Wife: what are you thinking about?

Me: how to optimize key storage in a binary tree

Wife: forget that I asked

I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

Yesterday I managed to optimize a query...
Went from 43 seconds to 0.0702 seconds.

For some reason mysql decided to copy the data of 4 huge tables into a temp table and do its operations there... (the copying to temp tale took 42/43 seconds)

Two composite indexes later and I saved the company hours of time over the course of a few months.

Feels good.

When you're trying to optimize a process and a team members gets upset because "that's not the way we've done it before!"

No fuck. That's why we are fucking improving it.

Me: Optimize a sort & match method in backend because users complain it's a bit slow.

Coworker: These algorithms are both O(n), so they're identical *closes PR*

Me: *start zoom call* "Heeeeeeeeeey Iiiiiiiiiii wouuuuuuuld liiiiiiiiike toooooo diiiiiisscuuuuus thaaaaaaaat puuuuuuulllll reeeeeequuuueeest yooooouuuuu cloooooossseeeed"

Coworker: "wtf are you doing, why are you talking so slow"

Me: "No matter whether I talk fast or slow, the information still reaches you in O(n) time, so why are you complaining"

I fucking hate it when people misunderstand the purpose of (or abuse) big O notation. It's an estimate of how an algorithm SCALES once the set increases in size, in which case you leave out both less significant terms and constant factors.

But those terms and factors are important when you're talking about the DIRECT PERFORMANCE of the algorithm on fixed-size sets, instead of SCALING to larger sets.

1n and 10n are both O(n), but 10x performance on a job that used to take 10 minutes is still significant.

Fuck you, devs who quote Knuth:

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil"

I agree with the spirit of the quote. I agree that long-winded arguments comparing microsecond differences in performance between looping or matching constructs in a language syntax is almost always nonsense. Slightly slower code can even be preferable if it's significantly clearer, safer and easier to maintain.

But, two fucking points need to be made to you lazy quickfix hipsters trying to sell your undercooked spaghetti code as "al dente", just fucking admit that you had no clue what you were doing.

So here we go:

1. If you write neat correct code in one go, you don't need to spend time to optimize it. Takes time to learn the right patterns, but will save you time during the rest of your career.

2. If you quote Knuth, at least provide the context: "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time [...] Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%"

YES THAT CRITICAL 3% IS WHERE YOU MESSED UP.

I'll forgive you for disgorging your codevomit into this silly PR.

BUT YOU'RE QUOTING KNUTH IN YOUR DEFENSE?

Premature optimization is the root of all evil... 6300 SQL queries to show a little aggregate graph on the dashboard... HE WOULD FUCKING SLAP YOUR KEYBOARD IN HALF IN YOUR FACE.

I hate having to optimize for mobile, but hate visiting sites not optimized for mobile.

Lead engineer: "Well, uh... I haven't really prepared a test for you but the HR insists that I should test you before wrapping up this interview.. so uh.... what do you suggest we should do now?"

Me: "Um... how about we walk through my latest project code and you can ask me to optimize it?"

Lead engineer: "Sounds cool, allright let's do that. How much time do you need?"

Welp. Did I just pick my own interview question?

Client: We're gonna be hosting our site on [Overly popular shit host] via a shared hosting account.

Me: Well the performance isn't going to be stellar with WordPress on there, but if that's what you want, sure. I'll enable all the cache rules possible and make sure PHP 7 is running it, but there won't be any further optimizations I can do to make it faster with such limited hosting access.

[Next day after launching the website...]

Client: The website is super slow. I thought you were going to optimize it?

Me: That is the loading time with the optimizations I said I can apply. That host isn't great for performance unfortunately.

Client: Well you're going to need to find us a reputable host as a replacement, set up the account and move the website there so we aren't waiting forever for a page to load.

Me (in a reply via email):

Me trying to optimize my overloaded stack

Just finished assisting a junior dev with optimizing his code.

What used to take 2+ hours now takes less than 4 mins! 😎

Had to wirte and optimize a C++ program that finds for 1000x1000x1000 grid points the 100 nearest points for each (with an additional factor to make it more complicated).
It had to run in under 18 minutes to pass. No matter what I did I couldn't get it fast enough. I tried kd-trees, caching of certain points, optimizing distamce calculations by ommiting any irrelevant factor, saving points' calculated squares etc etc. When Ibwas down to 20 minutes, I realized, that my makefile had an error and ignored the - O3 flag...
Well, it actually ran 5 minutes with -O3.

That moment when you optimize something from taking ~10 minutes to ~17 seconds and are unsure if you managed to actually optimize that much or did you create a bug that doesn't return half the data...
Please let it be the former.

At the moment I'm trying to optimize a slow old MySQL query from a project I made several years ago. The execution time is in excess of 55 seconds. Not good :(

After about an hour of experimenting I finally set a good index and reduced the time to < 3 seconds.

Chuffed :)

Fun/Interesting fact:
"++i" can be slightly faster than "i++"

Because  "i++" can require a local copy of the value of "i" before it gets incremented, while "++i" never does. In some cases, some compilers will optimize it away if possible... but it's not always possible, and not all compilers do this.

We've started a new betting system in our office. Every time you lose a bet, you have to optimize atleast one project for Internet Explorer 😂

Medium Article Title: How to Optimize Your Use of the Terminal

Dev: Oh goody.

Article Content: The terminal is a cli that devs use in order to work at their jobs. It is a very important tool in which… (continued)

Dev: …

WHO IS THIS ARTICLE FOR?? PEOPLE WHO WANT TO GET BETTER AT THE TERMINAL BUT HAVE NO IDEA WTF A TERMINAL IS?

This isn’t high school english class, you can skip the circle jerk introduction.

Client: Only an question: do you have a service to optimize my php skripts ?
Me: What kind of script are you referring and what kind of framework?
Client: Yes

Rants about how big jQuery is (83 KB), misses project deadline trying to write efficient JS to "optimize" load time, eventually ends up saving 2 KBs.

Witchcraft: Code that has been optimized to a point at which even its author has no concept of exactly how it works, only what it is used for.

Few weeks ago I was having a few beers and messing around with a Minimax AI that could be used for different games as long as you fed it possible moves and win/loose-conditions. Could be used for like Tic Tac Toe on a 5x5 field, connect four etc.

I hadn't got it to work yet as I tried to implement alpha-beta pruning to optimize it. When I was playing against it I thought "Damn you're stupid, why would you even make that move" but still finished the game.

Before I knew it I had fucking lost. It outplayed me like 6 moves before I even knew what was happening.

And that's one of the top coolest feelings I've had as a developer, got destroyed by my own program.

-Let's start making the game!
-Yaay
-We should focus on performance optimization!
-But we don't have anything to optimize yet..
-Performance optimization!!!

1 month later

-OK you were right, we can't focus on performance now. We need to start making this game!
-Finally!
-So we're in pre-production now, let's do some R&D!
-Awesome, I wanted to start designing our workflow for adding new content, and maybe also loca..
-NO! That's unimportant! We must do R&D!
-OK what should we Arr-and-Dee?
-Performance optimization!!!

!rant

Some days ago I finished "Ray tracing in a weekend" (Peter Shirley) and I'm learning a lot :D

In the new year I will start with "Ray tracing the next week", but there are still some things I want to tackle before that (improve code quality, optimize... it's my first project that is bigger than a codeforces problem solution, a part from the projects at work).

Any sources of wisdom and recommendations are welcome!!

Google: You need a fast website to rank well.
Me: Ok, so why does your Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Google Optimize code drag my site down to the seventh circle of Hell in performance?
Google: You need a fast website to rank well.
Me: ...

When you realize the only way to optimize your C++ code is to start writing asm routines...

Chuck Norris can write Java without wearing glasses. He can C#.

Chuck Norris can compile C++ with just a word editor and K&R.

Chuck Norris can read the comment you almost put in on line 63 (it would have been very helpful.)

Chuck Norris can optimize programs in binary.

Chuck Norris does garbage collection with his mind.

Dev: This content might be too large to fit into this area on mobile.
We might need to add scrolling or design it differently.

Designer: It fits perfectly in the design.

Dev: But the user might have a smaller screen size than in the design.

Designer: We don‘t optimize for small screens.

Dev: But we still need to handle it somehow.
Also, the text might be longer for other languages.

Designer: No problem, we will provide short text for all translations.

Dev: We have 30 languages and the translations are made by a third party. We can not control it.

Designer: We‘ll manage somehow.

Dev: Also, the user might be using an accessibility setting on the device which makes the font size larger.

Designer: Unlikely

Dev: Also, the available screen size might be reduced by the on-screen keyboard.

Designer: … Ok then.

-

It‘s always a conversation like this. It repeats indefinitely.

This rant is particularly directed at web designers, front-end developers. If you match that, please do take a few minutes to read it, and read it once again.

Web 2.0. It's something that I hate. Particularly because the directive amongst webdesigners seems to be "client has plenty of resources anyway, and if they don't, they'll buy more anyway". I'd like to debunk that with an analogy that I've been thinking about for a while.

I've got one server in my home, with 8GB of RAM, 4 cores and ~4TB of storage. On it I'm running Proxmox, which is currently using about 4GB of RAM for about a dozen VM's and LXC containers. The VM's take the most RAM by far, while the LXC's are just glorified chroots (which nonetheless I find very intriguing due to their ability to run unprivileged). Average LXC takes just 60MB RAM, the amount for an init, the shell and the service(s) running in this LXC. Just like a chroot, but better.

On that host I expect to be able to run about 20-30 guests at this rate. On 4 cores and 8GB RAM. More extensive migration to LXC will improve this number over time. However, I'd like to go further. Once I've been able to build a Linux which was just a kernel and busybox, backed by the musl C library. The thing consumed only 13MB of RAM, which was a VM with its whole 13MB of RAM consumption being dedicated entirely to the kernel. I could probably optimize it further with modularization, but at the time I didn't due to its experimental nature. On a chroot, the kernel of the host is used, meaning that said setup in a chroot would border near the kB's of RAM consumption. The busybox shell would be its most important RAM consumer, which is negligible.

I don't want to settle with 20-30 VM's. I want to settle with hundreds or even thousands of LXC's on 8GB of RAM, as I've seen first-hand with my own builds that it's possible. That's something that's very important in webdesign. Browsers aren't all that different. More often than not, your website will share its resources with about 50-100 other tabs, because users forget to close their old tabs, are power users, looking things up on Stack Overflow, or whatever. Therefore that 8GB of RAM now reduces itself to about 80MB only. And then you've got modern web browsers which allocate their own process for each tab (at a certain amount, it seems to be limited at about 20-30 processes, but still).. and all of its memory required to render yours is duplicated into your designated 80MB. Let's say that 10MB is available for the website at most. This is a very liberal amount for a webserver to deal with per request, so let's stick with that, although in reality it'd probably be less.

