click work. So many click methods all broken. So many wait methods all broken. Its not just the elements don’t click! There are so many ways to click that almost work but surely they all fail the same in the end. ok at this point I’m just repeating myself…

there yet even more issues that I can’t remember…and will soon remember as I journey into this project yet again…

thanks for reading I hope I entertained and would love to hear your experience!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compare and harmonize the web configs

Oh no someone set execution timeouts to 14 days

Fuck fuck fuckity duck

Hey compare all the web configs of all environments and harmonize them all wtf cmon bruh do your job as a developer

Take them and back them up into svn. What do you mean svn isn't a back up system of course it is well its the only thing we have fuck

What do you mean we have shit logging where people will catch an exception and only print the word exception in the log you can figure it out can't you we have live produxtion issues that hace to be solved now what the fuck

How dare you make a. Mistake copying our shitload of a bloated codebase and configuring our 100s of different options all by fukcing hand what the fuck dude do yoh write anyrhing down?

Please catalogue all the exception mails we are getting but we have no db or error reporting system so they all just plop into tue inbox and thats all ypur fuckjng data figure it out kid

This is a rewarding, fulfilling job whwrw you can be both dev ops and a developer and manage all of our fucking environments of which there are about 15 of all your own with no sort of tool or software to aid you because haha what the fuck we wouldn't make your life easy

Whata that you want to spend time to write stuff or change stuff that will nake it easier fot you fuxk that bruh get back to your biklable tasks like holy shit you thjnk this is a charity ofr aomw shit

Live production issues
Live production issues
Produxtion issues. A ghost in the machine. Find it fix if find it fix it find it fix it cmon why can't you fix it I expect you to spend your day hopelessly pretending to try to solve something you fucker

One of the only peopel able to help you sometimes though hes a bit of an old laxky, yeah hea fucking leaving see ya seeya kid and now we're not hirinf anyone to fuckjng help you no no no managing and monitoring the environments its your jov alll fof them every sngle on do you knkw all the xonfiguraiton values for them yet??

Instead we are hiring a new sales person to fucking make us some more money and we don't need naother seceloper to help you infqct lets have you use this mid end retail computer from 2014 to develop on yeah yeah oh but all our shitty code and visual studip will destry your memory but too bad!! Hahahahahdhsj

Go lice is all you, why sare you so slow

How long will it take
How long will it take
How long will it take
How long witll it tqk2
How long will it take holy shit
Give time estimate for sonethign that I don't fucking know how about it will tqke till fuxk you oxloxk

Anybody else getting annoyed with VSCode lately? I’m constantly getting updates to the editor and various plugins that add near-forced autocomplete suggestions, cursor hijacking, codelens and inlay hints (messes up spacing and layout), etc. It’s starting to drive me crazy! Just let me write my code! I love the syntax highlighting and autocomplete, but developer tools need to be optional, not have their off button buried behind some 5-layer JSON object that’s not documented anywhere!

I just want to write code, and I want my editor to be a tool, not an annoying little bee swarming my face all the time trying to get me to do things I don’t want to do! Microsoft and plugin devs need to stop enabling these obtrusive features by default and put them behind a “New Features” wizard or something!

Power BI: wonderful tool, pretty graphics, and can do a lot of powerful stuff.

But it’s also quite frustrating when you want to do advanced things, as it’s such a closed platform.

* No way to run powerquery scripts in a command line
* Unit testing is a major pain, and doesn’t really test all the data munging capabilities
* The various layers (offline/online, visualisation, DAX, Powerquery, Dataset, Dataflow) are a bit too seamless: locating where an issue is happening when debugging can be pain, especially as filtering works differently in Query Editing mode than Query Visualisation mode.

And my number 1 pet peeve:
* No version control

It’s seriously disconcerting to go back to a no version control system, especially as you need to modify “live code” sometimes in order to debug a visual.

At best, I’ve been looking into extracting the code from the file, and then checking that into git, but it’s still a one-way street that means a lot of copying and pasting back into the program in order to roll back, and makes forking quite difficult.

It’s rewarding to work with the system, but these frustrations can really get to me sometimes