10MB, the available RAM for the website you're trying to show. Of course, the total RAM of the user is comparatively huge, but your own chunk is much smaller than that. Optimization is key. Does your website really need that amount? In third-world countries where the internet bandwidth is still in the order of kB/s, 10MB is *very* liberal. Back in 2014 when I got into technology and webdesign, there was this rule of thumb that 7 seconds is usually when visitors click away. That'd translate into.. let's say, 10kB/s for third-world countries? 7 seconds makes that 70kB of available network bandwidth.

Web 2.0, taking 30+ seconds to load a web page, even on a broadband connection? Totally ridiculous. Make your website as fast as it can be, after all you're playing along with 50-100 other tabs. The faster, the better. The more lightweight, the better. If at all possible, please pursue this goal and make the Web a better place. Efficiency matters.

I used to think Electron apps were gonna do great and make it more accessible for companies to produce high quality programs with ease.

Oh boy I was wrong. All it did is enable big companies with the ability to refactor all of their software to run 5 times slower, consume 10 times more memory and kill your battery 20 times faster.

I fucking hate all of this prototype fast optimize later bullshit. Can I get some value for my dollar? How come technology is just being degraded for the same of "ease of programming".

You save programming time but sacrifice end user time, cus our time just doesn't fucking matter.

TIL that my company has an HTML/CSS guy whose only job is to optimize others frontend code and he has a higher pay scale than me.

How the fuck that skill could end up into a legitimate job profile!!!!

!rant
Our lead dev in the company seems to be a smart guy who's sensitive about code quality and best practices. The current project I'm working on (I'm an intern) has really bad code quality but it's too big an application with a very important client so there's no scope of completely changing it. Today, he asked me to optimize some parts of the code and I happily sat down to do it. After a few hours of searching, profiling and debugging, I asked him about a particular recurring database query that seemed to be uneccesarilly strewn across the code.
Me: "I think it's copy pasted code from somewhere else. It's not very well done".
Lead Dev: "Yeah, the code may not the be really beautiful. It was done hurriedly by this certain inexperienced intern we had a few years back".
Me: "Oh, haha. That's bad".
Lead Dev: "Yeah, you know him. Have you heard of this guy called *mentions his own name with a grin*?"
Me: ...
Lead Dev: "Yeah, I didn't know much then. The code's bad. Optimize it however you like. Just test it properly"
Me: respect++;

When a co-worker requested changes on a PR giving the reason "I am a fan of'".
No because it will optimize the application, or make the code more maintainable. He's just a fan. Like I went to work to look for fans.

Those SEO guys that believe they are some kind of web Gods for building a real crap over WP with a $50 theme and fucking Visual Composer (the most fucked up piece of shit ever) and then ask you to just "optimize" their bloated site so they can get a great score on PageSpeed Insights.

NO.

No way I'm gonna put my hands on that *thing*.

Coworker: since the last data update this query kinda returns 108k records, so we gotta optimize it.
Me: The api must return a massive json by now.
C: Yeah we gotta overhaul that api.
Me: How big do you think that json response is? I'd say 300Kb
C: I guess 1.2Mb
C: *downloads json response*
Filesize: 298Kb
Me: Hell yeah!
PM: Now start giving estimates this accurate!
Me: 😅😂

“Get the code working first, then worry about how to clean and optimize it.”

For me when I learnt about optimization and how one thing was better than something else, I tended to focus on that. I’d have a picture of that in my mind, and would try to write as clean of code with less hacks in the middle and as optimized as I could in the first go, which slowed me the way fuck down.

After he said that to me, I realized I was stupid and just wasting time if I worried about that from the start. Would waste time, and just cause more headaches from the start than it was worth.

——

Oh also another one, I knew never to trust the client from the start but the way he said it was funny. “Never ever trust the fucking client, don’t trust them with anything. I trust Satan more than I trust the client.” 😂

I finally finished my implementation of a suffix array construction algorithm! 😄
It takes about 30 mins to process 1GB of text and uses all available RAM, but it works! 🎉
Now I can optimize it, the original algorithm is 3x faster.

LONG RANT ALERT, no TL;DR

* Writes an email to colleague about why I can't create a page on our CMS without at least a H1 title. She wants to me to put up an image with text on it (like a flyer), for multiple reasons, I say I need a textless image. *

30 minutes later:
* Casually plans a frontend optimization project, by looking at files on the CMS, in order to make further development easier and less time-taking*

*** EMAIL NOTIFICATION ***
* clicks *

"Hello, this is [Graphic designer] from the company who created the image with text on it. I do not understand why you can't put display:none on your <h1> tag. Also, being a web company, we are used to making themes and my solution of display:none will work. It's pityful to work on a design only to have it stripped out from most of its concept. If you can't do that, do tell me what resolution you need."

My first reaction:

"Dear [Graphic designer], I am managing our corporate identity, our backend and frontend codebase, I am a graphic designer myself, and am also SEO-aware. For at least 8 reasons (redacted, 'cuse too long), I will need an image without text. As told to my colleagues, I need a 72/96 DPI 16:9 ratio image, 1920x1080 is a good start but may be bigger. Also, looking at the image, it'll have to be in JPG, at 100% quality, exported for the web. Our database software will optimize the image by itself."

Reasons are about SEO issues, responsiveness issues, CMS tools issues, backend and frontend issues.

Instead, I sent following email "We can't. Image please."

I mean seriously. A bit of clarity for you:

In my company, nobody has the slightest idea what I do. They don't understand how a computer works (we all know it works by magic, right?). So of course, when one thinks what we don't know, we know it better than the one who knows, my colleague thought our CMS was like a word document, and began telling me how I should display her bible-length text-infected image, by using some inline css styling display:none.

I tell her "nope, because of my 8 reasons". She transmits that to the agency who's done the visual, now I have this [Graphic designer] not understanding that there are other CMSs than Wordpress on the web, and she tells me, me being one of the most aware on this CMS we have, how I should optimize my site?

Fucking shit, she connects on our CMS for 1 second and she'll get cancer since it's so bad. I'm in the process of planning a whole new rewrite so the website is well designed (currently I am modifying a base theme made by an incompetent designer). I know the system by heart and I know what you can, or can't do.

Now I just received an answer: "so it's only a pure technical problem". NO, OUR WEBSITE WAS CODED BY A CHIMPANZEE WHO THOUGHT WEB DEV WAS AS EASY AS WRITING "HELLO WORLD" ON A SHITTY CMS THAT FORCES DEV USERS TO USE A FUCKING CUM-WHITE-THEMED EDITOR TO EDIT THE WHOLE SITE!!!

I can't just sneeze and "oh look, it's working!"

Ooh, look! Node got async/await!
Ooh, look! I can lint shell scripts with shellcheck!
Ooh, look! Webpack 2 has been released!
Ooh, look! I can switch over from npm to yarn!

There is so much stuff I want to upgrade and optimize in our project, that I forget about the actual JIRA ticket.

If you know Fortran and are familiar with fluid dynamics, NASA has a challenge out for people to optimize some of their Fortran code.

Funny commit messages

// I dedicate all this code, all my work, to my wife, Darlene, who will
// have to support me and our three children and the dog once it gets
// released into the public.
//
// Dear maintainer:
//
// Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine,
// and have realized what a terrible mistake that was,
// please increment the following counter as a warning
// to the next guy:
//
// total_hours_wasted_here = 42
//

Inmates are trying to take over the asylum again.

Got a message from the web team manager deeply concerned because since switching to the new logging framework, the site is significantly slower.

She provided no proof or any data to what 'significantly slower' means.

#1 The 'new logging' has been in place and logging for 5 years. We only recently depreciated the ILogger interface ('new' ILogger interface only has 1 method instead of 5)
#2 The 'old logging' was modified 5 years ago, so even if you were using the 'old' interface, the underlying implementation is still the same.

She tried to push the 'it wasn't this slow before' argument, so I decided to do some fact based analysis.
Knowing they deployed their logging changes couple of weeks ago, I opened up AppDynamics, looked at the average call time to Splunk (along with a few other http calls they are doing)
- caching services - 5ms
- splunk - 30ms
- Order Service - 350ms
- Product Data Service -525ms

Then I look at the data they are logging, for the month of June, over 5 million messages. At 30ms each, that's almost 42 hours spent logging errors...yes errors. Null reference exceptions, Argument exceptions, easily fixable stuff.

So far for the month of July (using the 'new' logging), almost 2.5 million errors. Pretty close so far with June's numbers.

My only suggestion was to fix the bugs in their code so they don't log so many errors.

Her response.."Can we have one of our developers review your logging code? We believe we can find ways to optimize the http requests"

Oh good Lord. I'm not a drinking man..but ...I might start.

I finally fucking made it!

Or well, I had a thorough kick in my behind and things kinda fell into place in the end :-D

I dropped out of my non-tech education way too late and almost a decade ago. While I was busy nagging myself about shit, a friend of mine got me an interview for a tech support position and I nailed it, I've been messing with computers since '95 so it comes easy.

For a while I just went with it, started feeling better about myself, moved up from part time to semi to full time, started getting responsibilities. During my time I have had responsibility for every piece of hardware or software we had to deal with. I brushed up documentation, streamlined processes, handled big projects and then passed it on to 'juniors' - people pass through support departments fast I guess.

Anyway, I picked up rexx, PowerShell and brushed up on bash and windows shell scripting so when it felt like there wasn't much left I wanted to optimize that I could easily do with scripting I asked my boss for a programming course and free hands to use it to optimize workflows.

So after talking to programmer friends, you guys and doing some research I settled on C# for it's broad application spectrum and ease of entry.

Some years have passed since. A colleague and I built an application to act as portal for optimizations and went on to automate AD management, varius ssh/ftp jobs and backend jobs with high manual failure rate, hell, towards the end I turned in a hobby project that earned myself in 10 times in saved hours across the organization. I felt pretty good about my skills and decided I'd start looking for something with some more challenge.

A year passed with not much action, in part because I got comfy and didn't send out many applications. Then budget cuts happened half a year ago and our Branch's IT got cut bad - myself included.

I got an outplacement thing with some consultant firm as part of the goodbye package and that was just hold - got control of my CV, hit LinkedIn and got absolutely swarmed by recruiters and companies looking for developers!

So here I am today, working on an AspX webapp with C# backend, living the hell of a codebase left behind by someone with no wish to document or follow any kind of coding standards and you know what? I absolutely fucking love it!

So if you're out there and in doubt, do some competence mapping, find a nice CV template, update your LinkedIn - lots of sources for that available and go search, the truth is out there!

>Gets job to optimize some code
>Me:"What could go wrong?"
>Code is commented in Arab
"All around me are familiar faces..."

My job feels (and acts) like a soulless void.

Wow, that sounds like lyrics to an emo song for adults. screw that.

But it's still pretty accurate: While I have quite a few coworkers, and they're at least somewhat chatty, they never seem to respond to me, or even notice me. I see them talking, but anything I do or say gets ignored. It goes into the void and disappears.

I talk in the off-topic channels. People talk around me.
I make comments on releases. No responses.
I talk about music I've been addicted to. No responses.
I talk about food and cooking -- a popular topic at work. No responses.
I respond to an invitation to join the security team. No responses. (well, an empty deferral)
I release various features, some both my boss and a coworker described as "soul-crushing." No thanks, priase, appreciation; honestly, no one even seemed to notice.
I build useful utilities and functions for other devs to use. Nothing.
I optimize the scripts everyone uses on a daily basis, and mention it to others. Still nothing.

The void eats my efforts, and occasionally spits out parcels of work for me to do. The only responses I recieve from the void are when I ask about its parcels of work. When I send them back completed, nothing happens -- unless they need more work. If they do not... nothing.

My previous job was friendly and nice and rewarding.
The job before that was Hell.
This one feels like Purgatory, but ... somehow emptier.

Survive to see the day where we don't have to optimize for IE11&Edge fuckery anymore.

Fucking shit, this university's website is so damn slow! Basically Every Semester, every student need to enroll to certain classes in University Website.

But the Infrastructure is not enough to handle such a big amount of students, we have approx. 7000 students enrolling at the same fucking time.

And here i am can't enroll to any class at all this semester. Fuck such a waste of time. This always been a thing since they digitalize enrolling system.

I don't want this to happen again. The student always be a victim since they cannot handle the request. Now, as a dev, i want to propose something better to optimize the server, i have some connection to pass some bureaucracy. I am going to do some brainstorming and I will need some solution.

Here some data i gather when i am mad from my univ infrastructure division :
1. The Server is a simple Local Server Forwarded to the Internet.
2. The Server use Windows Server 2007.
4. Web Server Using Microsoft IIS
3. The Website built using ASP.NET
4. The connection is not SSL encrypted (yes its fucking use the http)
5. Hardware Spec (not confirmed officialy, i got this information from my professor) :
- Core i5 4460
- 4 GB Ram
- 1 Gbit NIC

I will summon some expert here and i hope want to help me(us all) out.

Someone to me: "Can you optimize this website for Page Speed Insight"

Me: "But it's a fucking Wordpress,.. Go home."

Honestly I see more and more abstraction layers added and from year to year less people understanding how a computer and some algorithms works. In the end it would be like the mechanicum or whatever the name was of the w40k universum where the specialists have not a damn clue how their creations (in our case software) works and how to optimize it anymore

The best comment I ever read in the production...

/*
* You may think you know what the following code does.
* But you dont. Trust me.
* Fiddle with it, and youll spend many a sleepless
* night cursing the moment you thought youd be clever
* enough to "optimize" the code below.
* Now close this file and go play with something else.
*/

Me: "It's a balance between three things: you either optimize for computation, memory use, or programming effort. Computers don't have a infinitely fast processors with an infinite amount of memory."

Coworker: "Did anybody tell Java?"

Company top execs: "We need to optimize our costs and reduce our expenditure by x€ to keep the profit margin at acceptable levels for the shareholders"

YOU ARE PUSHING OUT SHIT PRODUCTS DAY IN AND DAY OUT THAT YOU FUCKING SUITS THINK WILL BE THE NEXT BIG THING BUT NOONE REALLY WANTS OR NEEDS. WE ALREADY HAVE A TON OF THOSE BORN-DEAD SHITCAKES HANGING AROUND ABD NEW ONES ARE ALREADY BEING PREPARED FOR LAUNCH.

"OPTIMIZE COSTS"? HOW ABOUT YOU STOP PRODUCING SHIT AND STICK TO YOUR FUCKING CORE BUSINESS MODEL!!!

"OPTIMIZE COSTS"? WE HAVE A ZERG OF OLD FUCKS, WHO ARE STILL WAITING FOR THE FUCKING SMS TO START THE NEXT TECH REVOLUTION, ON OUR PAYROLL. ALL THEY FUCKING DO IS PLAY SUDOKU IN THE KITCHEN AND DISCUSS TECHNIQUES ON HOW TO RAISE GOATS!!!

"NO MONEY TO GIVE A PAYRISE TO DEVELOPERS"? WHY DONT YOU JUST FUCKING GET RID OF THE USELESS DUDES BASICALLY DOING THEIR TENURE AND CLOSE SOME OF THESE FUCKTARDED PRODUCTS THAT 4 PEOPLE OUTSIDE OF THE FUCKING COMPANY USE BUT NEED A TEAM OF FUCKING 20 TO MAINTAIN! NO!!! THEY WILL NOT BE THE NEXT BIG THING! NO!!! ANYTHING YOU SHITCAKES WHO THINK MOBILE APPS IS THE "NEW EMERGING MARKET" WILL EVER CREATE THE NEXT FUCKING BIG THING!!!!!

STICK TO YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS AND STOP CREATING USELESS SHIT THATS MAADE BY FUCKING USELESS PEOPLE!!!!

FUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!

When you're in the optimizing code zone

Hmmm, this feature that I added seems to make the whole process 50% longer. I need to optimize something. Let's see now...
Yeah, make that a shared resource and parallelize IO to leverage the multi-core architecture. Hash map for this, binary tree for that. This thing that gets called a million times can be written easily without a regexp. That thing can be rewritten in Rust as it's too demanding.

There! Works! And it's also a lot cleaner. Nice!

How's the performance doing? 70% longer.

Fuck having to optimize newsletter for fucking outlook which uses Word engine to render html newsletters.. Microsoft, what the fuck bro?

Oh, it's finally done and works well!
Oh, let me just optimize that a little... And probably rename this...

5 minutes later:
Shit it does not work now.
10 hours of debugging later:
I'll fix it later

To all new devs:
Commit more regularly

Tijuana Flats needs to upgrade their hosting and optimize their site. Took like 15 minutes to order tacos today.

Fucking bullshit I tell you. What is this world coming to?

When you pay money to Facebook to advertise yourself as SEO expert, but are unable to even properly optimize your own website.. 😬 🤷‍♂️

We did retrieve the whole list 20 lines ago, didn't we?
Well, who cares... Let's retrieve it again IN A LOOP, im EACH ITERATION.
and then for good measure lets make another query for each item, each time we retrieve the list. Why not?

I have to make an effort not to swear right now. I have been asked to optimize a particular oiece of code...

Ffs

Caching is a subject, misunderstood by a lot of developers. Optimize then cache, don't cache to optimize.

When that guy *always* starts trying to aggressively optimize his code right after writing it. It really is the root of all evil. DK

I recently realized that I've been using 2 text editors and 1 IDE pretty much at the same time for different purposes.

Atom -> Code Beautification (atom-beautify is simply the best)
VSCode -> for actual coding (blazing fast and quite good completions)
Webstorm -> cleanup the code, optimize imports

And that made me thing why is it so hard to have all these things in one application (be it a core feature or a plugin/extension). And then I realized smth, only webstorm more has all the features built in, but I don't need/want full IDE for web development (Angular / React) alas it has great features like component automatic imports etc, but not a deal breaker.

So I am having a dilllema. On one hand, Atom has everything I need (especially atom-beautify, my OCD is at peace) except for proper completions (partially solved with extensions) and terminal integrations. On the other hand, VSCode is very fast, has good code assistance but half-broken import completions and terrible code beautification even with extensions such as jsbeautify that require you to have a separate file for each project instead of it being an editor setting/plugin like in Atom.

/* insert joke here */ When will Atom and VSCode go super Saiyan mode and become "Atomized Visual Code" :P I wanna stop bunny hopping between editors!

A bot to help you to spend less time on finding a name and design a logo than coding the project

Time to uninstall. Never use it anymore.

When the guy with his master's who's job you were told you weren't qualified for performed the following all in one query:
1. A massive many to many join on a 4 million row table.....to itself on in inner query through a linked server.
2. Decides to try and join this massive inner query (see step 1) to another table on a second many to many join.
3. Writes a function for month. Yes instead of month(literallyadate)

Then this guy emails me to ask if I can optimize it because we yelled at him for trying to insert 216 GB of data into a table (again on a massive many to many joined disaster). We told him if a query was taking more than 40 minutes we needed to see it.

I regret saying that now...should have just bought more space ;)

Got myself into Facebook's Graph-API...
...everything is so easy and well optimized.

NOT! Now I have to optimize the request to reduce loadtime. Why is there data so fractured?

Intel is dying right now tbh. I hope the can get back on their feet but as of right now, chaos. They have had multiple ceo changes within 1 year and their current is a horrible leader. They have been really wasteful with their money (like buying McAfee...) And the inly reason they are leading in the CPU market, Tick Tock, is failing. It used to be Process - Architecture. Now intel has announced they are not changing the process for 8th gen, currently it's Process - Architecture - Optimize - Optimize - Optimize. Which is not good. It has been leaked that Intel is currently just hoping for AMD Ryzen to fail, let's face it, Ryzen seems really promising and might be the comeback AMD needs.

TLDR; Intel is a one trick pony and their one trick is failing. They have been really wasteful with their money and their current hope is that Ryzen fails.

I have an Intel CPU in my system and i find them to be better than AMD, but the tables might turn.

I am feeling little fucked up.
I talked to one of the female employees from my new company, I'll be joining next month.
She asked manager to hire a girl in the team, I know she casually asked but after knowing this, I know my interviews were surprisingly easy, I mean I know already that no one asked me to optimize anything... did the fucking hired me for diversity, pay is good, people are good, work is good but seriously if I'm getting hired for the fucking diversity my manager is going to have a good speech from me and I'll move from his team for sure.

Here's to @Wisecrack:

Some time ago I pitched an idea to my boss about a platform we implement to optimize some fucked-up processes and in fact a whole project and I boasted some 20-30% increase in productivity. Yeah, I know ... what a fucking big mouth.

Truth be told they (almost all project members) went all for it so we started working on that software.

A small step for me, a GIANT LEAP IN A FUCKING CESSPOOL.

And of course it's just the two of us - me and my colleague - as always.
And we don't have requirements - as always.
And now there are deadlines too!
And people be like: IS IT READY YET?

So between playing a consultant, a product owner, systems architect, product manager, designer, front-end/back-end developer, DBA, DevOps engineer, YOU-NAME-IT-ROLE, and dealing with my everyday work-related bullshit (because yes, I do that too) I lost all appetite for it.
I actually loved this idea and what it can be born out of it, now I'm frustrated. It's still relevant and it will still benefit them, but I am already FUCKING SICK AND TIRED OF IT.

So my "oh, how I'd love to help them" personality is fighting my "let them sink in their own shit" personality and I'll see which will come on top. :)

Truth is if I had the "5-years-ago me" energy a good chunk of that project would be done by now. 😁

Also yesterday my daughter had shouted at old people and had thrown stuff at them while at kindergarten. I sure hope they deserved it LOL.

FML?

Fucking fuck fuck fuck outdated superiors that know jack shit about how software development works. Dnt even know about git, docker, cloud services. Everything is done on premise with network that is fucking crap and when an app is down "hey why is it down?" ask the fucking server and network admin how the fuck am i supossed to know? i have to create workaround codes when other devs just need to deploy their app and its fucking running as it should be. why the fuck do i need to spend my time debugging Ping timeouts? im a fucking dev. I have done designs, analyze requirements, build frontend, backend, optimize codes, paying attention to security and now i have to fix network problems as well? fuck off

Create Innovation my fucking arse. you just Keep saying that but then wondering "what is this new thing youre trying? its new and different why do that?" because you asked for innovation you fuck. If i copied some other concept its not innovation is it pricks.

Fuck them and all the brown nosers as well.

The battery of my good old Huawei Y300 is slowly dying. So I thought it was time to cut the battery consumption a little. What a delusion. A new battery costs < $5 btw, but I'm too lazy to order :)

I've tested 16 highly acclaimed (of about 20,000, didn't count all of them) battery apps - they're all!, and I mean all!, total crap. There is not a single app that does what it promises. And all totally fucked up with advertising - including some of the paid apps. Most apps consume more power than they actually save.

The winner of all this shit was the app "Battery Repair", which supposedly repairs broken cells. Well, well.

All that junk should be thrown out of the store. But, no, these crap apps have ratings of 4.5 - 4.8 with millions of downloads. I don't get it.

The only app that actually works is, hard to believe, Kaspersky Battery Saver.

So if someone else wants to "optimize" their battery - forget it, it's not even worth looking for it.

Optimize your fucking images. So many apps I could use but this issue has me constantly waiting to do my task.

Stop overlooking this!

I just realized one of today's emails is asking to review again that spaghetti program and this time figure out how to optimize performance because it is getting flagged for high cpu and database usage. A Niagra of If-statements and nobody-cares-for-comments-and-technical-documentation.

*bleep* *bleep* *bleep* previous programmer.

I'll deal with this torture on Monday.

Just got into office and saw a group email about a recently released feature.

Apparently, it creates a lot of connections which it never closes. This could hang the server since it can only handle a large but finite amount of active connections.

Well the dev said: I will optimize later

My thoughts: later = min(never, production blows up)

I'm debugging a script...

It takes 1+ minute to start because it loads data from remote API and apparently loading 80k objects takes a lot of time, even though I need only headers

I could optimize it. Like, add a local cache. But I will not.

Instead I will waste 1 minute, then another minute, then another minute, each time hoping it's the last pass, but no. I will waste the whole day on it and at the end of the day I will still NOT have the slightest idea why it is slow. That is what will happen, I predict it.

Good times

Pretty much a sort of research work. The first assignment was: "look, we have this CAD viewer, but we would want to eventually optimize the structure of the mesh, so here's this method of minimizing the memory footprint. Try implementing it and integrating it with our application."

PS: the method is using triangle strips, where the next triangle uses two vertexes of the previous one, theoretically reducing the memory footprint of the mesh by 2/3 if the mesh is fully optimized. In the end, due to memory and performance constraints (this had to run on the first gen iPad), and overall application architecture, on the fly striping was unfeasible and gained no benefit, because striping an arbitrary mesh is a fucking hard task.

Another one was an implementation of smooth shading by recalculating vertex normals in runtime.

So, as I'm currently cut off from the world of tech, my anxiety in regards to research has settled and I actually enjoy doing it again on my terms. It just makes me jealous to look at all these people developing cool stuff and wanting to get in on the project and maybe improve a part or two, particularly the robot kind. I want to slap some neural nets on majority of the robotic shit I see, or optimize them, or do something to make them more robust... But I don't have a research position right now where I can spend time and money doing that. So I just sit in front of my laptop and sulk.

... And literally this is why we can't have nice things. Cuz I'm not hired to make nice things. Literally.

I've seen several rants on here about poor documentation on great libraries. Well I just spent 9 hours in a car today and I realized that even the ones that have great documentation absolutely SUCK at being mobile friendly. I'm no web developer but how freaking hard is it to optimize your stupid website for small screens??? There are a million frameworks out there you can choose from PLUS it's almost entirely text so it can't be that hard!! I have to zoom in about 300% to be able to read it, then I have to scroll back and forth because it no longer fits on the screen.

My brother (not a dev) asked me for help for his A* algorithm he's trying to optimize.

I'm so proud

There are few developer who name their functions all wrong, but the functionality is fine. Then there comes those who name their functions right but the functionality is nothing close to what it says. There is this function I debugged. It's name is optimizeQuery. It does not optimize the query at all. Rather dismantles it. Also it made it's way to the production. 😅 Now I have to correct and optimize the optimizeQuery.

Anyone played Human Resource Machine yet? It's fun to solve and optimize these algorithm puzzles after a hard work day.
Does anyone know other games like this?

This shit makes me fucking rage! Ok, so here it goes. I use Multiswipe (multiswipe.com) and I'm actually very happy with it. It works as advertised and doesn't crash. Then I bought a new laptop. I wiped the old one and installed multiswipe on the new one. After launching I'm greeted with the registration (I bought it) where it claims I have already registered the software on a different computer. So I reach out to the owner and ask him to help out and am told

"MultiSwipe can be installed and updated as many times as you want as long as it is in the same machine, but if you change laptops then you will need to purchase a new license, this is because MultiSwipe implements a serious of optimizations depending on your touchpad brand and model and as such it's physically linked to it."

This sounds like horseshit to me. If I download a fresh copy, wouldn't it optimize depending on the new system?

But ok. I'll purchase another one, only to be told that my e-mail address is already in use. After reaching out I am told that I HAVE TO CREATE A NEW EMAIL ADDRESS.

Jon, if you read this, I seriously love your software but what the fuck is this fuckery. Like, seriously, how god damn hard can it be to allow customers to purchase multiple licences?

I'm so angry that I'm considering pouring time into cracking it and sending him the new version with the text "nvm, got it to work."

I'm open to suggestions....

I often read articles describing developer epiphanies, where they realized, that it was not Eclipse at fault for a bad coding experience, but rather their lack of knowledge and lack of IDE optimization.

No. Just NO.

Eclipse is just horrendous garbage, nothing else. Here are some examples, where you can optimize Eclipse and your workflow all you like and still Eclipse demonstrates how bad of an IDE it is:

- There is a compilation error in the codebase. Eclipse knows this, as it marks the error. Yet in the Problems tab there is absolutely nothing. Not even after clean. Sometimes it logs errors in the problems tab, sometimes t doesn't. Why? Only the lord knows.

- Apart from the fact that navigating multiple Eclipse windows is plain laughable - why is it that to this day eclipse cannot properly manage windows on multi-desktop setups, e.g. via workspace settings? Example: Use 3 monitors, maximize Eclipse windows of one Eclipse instance on all three. Minimize. Then maximize. The windows are no longer maximized, but spread somehow over the monitors. After reboot it is even more laughable. Windows will be just randomly scrabled and stacked on top of each other. But the fact alone that you cannot navigate individual windows of one instance.. is this 2003?

- When you use a window with e.g. class code on a second monitor and your primary Eclipse window is on the first monitor, then some shortcuts won't trigger. E.g. attempting to select, then run a specific configuration via ALT+R, N, select via arrows, ALT+R won't work. Eclipse cannot deal with ALT+R, as it won't be able to focus the window, where the context menus are. One may think, this has to do with Eclipse requiring specific perspectives for specific shortcuts, as shortcuts are associated with perspectives - but no. Because the perspective for both windows is the same, namely Java. It is just that even though Shortcuts in Eclipse are perspective-bound, but they are also context-sensitive, meaning they require specific IDE inputs to work, regarldless of their perspective settings. Is that not provided, then the shortcut will do absolutely nothing and Eclipse won't tell you why.

- The fact alone that shortcut-workarounds are required to terminate launches, even though there is a button mapping this very functionality. Yes this is the only aspect in this list, where optimizing and adjusting the IDE solves the problem, because I can bind a shortcut for launch selection and then can reliably select ant trigger CTRL+F2. Despite that, how I need to first customize shortcuts and bind one that was not specified prior, just to achieve this most basic functionality - teminating a launch - is beyond me.

Eclipse is just overengineered and horrendous garbage. One could think it is being developed by people using Windows XP and a single 1024x768 desktop, as there is NO WAY these issues don't become apparent when regularily working with the IDE.

!Rant But this is hilarious 😂

Appraisal interview of Gayle:

Gayle:- Sir, I scored 211 Runs in 118 Balls. I made the team win the crucial match. I should get “A” rating.

Management:- You hit 17 Sixes and 23 Fours. Though, that is good but that is not something new you have done. That is why we hired you. As this is not something new, I will mark it as “Innovation Lacking”.

Gayle:- But sir, I played according to the situation. I took 21 singles as well.

Management:- Exactly, your performance is not consistent. You played 15 Dot Balls as well. This means, you failed to optimize the resources.

Gayle:- But…

Management:- Also, I would like to mention that you are not a team player. The whole team scored 112 and you all alone made 211.

Gayle:- What??

Management:- Yes. So, overall, you are getting a “C” rating for the year. Improve Consistency, Innovation, Utilization and Team Work...

I envy all those developers with clean codebases and consistent coding standards and nice architecture.

I'm fixing bugs and optimize code in someone else written project. which looks like spaghetti. with naming conventions like "a", "bbb", "zA" comments written in unknown language and off course the deadline was yesterday.

Last year I was asked to optimize a code in our legacy portal (yet to be replaced with the new portal). The legacy system didn't have a design phase. Straight away went to development by whatever developer available at that time.
It was seriously fucked up.

So I went and had a look at the vanilla PHP code that served data for a datatable.
** I nearly fainted **

A query was done to get data from a table without any joins.
Then for loop to display those data.
Then inside for loop, for every single column that gets data from a related table there's a fucking query.
Eg: select * from users where.... to display username. Then again select * from users where..... to display user's email, then another query for his phone number. Then another query to get service providers name, then another to get their phone number.

I think the guy who did it wrote his first hello world app with a bunch of queries and sent it to production. No one bothered to check until 4 years later when it slowed down like a friggin snail.
I'm surprised it even survived that long.

!rant

Looked into browser jank and how to optimize large lists of images in a scrollbox, went from 20fps while scrolling to ~60fps ❤️

How do I make my manager understand that something isn’t doable no matter how much effort, time and perseverance are put into it?

———context———
I’ve been tasked in optimizing a process that goes through a list of sites using the api that manage said sites. The main bottle neck of the process are the requests made to the api. I went as far as making multiple accounts to have multiple tokens fetch the data, balance the loads on the different accounts, make requests in parallel, make dedicated sub processes for each chunks. All of this doesn’t even help that much considering we end up getting rate limited anyway. As for the maintainer of the API, it’s a straight no-can-do if we ask to decrease the rate limit for us.

Essentially I did everything you could possibly do to optimize the process and yet… That’s not enough, it doesn’t fit the 2 days max process time spec that was given to me. So I decided I would tell them that the specs wouldn’t match what’s possible but they insist on 2 days.

I’ve even proposed a valid alternative but they don’t like it either, admittedly it’s not the best as it’s marked as “depreciated” but it would allow us to process data in real time instead of iterating each site.

Yay your shit loads in a second on the latest iphone 69 and samsung 30 or whatever, so does everything, that's not a testament to your awesomeness. Why the fuck don't you test and benchmark on low end devices!?? Guess I'll optimize your shit myself... Oh and what's this? FUCKING SPAGHETTI EVERYWHERE!!!! You fuck knuckle find another job cunt.

At what point do you stop optimizing queries and realize it's a database architecture, scaling problem?

We've been having production issues this week because a lot more users with more demands, and I'm going we need more servers... We can't just have one db, we need to parallelize like Hadoop...

Everyone else is going, how do we optimize queries, indexes, reduce the load...

A: Please build a Website for our new product.
A: Please use fancy technology, Animations and stuff!
B: OK, but $_things won't Work on mobile
A: mobile is Not our target audience. No Problem, optimize it for big Screens only.
B: it's 2017 - we need a mobile optimized Page, are u sure?
A: yes, so what i say

A week later...

B: hey a, here is Your preview. Optimized for big Screens, and i didn't Care much about mobile.

A: HEY B, YOU NEED TO FIX $FUNCTIONS ASAP!! THEY DON'T WORK ON MOBILE

Last year, we had computers architecture class where we study about the architecture of processors like RISC, CISC, SIMD... The teacher was a nice person but didn't have much knowledge on the field. I read some of Patterson&Hennessey book (computer organisation and design iirc) and learned how to use openmp and mpi, and then in the last lab we were required to optimize matrix multiplication using 4 threads in openmp, the best students optimiseed for 4 times at best, meanwhile I made 16 times optimisation and showed the teacher how fast it was. She was really impressed lol

Big company asking me about query optimization during a DEV position interview... Do you really have no one better than me to optimize your queries?

I'm really afraid of your codebase now... Might decline if I pass...

Things you should probably not say in an interview += "I like Rust because I get to write a lot of code before performance starts to become a problem and I have to optimize"

"I see you're computing the same result multiple times, you shouldn't do that, here's how you optimize that out"

Okay listen you fuck, that's a null guard which goes directly into throwing an exception. The most optimal path is getting past the null guard as quickly as possible, which is what I do. Once you've failed the null guard, throwing an exception faster doesn't do you any good.

I swear plenty of FOSS programmers don't even really look at the project, they just find "errors" that make them feel smart.

This is what I did today in 5 hours and 45 minutes. Documentation and optimized code inside. One method was kinda tricky but I managed to optimize it from 1,88s in the first lazy version to 35ms in the end. Now that's what I call a productive day

New day. New legacy project that needs triage.

The project has existed since before 2000 so it all "works" and has no known business logic bugs. It does however have performance issues which sure I can have a look. It can actually be quite fun and rewarding to optimize performance.

This is a titanic dotnet framework leviathan consisting of over 12,000 cs files using razorpages, entity framework, and... nhibernate? I have my gripes with both EF and NH but they are both fine if used correctly, like any other tool. I've never seen them used together however.

As It Turns Out™, NH was implemented first and at a time when NH did not support async operations. It made sense if you look it up and it's meant to delegate commands via a separate layer, but different story.

Then for... reasons... EF came in and gradually took over.

Because of the way this is all set up, everything will faceplant if you try doing anything async, even if it has nothing to do with calling the db. Any attempt in making this work leads you down a slippery slope of having to rewrite the entire thing, which is out of the question in terms of their budget and expectations.

Sometimes it's a detriment when it works in spite of its issues.

Didn't think I had material for a rant but... Oh boy (at least at the level I'm at, I'm sure worse is to come)

I'm a Java programmer, lets get that out of the way. I like Java, it feels warm and fuzzy, and I'm still a n00b so I'm allowed to not code everything in assembly or whatever.

So I saw this video about compilers and how they optimize and move and do stuff with the machine code while generating the executable files. And the guy was using this cool terminal that had color, autocomplete past commands and just looked cool. So I was like "I'll make that for my next project!"

In Java.

So I Google around and find a code snipped that gives me "raw" input (vs "cooked" input) and returns codes and I'm like 😎. Pressing "a" returns 97 (I think that's the ASCII value) and I think this is all golden now.

No point in ranting if everything goes as planned so here is the *but*

Tabs, backspaces and other codes like that returned appropriate ASCII codes in Unix. But in windows, no such thing. And since I though I'd go multiplatform (WORA amarite) now I had to do extra work so that it worked cross platform.

Then I saw arrow keys have no ASCII codes... So I pressed a arrow key and THREE SEPARATE VALUES WERE REGISTERED. Let me reiterate. Unix was pretending I had pressed three keys instead of one, for arrow keys. So on Unix, I had to work some magic to get accurate readings on what the user was actually doing (not too bad but still...). Windows actually behaved better, just spit out some high values and all was good. So two more systems I had to set up for dealing with arrow keys.

Now I got to ANSI codes (to display color, move around the terminal window and do other stuff). Unix supports them and Windows did but doesn't but does with some Win 10 patch...? But when tested it doesn't (at least from what I've seen). So now, all that work I put into making one Unix key and arrow key reader, and same for Windows, flies out the window. Windows needs a UI (I will force Win users, screw compatibility).

So after all the fiddling and messing, trying to make the bloody thing work on all systems, I now have to toss half the input system and rework it to support UI. And make a UI, which I absolutely despise (why I want to do back end work and thought this would be good, since terminal is not too front end).

I know by heart that "premature optimization is the root of all evil" but not when I'm coding, no! I premature optimize the shit out of my code until I get crippled down and then I undo everything and make a working version no matter how terrible it is.

Ffs, HOW!?!? Fuck! I need to get this rotten bs out.

RDS at its max capabilities from the top shelf, works OK until you scale it down and back up again. Code is the same, data is the same, load is the same, even the kitchen sink is the same, ffs, EVERYTHING is the same! Except the aws-managed db is torn down and created anew. From the SAME snapshots! But the db decides to stop performing - io tpt is shit, concurrency goes through the roof.

Re-scale it a few more times and the performance gets back to normal.

And aws folks are no better. Girish comes - says we have to optimize our queries. Rajesh comes - we are hitting the iops limit. Ankur comes - you're out of cpu. Vinod thinks it's gotta be the application to blame.

Come on guys, you are a complete waste of time for a premium fucking support!

Not to mention that 2 enhanced monitoring graphs show anythung but the read throughput.

Ffs, Amazon, even my 12yo netbook is more predictable than your enterprise paas! And that support..... BS!

We're now down to troubleshooting aws perf issues rather than our client's....

Not really coding, but debugging complex problems. I love it when I have to dive in head-first and dig (very) deep to find answers to super-complex problems. I once went into the internals of a programming language to understand why a library was acting up in a particular scenario. Another time I had to optimize and re-compile from source (after modifying it) so that the application would not leak its memory. (Of course, I contributed it back to the language).

The inner satisfaction that you get after all that hard-work when it finally works, pays off! Bliss!

I hope I did not make the wrong decision here:
Been working on a side project using React Js for a year now. After getting to know more about Vue, I just started rewriting it and moving it to Vue, to speed things up I'm using core JS classes for network stuff and validations ...etc just rewriting Redux to Vuex and React Components to Vue Templates

If I made the wrong decision I'd appreciate if anyone tell me about it before I go deeper in the rewrite process lol

It is not that I found speed difference both perform the same from what I've seen for my scenarios. But the output code of Vue is soooo much cleaner than what I found in React, either I failed to write a clean react code no matter how hard I try to optimize it, or Vue really takes the short way and keeps things clean.

I once asked our graphics designer to send me a 1x1 transendent pixel as an image. She was just filling that role at the time, not being an actual graphics designer, and the request was rather unusual. It took us a couple of attempts to get what I wanted. I like to optimize memory for the apps, maybe a bit too much.

After working with a coworker on some odd issues, I finally decided to check on the actual ticket he needed assistance with.

From now on, we will optimize our HTML for aesthetic appeal in Chrome's dev tools. display:none is verboten.

Sometimes I wonder if I've had a stroke or if I've died and am in purgatory.

My scrum master said, 'I would optimize your work hours.' He's monitoring how much time every one spends on browsing non-productive webs like devRant. How can I fight back? :(

Optimizing JS is such a pain. like, the total runtime of the rest of the code is not measurable compared to DOM operations, so the goal would be to optimize DOM access, but there are zero resources online on the relative cost of certain operations, and I get the feeling that they don't have much in common across browsers.

About 14 hours. From 10 AM to 12 PM.

It was a difficult problem on one of those algorithm practice websites, which I just couldn't let go of. I spent most of the time trying to micro-optimize and do the same (wrong) thing in different ways.

The next day, I managed to finish the problem in 2 hours using a different approach.

I learned a bunch of things from this:
- Algorithm analysis matters.
- If you spend too much time on a problem without taking longer breaks, you get stuck in a loop repeating the same mistakes.
- A fresh mind is significantly more productive and creative. Take a break, think about other things and let go of that mental baggage, you'll be surprised.

I know nothing about this.
Let's say your computer is on all night, and then you hit it in the morning, just re-activating all your windows... for me, it's always like a 10 minute wait until it "catches up".

I realized this morning, like, why doesn't it optimize itself while I'm away, so that when i do come back, that 10 min wait doesn't happen.

I'm sure they have thought of this, so why does it take so fucking long to wake up your computer.

Background: I am currently working with a DB that has websocket functionality ("notify a client on insert/etc."). However, you do have to whitelist tables in order to use them with sockets.

I wanted to optimize my code and didn't want to mess with my coworkers dev-data, therefore I duplicated the table. After improving some small things I noticed that the interface does not change with new socket data. I have spent the last hour or so trying to figure out where I broke it.

I just realized that I forgot to whitelist that duplicated table 😐 Most relieving moment today 😅

Bonus side effect: The code is much cleaner now since I refactored a lot of the realtime-logic in order to understand it/fix the bug.

I know recursion is everywhere but I recently noticed it in very unusual place('unusual' in the way we see), I hail from India, we studied in our childhood about road less taken, the way I see, everyone has to take so important decisions in yheir life, one such decission is about career, in India road less taken in career paths is everything other than orthodox education, I too the dreaded road "Education", next decission is to choose stream and there the road less taken is anything other that "Engineering (or medicne) " and I took (*as expected) engineering, after taking computers (which is the dreaded road now) next decision is what next? Dreaded road is job, but this time I chose take a road little less traveled in CS. Then I next decission was to choose the research stream the road less taken here (NOW) is systems as AI is in its prime and everyone whants to ride the wave, but I chose Systems in research, after all these my point how how boolean function is called recursively (in the sense of construct) and as a systems programmer I realize the importance of optimizing how I answer these functions quick and accurate. This is one such boolean function but I am sure you can find many in our path till here so It is better to realize what these functions are optimize then as a good Programmer of your own Life.

One of professors has an interesting philosophy in regards to how software is planned. He makes us forget that we dealing with a computer and has us write instructions as if we are teaching a human (no optimization, binary, or unnecessary numeral variables). Then we change it into code, then we optimize it. Every time. It freaks me out, but it gets us thinking. Not sure. If that is genius or insanity.

what about making something that works before trying to optimize part of the not-yet-working stuff?

I’m so fucking tired of having to work with shitty code day in and day out and not being able to optimize it. I want to quit so bad without having a job lined up… I fucking hate being a developer now thanks to these fucking pieces of shit.

You had two additional weeks to improve your project.

You could research different marketing strategies to increase revenue. You could add some new features to attract more users and ensure your existing users are satisfied. Finally, you could optimize performance to make your UI quicker.

But you’ve chosen to write some unit tests. Now that two weeks are gone, you got no new features, no performance improvements and no new marketing strategies while your competitors got them all.

Tests caught obvious bugs that can even be caught by static typing, but you by definition couldn’t write tests that’ll catch unpredictable bugs, so they are still present.

After six months you realize you have to rewrite a major part of your project because your project (surprise-surprise) has to chase market needs to stay relevant. Your tests are thrown into trash along with your old code.

“Having trouble with code quality? Write a lot of tests. And I mean a *lot*. Test every file in isolation. Mock as many imports as possible.

When you're done, your code will still be bad, but now your tests will make sure it's impossible to improve anything in any meaningful way.”

I have do optimize a website to work in internet explorer... Hell no, but have to.
Which version will you then say that it should at least work in? Just the newest one.
I don't think I can get it to work in every single old internet explorer, but maybe the newest one could be possible.

Not in prod today, but was part of a group project that we handed in and which got us an A.

The project was to write a PID controller for a robot that would drive along a track using a sensor to follow markings on the floor. During development we were drawing graphs of the PID parameters and sensor input every tick, which caused a bit of lag but no worries - we'll turn it off for the trial runs.

Imagine our pikachu shock meme when we turned off the graphs and our calibrations were suddenly *way* off since we had been oversteering all along to compensate for the lag.

There wasn't enough time to optimize it before the deadline and using sleeps didn't produce the same "type" of lag, so we just made the graph minimize itself when it opened. To this day I wonder if the professor ever saw it or if we got the A despite it.

The company I worked for had to do deletion runs of customer data (files and database records) every year, mainly for legal reasons. Two months before the next run they found out that the next year would bring multiple times the amount of objects, because a decade ago they had introduced a new solution whose data would be eligible for deletion for the first time.

The existing process was not be able to cope with those amounts of objects and froze to death gobbling up every bit of ram on the testing system. So my task was to rewrite the exising code, optimize api calls and somehow I ended up in multithreading the whole process. It worked and is most probably still in production today. 💨

I have been spending all day optimizing a wordpess site for pagespeed, looking into how can I optimize the custom scripts which block rendering and I was learning some new things, it was hard but I was making progress. Then comes the senior engineer who installs a plugin and pagespeed went from 60 to 90 on mobile, I was pretty shocked. Then it hit me. IT DELAYS THE LOADING OF EVERY SCRIPT AND IMAGE UNTIL USER INPUT TRICKING THE SCORING SYSTEM. U GET A WHITE SCREEN IF YOU DON'T DO ANYTHING. I told him it's not really faster this way, and he agreed it is not "ethical" but the score is good.
Am I still an idiot naive kid? There is a line between scamming people and quality work, but it keeps getting more blurry.

I've always wanted to do something in IT Support, but I didn't know where to start. I've been helping my co-workers optimize their system and even helped retrieve photos from a tablet that had a broken screen; her service plan said along the lines of "if they weren't there they were lost," I was able to retrieve them in a matter of hours (Really guys! I'm shocked! It was just a broken touchscreen, the storage was just fine. I think I'll remember this moment).

And because my growing impopularity, I started a new business called The Webnician. The company is split into two sections, the Technician, and the Web Developer. Hence, The Web(Tech)nician. I am proud of my name choice.

Then I wanted to become a certified technician, so I did some research on how to become one and found out I need to take the CompTIA A+ 220-901 and 220-902 exam and... I couldn't be more excited!

I've always loved computers, and maybe my late father had some say into it. Nevertheless, I am excited to begin my journey, even though it took awhile to find where I needed to go. I hope you all can follow me on my journey and support my new business.

I don't have anything else to say, so I'll just leave here.

What if we optimize this ?
We have to optimize this.
Don't worry well optimize it.
Optimize, optimize, optimize.
I'm sick of this word !!! It doesn't have any meaning to me anymore !!
Yeah. My manager has me on my nerves.
Rant over.

Another try to optimize app for Android Go.
For those, who doesn't know, app will be featured in special Google Play section if it fits some restrictions.
And one of thhose restrictions - app must use less then 50Mb of RAM.
So, I've decided to start from scratch.
Hello world activity without appcompat library, only Anko and Kotlin support.
32Mb of RAM
SERIOUSLY?? What the flying fuck, Google?
I hope some of you will point me, what I'm doing wrong.

Even I know I'm bullshitting right now. But maybe (like never) I'll optimize this one day (like really really never)

Hello, today was my First day, internship at Microsoft innovation center BE, a great day with amazing people, my project is called tech Office, we need to process data from sensors in the office, create and use Microsoft AI to optimize and help the office become smarter and more efficient. Make the life better and the environment more productive. I don't really know where to start but I'm happy to be given such an opportunity and will do everything to make this work !

I spent the last 2 days, my father's birthday, and my birthday working on a bug for the game in developing for mobile. And I've done everything to try and fix it. Optimize the vertices, deleted assets not in use, organized all my assets into separate folders, and you know what. Fuck it. If "app not installed" I'm going to port it to PC.

Question to the frontend devs: I'm currently trying to optimize part of our JS. How do sourcemaps influence loading/rendering Speed in the Browser?

In the `webpack.config.js` we use uglify as minimizer for js. It has the option `sourceMap` Set to `true`. Now as I understand it, this caused it to Inline a sourcemap inside the JS file (which leads to a slightly bigger file size and thus longer load time for the generated file...).

My Question: should sorcemaps be enabled for prod (minified) files? Why yes, why no? Do they help the browser parse the JS faster?

I can't take this Swift compile time anymore. It's up to 40 minutes now and all we can say is "optimize the code" and "get faster computers"

If I have to write one more uber-complex, goddamn Google Optimize test, I will literally piss and shit and throw up on my computer and then throw it out the window.

Idk why but this morning I was thinking about this high school elective class where we learned Adobe flash. But specifically 2 instances where I ignored the teacher and did my own thing

1. We were using Sprite sheets and he had us use photoshop to cut out the Sprite to a different layer and manually save each Sprite one by one to disk to use in flash. Some sheets had 50 fucking sprites
So I found a script for Adobe (action script I think they called their Javascript derivative) that exported every layer for me without all the manual clicking. There is probably an even better way. But this worked for how lazy I was back then

2. Our final projects we could do anything but he suggested not doing anything too complicated cause of time constraints and he barely taught is the scrptinh language for Adobe flash so making flash games was almost out of the question.
Me being stupid really wanted to make a working pong game. So I spent too long watching a German (i dont know German) tutorial video I found, and troubleshooting outdated code from that video. And improving things where I could with my limited knowledge made worse cause I wasn't interested in programming and didn't start learning python until the following year

Yeah don't know why I was thinking about those. But I feel it's a good perspective on how far I've come. From hacking together a pong clone with no skills, to being hired to automate and optimize processes and legacy projects

They keep training bigger language models (GPT et al). All the resear4chers appear to be doing this as a first step, and then running self-learning. The way they do this is train a smaller network, using the bigger network as a teacher. Another way of doing this is dropping some parameters and nodes and testing the performance of the network to see if the smaller version performs roughly the same, on the theory that there are some initialization and configurations that start out, just by happenstance, to be efficient (like finding a "winning lottery ticket").

My question is why aren't they running these two procedures *during* training and validation?

If [x] is a good initialization or larger network and [y] is a smaller network, then
after each training and validation, we run it against a potential [y]. If the result is acceptable and [y] is a good substitute, y becomes x, and we repeat the entire procedure.

The idea is not to look to optimize mere training and validation loss, but to bootstrap a sort of meta-loss that exists across the whole span of training, amortizing the loss function.

Anyone seen this in the wild yet?

I hate Matlab.

It's slow.

It's full of propriety nonsense.

It's costs money, which automatically makes it the worst thing to ever mar the beautiful face of the programming world.

Just so you know where I'm coming from, I own a 1980 Fiat X1/9. Needless to say I like to be under the hood and need to feel connected to what I'm working with.

The feeling I get when I want to pop the hood and maybe optimize something only to remember that this is a corrupt proprietary money machine built on the dry bones and scattered dreams of CS students whose sheltered coding experience won't give them a chance in the real world-- is a feeling I can not tolerate.

I quit.

Had to do the FizzBuzz test in PHP. Proceeded to creat a range(1, 100) before the for loop instead of using the loops own index #. Worst part is I realized what I had done in the parking lot after I left. They asked me multiple times how I could optimize the code too lol.

1) Had to fix severe bugs in a dynamic UI (configuration-driven forms) component.

Recognized undocumented Copy/Paste/Modify/FuckUp driven variations of the same component all over the project. Unsurprisingly, the implementations covered 99% of the antipattern catalog on wiki.c2.com and could compete with brainfuck in regard to human-readable code.

Escalated the issue, proposed a redesign using a new approach, got it approved.

Designed, Implemented, tested and verified the new shared and generic component. Integrated into the main product in the experimental branch. Presented to tech lead/management. Everyone was happy and my solution opened even more possibilities.

Now the WTF moment: the product with the updated dynamic UI solution never has been completely tested by a QA engineer despite my multiple requests and reminders.

It never got merged into baseline.
New initiatives to fix the dynamic UI issues have been made by other developers. Basically looking up my implementation. Removing parts they do not understand and wondering why the data validation does not work. And of course taking the credit.

2) back in 2013, boss wanted me to optimize batch processing performance in the product I developed. Profiling proved that the bottleneck ist not my code, but the "core" I had to use and which I must never ever touch. Reported back to him. He said he does not care and the processing has to get faster. And I must not touch the "core".

(FYI: the "core" was auto-generated from VB6 to VB.Net. Stored in SourceSafe. Unmaintainable, distributed about a bunch of 5000+ LoC files, eye-cancer inducing singlethreaded something, which had naive raw database queries causing the low performance.)

Does anyone have an alternative web framework mostly for an API? Much appreciated if Graphql out of the box.

One "pillar" of Rails is that it's done to optimize programmer happiness. My experience with Rails turned out to be true in that sense.

I was wondering if there's an alternative that could emulate that experience.

I had to optimize a SQL-Query and i was able to cut the amount of time in half.

The business part of the company said it is still too slow, so i researched deeper and looked into the called functions which are used in every part where to claculate value X.

Found 20 similiar selects to get values which are summed up afterwards into three different variables. Thought this can be done in three selects with "sum", but then i found the dumbest thing is this function:

V1, V2 have the values from the selects
V3 is ja given value
X is the return value
the function returns another value

help = functionCall(parameter) - V1 -V2
X= help + V1 + V2 +V3

WTF im mean it does the selects for nothing...
X = functionCall(parameter) + V3

I'm currently doing project in Java using JavaFX for GUI and after like 6 months I found out we can bind textfields to variables(yea,dumb me) and I got more than 20 forms so of course, binding is useful than that getText method. So I think there are many things like this which will help me to optimize my code but I dont know, so can anyone tell me more stuff like this?
I'm using MongoDb so I'm currently finding easiest way to make Bson document from textfield values. Any suggestions?
(Sorry, for my bad English)

Am I the only one who will spend half an hour reading through the "top all-time rants" section of devRant to figure out why they're so popular? I just can't shake that feeling that there's some sort of pattern there that I can optimize...

Guess I must be a developer, given that last statement :D

Question: How would you reimagine the dev interview process, trying to make it efficient to find ingenious freshers?

I'm gonna be hiring full MERN stack dev freshers soon. I hate coding interviews, and I just want to test their ingenuity and problem solving, not if they can code a textbook algorithm.

Plan so far was to ask them questions like: "What happens when you like a link in the browser" to gauge how deep they could track a request and understand the internet infrastructure.

And make them audit gpt generated react code, and optimize it.

What're your thoughts, folks?

Spent an hour trying to optimize some code but none of the stuff I was trying (rearranging/overlapping DMA transfers with other stuff for some ye olde concurrency) seemed to be doing anything.

Aaand obviously the stupid thing was set to autobuild Debug config on save but I was testing Release config. Sigh.

Its fucking impossible to utilize less than 8 hours for a 5-9. I cant work on my side project with this pace

Please help me how to optimize my time so i can both work this 9-5 job and also work on my side project from 5-9

All users of IE should not have kids, they should die terrible deaths just so they don't spread disease of IE use and we can stop being required to optimize shit for IE. I wish genocide on the IE infidel

!rant but a question...

I know that with the vast examples/tutorials online this may not be necessary, but I wanted to ask the community if you guys/gals would recommend going back to school to get a formal CS education or if it would be a waste of time, money, and resources compared to just using web based sources? I've tried the college thing 3 times when I was younger but couldn't concentrate and lacked the discipline to focus and finish classes. But I'm a bit older now and wanted to know if you would recommend going back to school or if time would be better spent performing self-study and learning from home?

I'm still extremely new to coding and programming and only have basic knowledge of actual coding and a lot of the theoretical stuff in programming is completely foreign to me. Like for example, how to optimize code. I know that refactoring code to have a smaller more efficient footprint is always desirable, when it doesn't interfere with readability, but I'm unaware of where/how to modify code to run efficiently. Of course that may be wayyy to advanced for my use cases anyway 😂.

I'm trying to teach myself python as it seems like a great language for starting out and getting to understand the concepts of programing. Plus, it can be used directly in my line of work as well as side projects that I wanted to try my hand at.

Thank you in advance for your recommendations everyone!

ScalaJs React compiles Scala to React.js.
There's some cool typing involved but I haven't done web front-end since nested tables were meta, so there's lots to learn.

There's exactly one senior dev at my company who is fluent in this ScalaReact, so I tag him in the PR for my project. Every day at 10:00 am, slack publicly posts a reminder with @mention that he hasn't reviewed my PR.

Three days later I haven't heard anything so I send a DM over slack asking for feedback... No response.

Four days after the PR I beg for 10 minutes of pairing time, because something in my component hierarchy smells funny. He doesn't have time for me until 5:00 .

I've now built almost a weeks worth of work on the original PR and the feedback I get is 'this works, is performant, and has no obvious bugs, but you can't merge it until you restructure the underlying component hierarchy'

It takes me and another senior dev an entire day of pairing to implement the changes without breaking anything. But, I asked for the feedback because I wanted to learn and write good clean code so I'm irritated but willing to move on.

Yesterday I posted in slack that I was having a hard time following my callback chains to find where the color was assigned to a <td (because I had to add a coloring rule). I wanted to know if I could change the type signature of a component from Tagmod (one or more HTML tags) to VdomTagOf[TableCell] so that it would be clear where the color was assigned.

Instead of just telling me 'no' and giving some context, the react dev gives me:

"Why would a dev need to know about the type unless they’re actually trying to use the thing ? Those are all great questions, but id suggest trying not to prematurely optimize for those until they actually come up"

I flipped my shit. After you couldn't make time for me for a WEEK I had to justify to the CEO why I was spending a day on PURE refactors to accommodate your PREFERENCES. Meanwhile when I'm being VULNERABLE and exposing that I am confused and struggling to complete my task you DISMISS my concerns and attack my motivations.

Unfortunately, this is all happening in the public slack channels and I start defending readability and my premise while triggered. Now I'm riding the shame train for fighting in public slack and trying to pretend none of this ever happened.

I spent the last 1.5 hours trying to optimize delivery of two 8.0KB JS files. It didn't work, at all tried like everything I could find. At the end I initialized it in angular json and made it load regardless. Made me realize that it is not made for optimization.

I sometimes wonder , how do my co workers have so little ownership on what they do. The business analyst does nothing , the management cant even optimize a filter on an excel sheet let along Jira but are somehow still employed. What psychological trick is this , meanwhile I slave away at refactoring code until it is perfect(at least to my knowledge) and then do the other peoples jobs also. How do i stop doing this, it seems i cant help myself.

I'm wondering if there is a way to use Machine Learning algorithm to optimize games like Screeps.com, which is a game that you control your game by writing JS code. Letting the algorithm write human readable code might be too challenging, but optimizing some aspect of the game should be possible, like the best scale up route optimization using re-enforced learning.

When you start a new game and you can't stop your dev brain and just enjoy the damn game and play it as it is!!!!

Grabbed this baby up the minute i had a chance to. Being the dev that i am, already thinking of doing something to optimize my calendar confidant(social links)-wise.

I mean i have the list of confidanfs, the date they start and the days they are available. All i need is a tool that can take all these in, apply some scheduling algorithm, and churn out a calendar!!!

Someone said that I should optimize the performance of a website. In fact, the problem was the hardware specs and they still want me to optimize the UI. I have less dependencies, no weird event loops and a JSON that is twice as big because the guys at the backend said they're too lazy to optimize it.

So... It's either they upgrade the specs or blame the guys who made the api response.

I have an 8gb i5 7200u nvidia 920mx laptop.I want to optimize aftereffects because preview mode is so slow and not showing realtime fps.My composition is 1080p

I need help speeding up my website. It's hosted on GoDaddy shared and uses Managed WordPress. I've run tests on Pingdom, PageInsights, GTMetrix and load times vary from 1.3s to 5s depending on the server location. Apparently Managed WP GoDaddy uses a CDN and their own caching plugin (Varnish). I don't know if that's good or bad.

PageInsights says I need to optimize images. I'm using WP Smush but clearly it isn't helping too much. I always manually resize all my images to <=100kb.

Also, the age old leverage browser caching problem... How do I fix that?

Thanks a lot for taking the time to go through this :)

after having to deal with a lot of weird "rewrites" and "refactorings" by co-workers i started to add this comment into the head of my sourcefiles:

You may think you know what the following code does.
But you dont. Trust me.
Fiddle with it, and youll spend many sleepless nights cursing the moment you thought youd be clever enough to "optimize" the code below. Now close this file and go play with something else.

Found this somewhere on the interwebs and since i use it the "refactorings" and "optimizations" of my code stopped nearly completely

How to optimize when you're my boss and have written VB6 for the last twenty years: find anything you don't understand and blame it for the slowness.

*looks drowsy* Ugh my head..

You know what, guys? If you can freshly and directly remember how to do this:

- calculate the time complexity for each type of loop and code structure

- knowing how to write the following regex:
"A 15-digit number starting with a possibility of a group of 1-2 digit numbers, segregated into three 5-digit numbers tuples with three different separator characters, evaluated ahead"

- mentally work out how to reverse an array's indexes (swapping algorithm) without writing anything down

- know how to optimize a binary search in your head

then kudos to you. lmao
I'm rusty. It took me a while..

Code Optimization 😉

Before doing: After doing the changes, it ll be much easier to maintain😇

While doing : how it was working before 🤔 why I need these lines 🙄

After doing : Never gonna optimize existing file instead will start following the standard hereafter😏

While working thereafter.. 😛 : Instead of following these standards which consumes time, I can make the logic quicker and will optimize later...

Again the cycle repeats 😂

How many kilobytes of resources (CSS, JS) do you deem acceptable? I need to know how much I should optimize.

And no, I will not use no JS. Don't suggest that. Svelte is needed.

I've determined a simple formula for how to get people to stay in your app for long periods of time:

1. Infinity scrolling
2. OPTIMIZE BATTERY USAGE

Why? You can't infinitely scroll if your battery's dead.

Case Study: YouTube.

I need some advice to avoid stressing myself out. I'm in a situation where I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place at work, and it feels like there's no one to turn to. This is a long one, because context is needed.

I've been working on a fairly big CMS based website for a few years that's turned into multiple solutions that I'm more or less responsible for. During that time I've been optimizing the code base with proper design patterns, setting up continuous delivery, updating packaging etc. because I care that the next developer can quickly grasp what's going on, should they take over the project in the future. During that time I've been accused of over-engineering, which to an extent is true. It's something I've gotten a lot better at over the years, but I'm only human and error prone, so sometimes that's just how it is.

Anyways, after a few years of working on the project I get a new colleague that's going to help me on my CMS projects. It doesn't take long for me to realize that their code style is a mess. Inconsistent line breaks and naming conventions, really god awful anti-pattern code. There's no attempt to mimic the code style I've been using throughout the project, it's just complete chaos. The code "works", although it's not something I'd call production code. But they're new and learning, so I just sort of deal with it and remain patient, pointing out where they could optimize their code, teaching them basic object oriented design patterns like... just using freaking objects once in a while.

Fast forward a few years until now. They've learned nothing. Every time I read their code it's the same mess it's always been.

Concrete example: a part of the project uses Vue to render some common components in the frontend. Looking through the code, there is currently *no* attempt to include any air between functions, or any part of the code for that matter. Everything gets transpiled and minified so there's absolutely NO REASON to "compress" the code like this. Furthermore, they have often directly manipulated the DOM from the JavaScript code rather than rendering the component based on the model state. Completely rendering the use of Vue pointless.

And this is just the frontend part of the code. The backend is often orders of magnitude worse. They will - COMPLETELY RANDOMLY - sometimes leave in 5-10 lines of whitespace for no discernable reason. It frustrates me to no end. I keep asking them to verify their staged changes before every commit, but nothing changes. They also blatantly copy/paste bits of my code to other components without thinking about what they do. So I'll have this random bit of backend code that injects 3-5 dependencies there's simply no reason for and aren't being used. When I ask why they put them there I simply get a “I don't know, I just did it like you did it”.

I simply cannot trust this person to write production code, and the more I let them take over things, the more the technical debt we accumulate. I have talked to my boss about this, and things have improved, but nowhere near where I need it to be.

On the other side of this are my project manager and my boss. They, of course, both want me to implement solutions with low estimates, and as fast and simply as possible. Which would be fine if I wasn't the only person fighting against this technical debt on my team. Add in the fact that specs are oftentimes VERY implicit, so I'm stuck guessing what we actually need and having to constantly ask if this or that feature should exist.

And then, out of nowhere, I get assigned a another project after some colleague quits, during a time I’m already overbooked. The project is very complex and I'm expected to give estimates on tasks that would take me several hours just to research.

I'm super stressed and have no one I can turn to for help, hence this post. I haven't put the people in this post in the best light, but they're honestly good people that I genuinely like. I just want to write good code, but it's like I have to fight for my right to do it.

How do you feel when you built like 90% of a project, all the main logic and then you hang out over to another dev to basically clean it up for you?

Like optimize some queries, build the frontend, test it with the users.

Does any of you have the compulsion to micro-optimize every bit of code that you write? How do you deal with it?

I'm not just talking about algorithmic optimizations, but the real nitty gritty stuff. I'm talking about using bit fiddling to avoid if statements where speculative processors might make mispredictions. Anything that might make a program compile to fewer machine instructions or avoid extra stack frame overhead.

This all started a year ago when I took a systems programming course at my university, and started learning C and C++. But I find myself doing this in the wrong places. Who cares if this trivial program that I wrote runs in 1.2 or 0.6 seconds? My future employers won't care if my code is 10% more efficient when it takes four times as long to write.

It's gotten to the point that I can't bring myself to use languages like Python because I don't know how it's implemented under the hood and can't predict how the different ways I could write a function will affect performance. How do I bring myself to trust that the compilers (or interpreters) and the programmers that wrote them will be sufficiently optimal, and just move on? 😩

The chief came with a new idea.. something that runs ‘a side’ of our main project as some sort of manager. The database wasn’t designed with that in mind..

Now I’m wondering if I’m having issues because I could’ve designed the database better so that this wouldn’t be an issue or if I shouldn’t “blame” myself, because that wasn’t the initial idea. 🤷🏻‍♂️

We had to do a lot of migrations to keep adding and changing for the “new ideas” and now the database is a mess.. but it’s like.. too “big” to just start a new clean database structure, but it could optimize everything and make the backend easier/cleaner instead of dirty hacks/queries to combine all the different features.

As a ‘bad’ example, but the idea started as a todo list, migrated to a social network and is now migrating to something like smartschool to be able to manage users and groups, but with different features than the ‘social network’ had... I’m wondering what’s next..

UWP suck, I don't wanna hurt yall feeling but it's time to face the truths:
+ SandBox
+ Less Job Offer
+ Development more Complicated than Web App
+ Microsoft not create perfect hardware to make sure our app get to more consumers (the Pro X is failure)
+ Poor Optimized
Poor Optimized ?
the Windows 10 optimization is joke, all my surface laptop, pro, book I have tested. They claim that consume less Ram, but when using it along side electron and Win32 app. It feel so much choppy and lag. I mean WTF ?
UWP was made for optimize low specs SoC such as ARM base, now my laptop running on a core I5 + GPU still lag ??
I'm sorry but this is just sad. Im moving back to win32. WinRT sooner or later will end supported
And Microsoft will improve the Win32 Api

Tips for optimizing Windows performance on old PC. The following is what i got, please add things to the list.

- Defragment the harddisk
- Clear some space on the harddisk
- Reduce amount of unnecessary programs running in the background
- Check for malware/virus and remove them

And here it comes bois, the famous Monday Morning Mumbling is back, for everyone's pleasure.

Do you remember your uni years, when you had wonderful coding lessons, and you learned sick languages ?

I do aswell, since I'm still in uni.

But why, WHY, IN ALL OF GOD THOUGHTS, DO I STILL HAVE TO TAKE MATHS LESSONS ?

It's my fourth fucking uni year, and I'm still supposed to deal with math lessons which are about what I learned 6 years ago. And guess what ? I still failed the test since I fucking don't understand a single shit in maths.

"Uuuuh if yu wan tu derivate a function u hav to multiply ur derivated function basic expression with the derivate itself lul xDDD so funi"

FUCK OFF DUDES I DON'T GIVE A SINGLE SICK BIRD SHIT ABOUT MATHS. I WASTED THREE YEARS OF MY LIFE LEARNING ABOUT BINARY TREES, MATHEMATICALS WAYS OF SPILLING YOUR CEREAL BOWL WHEN YOU HAVE TO LEAVE IN FIVE MINUTES, NUMERIC WAY OF OPTIMIZE YOUR SINK SPACE WHEN YOU'RE TOO LAZY TO DO THE DISHES, JUST LET ME FUCKING WRITE CODE INSTEAD OF ANNOYING ME WITH UNEXPLAINABLE MATHS SHIT NOW !

I know maths are important, okay ? But I'm so fucking tired of learning this shit again and again and still failing those shitty tests where they only give you maths problems without any other goal than messing with your grades.

Fuck this shit I'm pissed off on so many levels, I wasted tons of money on a private school to enhance my résumé history, and now I'm stuck with some strange "f'(x)" boi that will ruin my year.

RT's appreciated, if you recognised yourself in this story, don't forget to send some biscuits to my postal address.

TL;DR : Why wasting your time on theoritical lessons when you could use your time to learn new dynamic technos, like C++98 ?

Trying to optimize web-scraping has been one of my greatest failures in life. 4 hours later and all my data is finally gathered. : (

Had to optimize today a DB File / MySQL 5.7

I'm sometimes sad that software cannot bite people in their crotches, shit in their faces and fuck their eyes out.

The config was non commented and a disaster.

Yay. Let's set thread_cache to 16K while max connections is 50.

And raise limits like max files without adjusting SystemD / ulimit

And OF COURSE MySQL sucks...

So let's migrate to PostGres.

*Brainfart*

This has happened way too often.

Really. Software should have the right to punish dumb people. At least ... 10 kv shock to teach a lesson.

Which Idea was it to combine C, C++ and Java in one big fucking Project. And who thought that it was a Good Idea to use Eclipse C++ for developing with Java. If the whole Project would have been in Java I could have used the auto Import feature from Eclipse, but if Eclipse doesn't Know that the Java Files are Java Files it doesn't fucking work. So I just had to spent a whole fucking Day compiling the Projects with Maven so that I can write around 100 Lines of Import...
And the best Thing is, a few Weeks ago the Imports existed so a fucking asshole just erased them when he tried to optimize these...
Sometimes I hate this company

I was reviewing an Angular (remember this) project where I work to find any possibilities to optimize the performance of app. For a moment an idea came to me to look and analyze package.json and see if there is any package listed there but it's not being used in the application.

...aaaandd there were fucking 32 unused packages. 32 packages that have been installed but are not used anywhere in the application. 32!!!!!

And you know what the best part is. 2 of them were react packages. I mean, literally, their name was react-bllabllablla- component, and when I visited npmjs website, their description was react component that does bllabllablla. It's fucking react....... It's in the name, it's in the description. Is my company giving jobs to fucking blind developers or what? I'm going crazy!

DOM manipulation in React apps such as

div.style.bottom = '20px;'

is a bitch to optimize.
Anyone got any tips?

I am particularly guilty of this, embedding non-constructive comments, code poetry and little jokes into most of my projects (although I usually have enough sense to remove anything directly offensive before releasing the code). Here's one I'm particulary fond of, placed far, far down a poorly-designed 'God Object':

/**
* For the brave souls who get this far: You are the chosen ones,
* the valiant knights of programming who toil away, without rest,
* fixing our most awful code. To you, true saviors, kings of men,
* I say this: never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down,
* never gonna run around and desert you. Never gonna make you cry,
* never gonna say goodbye. Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you.
*/
I'M SORRY!!!! I just couldn't help myself.....!

And another, which I'll admit I haven't actually released into the wild, even though I am very tempted to do so in one of my less intuitive classes:

//
// Dear maintainer:
//
// Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine,
// and have realized what a terrible mistake that was,
// please increment the following counter as a warning
// to the next guy:
//
// total_hours_wasted_here = 42
//